Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

 [....] If neurosis contains this more 'positive' element, then so for Freud does an ideological illusion like religion. He distinguishes in The Future of an Illusion between 'delusions', by which he means psychotic states of mind in outright contradiction with reality, and 'illusions', which for all their unreality express a genuine wish. An illusion, for example, may be false now, but might be realized in the future; a middle-class woman may fantasize that a prince will arrive to marry her, and in the odd case may prove prophetic. What characterizes such illusions in Freud's view is their 'forward-looking' perspective, which is to say that they are essentially modes of wish-fulfilment. Thus we call a belief an illusion', he writes, 'when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification' (213). We need only substitute the term 'ideology' for 'illusion' here to read the statement as impeccably Althusserian: it is not a matter of verifying or falsifying the representation in question, but of grasping it as encoding some underlying desire. Such illusions are indissolubly bound up with reality: 'Ideology', comments Slavoj Žižek, 'is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape an insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our 'reality' itself: an 'illusion' which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel‖'14 As Althusser might put the point: in ideology, social reality is invested in the imaginary, interwoven with fantasy throughout its entire fabric; and this is very different from conceiving of it as a chimerical 'superstructure' erected over a solidly real 'base'. It is also, we may note, different from conceiving of it merely as a 'screen', which interposes itself between reality and ourselves. The reality and its appearances or fantasmal forms are much more closely intermeshed than any such imagery would imply. Real and imaginary are given in ideology together – which is why Žižek can argue that 'the only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself there.' If 'disinvesting' ourselves of an ideological viewpoint is as difficult as it usually is, it is because it involves a painful 'decathecting' or disinvestment of fantasy-objects, and thus a reorganization of the psychical economy of the self. Ideology clings to its various objects with all the purblind tenacity of the unconscious; and one important hold that it has over us is its capacity to yield enjoyment. Beyond the field of ideological signification, as Žižek points out, there is always a kind of non-signifying 'surplus' which is enjoyment or jouissance; and this enjoyment is the last 'support' of ideological meaning.15

  Illusion, then, is by no means in Freud's view a purely negative category. Indeed it is a good deal less negative than Marx's early conception of ideology. If ideology is a condition of reality suffused and supported by our unconscious desires, as well as by our anxiety and aggression, then it conceals a utopian kernel. Illusion adumbrates within the present some more desirable state of affairs in which men and women would feel less helpless, fearful and bereft of meaning. It is thus radically double-edged, anodyne and aspiration together; and Frederic Jameson has argued that this is true of all artefacts in class society. Ideologies, cultural formations and works of art may well operate as strategic 'containments' of real contradictions; but they also gesture, if only by virtue of their collective form, to possibilities beyond this oppressive condition.16 On this argument, even such 'degraded' modes of gratification as pulp fiction encode some frail impulse to a more durable fulfilment, and thus dimly prefigure the shape of the good society. Surprisingly, then, Freud's concept of illusion turns out to be at one with the notion of ideology developed by the later Frankfurt school. For Herbert Marcuse, the culture of class society is at once a false sublimation of social conflict and – if only in the very structural integrity of the work of art – a utopian critique of the present. Walter Benjamin's study of nineteenth-century Parisian society reminds us of Michelet's slogan that 'every epoch dreams its successor', and finds a buried promise of happiness and abundance in the very consumerist fantasies of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Ernst Bloch, in his Principle of Hope (1954–5), unearths glimmerings of utopia from that most apparently unpromising of all materials, advertising slogans.

  To examine the unconscious dimensions of ideology is at once hopeful and cautionary. If ideology is interwoven with fantasy, then this is one reason for its formidable power, but such fantasies are never easily containable within the present, and point in principle beyond it. Utopia would be a condition in which Freud's 'pleasure principle' and 'reality principle' would have merged into one, so that social reality itself be wholly fulfilling. The eternal war between these principles rules out for Freud any such reconciliation; but the unreality of utopia is therefore also the impossibility of any total identification between our libidinal drives and a given system of political power. What thwarts utopia is the ruin of dystopia too: no ruling class can be wholly victorious. Freud has little to say directly of ideology; but it is very probable that what he points to as the fundamental mechanisms of the psychical life are the structural devices of ideology as well. Projection, displacement, sublimation, condensation, repression, idealization, substitution, rationalization, disavowal: all of these are at work in the text of ideology, as much as in dream and fantasy; and this is one of the richest legacies Freud has bequeathed to the critique of ideological consciousness….

Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

[....] It might be thought that men and women would naturally be driven to rebel against any authority as cruel as the superego. If they do not commonly do so, it is because in Freud's view the superego has its roots in the id or unconscious, closer to the unconscious than is the ego itself. Our submission to the law, in other words, is spurred on by strong instinctual forces, which bind us libidinally to it. The paradox, then, is that the very unconscious energies which fuel the superego's despotism are also those which drive us to embrace it; and this can be seen as deconstructing the Gramscian opposition of coercion and consent. What makes the law so coercive – the powerful unconscious impulsions behind its brutality – belong with the erotic drives which lead us to consent to it.

  If 'culture' in Freud's eyes is a matter of sublimation, compensation and imaginary resolution, then it is really synonymous with one influential concept of ideology. But Freud's view of civilization is also ideological in a different sense. For him, as much as for Thomas Hobbes or Jeremy Bentham, there is an eternal enmity between the ruthlessly self-gratifying individual and the demands of society. Men and women are naturally self-seeking, dominative and aggressive, monstrous predators who can be dissuaded out of mutual injury only by the prohibitions of authority, or by the bribery of some alternative yield of pleasure. Freud has little or no conception of human society as nourishing as well as constraining – as a place of reciprocal self-fulfilment as well as a mechanism for keeping us from each other's throats. His view of both individual and society, in short, is classically bourgeois: the individual as an isolated monad powered by its appetites, society as some mere contractual device without which libidinal anarchy would be let loose. Given this cynical market-place morality, it is hardly surprising that the 'culture' which is meant to regulate and reconcile individuals is revealed as alarmingly fragile in contrast to their insatiable lust to plunder and possess. Freud's psychoanalytic theory is not finally dissociable from the politics of his social class, and like bourgeois political economy is inscribed at key points by these prejudices. It universalizes a particular view of 'man' to global status; and much the same can be said of the later version of the theory which is the school of Jacques Lacan. Whatever striking insights Lacan's work has undoubtedly to offer, there is surely no doubt that its view of the human subject as a mere effect of some inscrutable Other, its scorn for the whole concept of political emancipation, and its contemptuous dismissal of human history as little more than a 'sewer', has had its part to play in that jaundiced, disenchanted post-war ethos which goes under the name of the 'end of ideology'.

  Whatever Freud's final trust in human reason, he is plainly not a rationalist as far as psychoanalytic practice goes. He does not believe that a patient could ever be cured simply by offering him a theoretical account of his ills. To this extent, Freud is at one with Marx: the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it Neurosis is to be dispelled not by displacing its 'falsity' with some intellectual truth, but by tackling the material conditions which give birth to it in the first place. For him as for Marx, theory is pointless unless it comes to intervene as a transformative force within actual experience. For Marx, the opposite of an oppressive ideology is not in the end theory or an alternative ideology, but political practice. For Freud, the alternative to psychic disorder is the scene of analysis itself, within which the only truth that matters is that which gets constructed in the interplay between analyst and analysand. Like political practice, the scene of analysis is an active 'staging' or working through of conflicts, a 'theatricalizing' of certain urgent real-life issues in which the practical relations of human subjects to those problems is crucially transfigured. Both revolutionary practice and the scene of analysis involves the painful construction of a new identity on the ruins of the old, which is to be recollected rather than repressed; and in both cases 'theory' comes down to an altered practical self-understanding. Marxism and Freudianism have due respect for analytic discourse, in contrast to those modern irrationalisms which can afford the luxury of not needing to know. But for both creeds, the proof of emancipatory theory lies in the performance; and in this process theory and practice never form some neatly symmetrical whole. For if theory is a material intervention, it will alter the very practice it takes as its object and so stand in need of transformation itself, in order to be equal to the new situation it has produced. Practice, in other words, becomes the 'truth' that interrogates theory; so that here, as in the play of transference and countertransference between analyst and patient, it is never easy to say who exactly is analysing whom. A 'successful' theoretical act is one which substantially engages with practice and thus ceases to remain identical with itself, ceases to be 'pure theory'. Similarly, an ideological practice is no longer identical with itself once theory has entered it from the inside; but this is not to say that it now attains to a truth of which it was previously just ignorant. For theory can only successfully intervene in practice if it elicits what glimmerings of self-understanding the practice already has. If the analyst is a 'pure' theoretician, then she will be incapable of deciphering this particular form of mystified speech; and if the neurotic patient were not already unconsciously in search of some self-understanding, there would be no neurosis in the first place. For such disturbances, as we saw earlier, are ways of trying to encompass a real dilemma, and so contain their own kind of truth.

Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

[....] The problem in Freud's view is that such hegemonic processes can quickly become self-defeating. We sublimate our otherwise anti-social instincts into cultural ideals of one kind or another, which serve to unify a race of predatory egoists who would otherwise be at each other's throats. But these ideals can then become tyrannically excessive in their demands, demanding more instinctual renunciation than we can properly manage and so causing us to fall ill of neurosis. Moreover, this hegemony is threatened as soon as it becomes clear that some are being forced into more renunciation than others. In this situation, Freud comments, a 'permanent state of discontent' will persist in society and may lead to 'dangerous revolts'. If the satisfaction of the minority depends on the suppression of the majority, then it is understandable that the latter will begin to manifest a 'justifiable hostility' to the culture which their labour makes possible, but in which they have too meagre a share. A crisis of hegemony will consequently ensue; for hegemony is established by men and women internalizing the law which governs them, and in conditions of flagrant inequality 'an internalisation of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed people is not to be expected' (191). 'It goes without saying', Freud adds, 'that a civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence' (192).

  The mechanism by which the law of society is internalized is known as the superego. The superego is the voice of authority within us all, no longer an externally imposed power but the very ground of our personal conscience and moral idealism. Once power has inscribed itself within the very form of our subjectivity, any insurrection against it would seem to involve a self transgression. To emancipate ourselves from ourselves – the whole purpose of Freud's therapeutic project – is a much more difficult affair than throwing off some merely external model of dominion. In the formation of the superego or Name-of-the-Father, power comes to entwine itself with the roots of the unconscious, tapping something of its awesome, implacable energy and directing this force sadistically against the ego itself. If political power is as recalcitrant as it is, then it is partly because the subject has come to love and desire the very law which subjugates it, in the erotic perversion known as masochism. The suppressed classes', Freud writes, 'can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals' (193); and this, psychically speaking, is one secret of the tenacity of political domination.

  Making the law our own, however, will not resolve the problems of civilization. Our appropriation of it will always be a partial, ambivalent affair – which is to say in Freudian parlance that the Oedipus complex is never fully dissolved. If we love and desire the law, we also nurture an intense animosity towards it, rejoicing in seeing this august authority brought low. And since the law itself is cruel, sadistic and tyrannical, it drives our aggression back upon ourselves and ensures that for every renunciation of satisfaction we are plunged deeper into neurotic guilt. In this sense, the power which sustains civilization also helps to undo it, stoking up within us a culture of lethal self-hatred. The law is obtuse as well as brutal: it is not only vengeful, paranoid and vindictive, but utterly insensitive to the fact that its insanely excessive demands could not possibly be fulfilled. It is a form of high-minded terrorism, which will simply rub our noses in our failure to live up to it rather than show us how to placate it. Before the law we are always in the wrong: like some imperious monarch, the superego 'does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it.'13 This fanatical power is out of control, driving men and women to madness and despair, and Freud, who regarded the law as one of his oldest enemies, sees it as one aim of psychoanalysis to temper its death-dealing rigour.

Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

[....] Religion for Freud is a sublimation of our lowly drives to higher spiritual ends; but so in fact is 'culture' or civilization as a whole. 'Having recognised religious doctrines as illusions', he writes,

  we are at once faced by a further question: may not other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a similar nature? Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well? and is it not the case that in our civilisation the relations between the sexes are disturbed by an erotic illusion or a number of such illusions? (216)

  Once one embarks on this line of thought, where will it end? Could it not, Freud muses, extend to reasoning and observation themselves? What if science itself were just another such sublimation? And what of the science known as Freudian psychoanalysis? The concept of sublimation is clearly getting out of hand, and Freud no sooner raises these embarrassing questions than he closes them peremptorily off. Lacking the means for undertaking so comprehensive a task, he modestly informs us, he will concentrate instead on the topic in hand.

