Aaron Asphar

These four ideas from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (click here or at the end for full text from scribd) have proved increasingly relevant over the last 30 years or so, and I find myself drawing on all the time. While I love reading Freud its not for his ideas these days but his manner of praxis, how his thought uncovers and resolves things, how his contepts develop and transformed with theoretical experience, and so forth. Having said that everything I write on this blog has something of Freud in it + when you think about the contribution he’s made to Western thought it gives you vertigo…

Species elasticity

This principle I use all the time in thinking about aesthetics, culture and sociality. He notices that there “is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things…a kind of organic elasticity.” This is fundamentally at odds with the constant demand to develop and individuate in the social world, to “push…towards progress and the production of new forms” – and this is another way of expressing psychosocial heteronomy. He writes:

“The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change…In the last resort what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live…Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition….[thus producing the] deceptive appearance of…progress, whilst in fact they are [still]…seeking to reach an ancient goal…

To my mind the negative antagonism between aesthetics/style/attitudes/subjectivities on the one hand and structure/stricture/social history/ossification on the other is usefully understood as the counter-dynamics, incommensurable to one another, for emotional, social, somatic (species) elasticity and social-historical self-reproduction, a point that ties Freudian theory directly in with the Marxian historical materialist dialectic (see posts on the Frankfurt School and Castoriadis who took this further). This is a dynamic of mutual negation, given voice to by various dialecticians of the Western tradition.

The Micro-organism Metaphor

Freud compares the development of the ego to the modified surface of an organism, and this exposition is every bit as poetic as it is philosophic:

“Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible……the surface turned towards the external world will…be differentiated…as an organ for receiving stimuli…….as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth…have become…modified…A crust [is]…formed…’baked through’ by stimulation… the living vesicle…is suspended in…an external world charged with …energies; and…[develops] a protective shield…: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic…In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers…with only a fragment of their original intensity…By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate.”

Ego becomes a compromise structure between life and non-life, developed out of the damage/suffering of the organism, and here see existential alienation as experiencing externality as at a petrified remove.

Traumatic Neurosis

On this model he explains the traumatic neurosis, and traumatic nightmares:

“…We describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield…Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale…the mental apparatus [is]…flooded with…stimulus… the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus…and…binding them, [arises]…dreams are endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively” [p.28]

The compulsion to repeat in all its forms can be understood in this way: it indicates an effort to reconcile, hence a difficulty in doing so according to social-historical forms, and it produces the symptom as an asocial adaptation to utterly particular nexus of intra-psychic discontinuity or rupture.

The Death Drive

This one is a Jamus Headed one from an emotional point of view. It is his first formulation of the death drive, which I have come to understand as negativity of species elasticity:

“The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception…The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.”

We should ask what inorganic nature could possibly mean for a death drive – what the meaning of such a late conceptual distinction of civilization could possibly mean for the drive in-itself…

“The implications in regard to the great groups of instincts which, as we believe, lie behind the phenomena of life in organisms must appear no less bewildering. The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death…What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die…in its own fashion. Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the living organism struggles most energetically against…dangers…which might help it to attain its life’s aim rapidly by a kind of short-circuit. Such behaviour is, however, precisely what characterizes purely instinctual as contrasted with intelligent efforts.”

I associate Freud’s death drive with Nietzsche’s Dionysian, Hegel‘s terror, Marxian revolution/emancipation/praxis, negativity, Castoriadis radical imaginary and so forth. It is the non-conceptual dynamic within the social, and for me that which animates the eternal present, which moves through social history thus moving history, to paraphrase Adorno’s suggestion of emotion in thought, which is one and the same suggestion. Anyway, Freud’s work ‘s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is available here from scribd.

Aaron 4/4

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