  Freud closes down the discussion, in short, just before it manoeuvres him into his own version of the Marxist doctrine of base and superstructure. In orthodox Marxist fashion, he informs us elsewhere that the basic motivation of social life is economic: civilization is just a cumbersome device for inducing men and women to do what they spontaneously detest, namely work. We are all naturally bone idle, and without this superstructure of sanctions and cajolements we would just lie around all day in various interesting states of jouissance. This is not, of course, exactly Marx's own point: the legal, political and ideological superstructure of society, for him at least, is a consequence of the self-divided nature of the economic 'base' in class conditions – of the fact that economic exploitation needs to be socially legitimated. It does not just follow from the universal injunction to labour. But Freud is aware that labour, at least in this kind of society, entails the renouncing of instinctual gratification; and the 'superstructure' of civilization, or 'culture', must therefore either coerce or cajole us into buckling down to the business of material reproduction. Freud's thought here is impeccably Gramscian: the means by which society is perpetuated, so he informs us, are 'measures of coercion and other measures that are intended to reconcile men (to their material destiny) and to recompense them for their sacrifices. These latter may be described as the mental assets of civilisation' (189). Or – in Gramsci's own terms – the institutions of hegemony. Culture for both thinkers is an amalgam of coercive and consensual mechanisms for reconciling human subjects to their unwelcome fate as labouring animals in oppressive conditions.

Reading notes: Freud's legacy to the critique of ideological consciousness [From: Ideology: An Introduction (2024 Verso edition) by Terry Eagleton]

[....] To put the matter in Marxist terms: if Freud is 'Althusserian' in his awareness of the chronic miscognitions of everyday life, he also shares something of the Enlightenment view of such false consciousness of the early Marx and Engels. And the exemplary Freudian text for this 'enlightened' critique of ideology is his late enquiry into religion, The Future of an Illusion.

  Religion, in Freud's opinion, fulfils the role of reconciling men and women to the instinctual renunciations which civilization forces upon them. In compensating them for such sacrifices, it imbues an otherwise harsh, purposeless world with meaning. It is thus, one might claim, the very paradigm of ideology, providing an imaginary resolution of real contradictions; and were it not to do so, individuals might well rebel against a form of civilization which exacts so much from them. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud contemplates the possibility that religion is thus a socially necessary myth, an indispensable means of containing political disaffection; but he considers this possibility only to reject it. In the most honourable Enlightenment tradition, and despite all his elitist fear of the insensate masses, Freud cannot bring himself to accept that mystification must be an eternal condition of humanity. The idea that a minority of philosophers like himself may acknowledge the unvarnished truth, while the mass of men and women must continue to be the dupes of illusion, is offensive to his rational humanism. Whatever good historical purpose religion may have served in the 'primitive' evolution of the race, the time has now come to replace this myth with the 'rational operation of the intellect', or with what Freud terms 'education in reality'. Like Gramsci, he holds that the secularized, demythologized world view which has so far been largely the monopoly of the intellectuals must be disseminated as the 'common sense' of humanity as a whole.

  To dismiss this hope as the dream of some dewy-eyed rationalist would be to evade the courage and challenge of Freud's text. For no modern thinker is more bleakly aware of the extreme precariousness of human reason – of the grim truth, as he comments in this work, that 'arguments are of no avail against (human) passions', and that 'even in present-day man purely reasonable motives can effect little against passionate impulsions'.12 For all his wary scepticism of the claims of reason, however, Freud has the imagination to ask himself whether unreason must always inevitably reign. The intellect, he remarks, may be powerless in comparison with the instinctual life; but though its voice is a 'soft' one, it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. 'The primacy of the intellect', he writes, 'lies, it is true, in a distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one' (238). Nothing, he claims, can in the long run withstand reason and experience, and the affront which religion offers to both is all too palpable. In the teeth of his own conservative alarm at the smoulderingly rebellious masses, Freud remains loyal to the democratic kernel of a mystified Enlightenment rationality. There is no doubt, in this work at least, as to whether it is such rationality, or a sceptical view of it, which is on the side of political progressivism.

Derleth, pastiche, and the content of form in horror

"Science fiction, horror, fantasy, and crime story are genres where pastiche permits the author the greatest space for self-indulgence. But the most successful efforts in the pastiche story turn out to be written by authors who have no interest in easy victories. Reggie Oliver succeeds in writing horror stories, sometimes based upon plot ideas by accomplished historic figures in the genre, like M. R. James, that ultimately supersede form-of-content limitations."

https://jayrothermel.substack.com/p/not-long-for-this-world-1948-by-august?r=1vg2di

"The Half-Pint Flask" (1927) by DuBose Heyward

"The Half-Pint Flask" (1927) by DuBose Heyward, from the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Bar the Doors: Terror Stories (1946) is a ghost story from the Jim Crow South. Deeply unsettling, with a fascinating setting.

https://jayrothermel.substack.com/p/the-half-pint-flask-1927-by-dubose?r=1vg2di