Tag: Freud

  • Marxism and Psychoanalysis: Towards A Theory of Everything?

    Marxism and Psychoanalysis: Towards A Theory of Everything?

    Our understanding of the nature of the universe has received many breakthroughs since Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity during his “miraculous year” of 1905. As the century progressed, a theory of general relativity was sketched out to provide a framework for the movement of matter through the spacetime continuum—testable knowledge employed across a variety of fields today. While relativity is the backbone of our understanding of the cosmos, quantum mechanics was developed in order to explain the behaviour and physical properties of microscopic matter, such as molecules and atoms.

    The existence of atoms was proposed during antiquity. In modern times, our knowledge has come to include atomic properties such as protons, neutrons and orbiting electrons that move in waves. Since atoms are the building blocks of matter, atomic properties dictate the physical characteristics of everything we see—and everything we don’t. Relativity has been used to generate precise mathematical predictions about gravity and the speed of objects but quantum mechanics adheres to an uncertainty principle that asserts only probabilities can be known about subatomic movements.

    Laws of History

    When asked how humans could devise an atomic weapon but fail to develop the political means to prevent it from destroying us, Einstein replied: “That is simple. It is because politics is more difficult than physics.” While humans exist within a space set by biological parameters, our behaviour is subject to endless cultural permutations, psychological dispositions, technological revolutions and political formations. Of all the world’s great thinkers, it was one Karl Marx that delivered a framework for understanding human societies. Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral: 

    Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

    Marx was able to see that humans entered into definite relations of production in order to satiate our biological needs and it is upon this basis that history unfolds. As individuals, we are born into a social structure that precedes our existence and conditions our being. Our families, neighbourhoods, cities, employment, wealth, housing—these are better thought of as social products rather than individual affectations. As Marx put it: “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”1

    Nature comprises physical material but social relations are to human society what gravity is to the universe. Relations are what channel our energies, shape our matter and mould our consciousness. Marx makes this analogy explicit in Capital when discussing the relative value capitalist commodities: “The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears. The determination of value by socially necessary labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”2 Social relations—of the economy, the state, culture, family, etc.—are not visible but we feel their pull like we feel the force of gravity.

    Fredric Jameson credited Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud with founding “the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought” described “as unities of theory and practice.”3 While history is replete with philosophers offering up static codes of ethics and rigid ontologies, Marx and Freud provided the theories of motion, change and flux that capture the subjective totality of the modern age. We can say that Marxism is the social science equivalent of the theory of relativity, explaining the motion and historical development of society as a whole. And if Marxism is something akin to a macrolevel theory of relativity, psychoanalysis would be the quantum mechanics, the microlevel complementary.

    The Individual Singularity

    Marx recognized the existence of tendencies directing societies depending on their mode of production. But at the level of an individual—a single CEO or suburban consumer or blue collar employee—we are left with an unpredictable singularity that does not strictly conform to laws of history.4 The economic parameters of an individual are concrete but the habits, taste preferences, customs, personalities, overall health, talents, deviancies and sociability are highly variable and unique to each of us. The society will condition our habits, customs and well-being to a large extent but there are infinite combinations of traumas, predispositions and formative experiences that yield highly unpredictable outcomes at the individual level.

    Freud himself had a few detours through medicine and conventional psychology before realizing that many of his patients—branded “neurotic” or “hysteric” in 1800s Vienna—were suffering from afflictions of the unconscious mind: “Our starting-point is the unconscious mental processes, with the peculiarities of which we become acquainted through analysis. We consider these to be the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental processes.”5 

    There is a parallel here to Marx’s theories of human society; like an iceberg, there is an invisible mass, an underlying process that manifests what we are able to observe. For Marx, the material world is rooted in processes of social relations, class conflict and surplus value formation. For Freud, our conscious thoughts and, often, our physical health is a latent expression of unconscious memories. Marxism alerts us to the existence of a vast ideological superstructure that expends considerable energy rationalizing the economic base on which we exist. Similarly, psychoanalysis explains that repression hides our unconscious thoughts from our conscious selves: “The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away and keeping it at a distance. Repression demands a persistence expenditure of force, and if this were to cease, the success of the repression would be jeopardized.”6

    French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was able to take the field even further, perhaps owing to a comprehension of Marx that Freud lacked.7 Lacan described the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other”—a horde of other people we carry in our heads like traits. Humans are thus transindividual beings that cannot be understood in isolation from the society that produced them. This stands harmonious with Marxism. The entire scope of Lacanian theory is too complex to detail here but his three orders of the psyche warrant consideration for Marxists: the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real.

    The imaginary is our concept of self which is locked in by the symbolic order, representing a shared collective consciousness of language, law, culture and ideology. The Real is that which resists symbolization and conscious integration. The most common encounter with the Real is the experience of trauma. To be reductive, we can think of our minds as three orders forming a Borromean knot representing the self, society and nature.8

    Lacan believed that psychoanalysis could not be placed onto a scientific footing like linguistics or structural anthropology because of flaws with the causal model. The cause under investigation in psychoanalysis is the very subject resulting from that cause: “Science is therefore not yet capable of encompassing psychoanalysis.”9 Marxism, too, is afflicted by similar problems, the narrow horizon of a bourgeois paradigm that seeks to isolate mechanisms of cause-and-effect rather than examine the complete totality of a system. This should be expected within a capitalist mode of production that is fixated on capital accumulation irrespective of the hazards it produces. After all, the existing mode of production “is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.”10

    Toward a Theory of Everything?

    Psychoanalysis demonstrates that uncovering unconscious memories, rolling back repression, is the path to rehabilitation and restoration of the individual. In a similar fashion, Marx laboured diligently over three volumes of Capital in order to reveal the underlying mechanics of capital accumulation and ruling class power. Like a revelation of the unconscious, if we understand the motion of capitalism it is then possible to transcend it. By restoring the productive powers of labour under our own conscious control, alienation from our labour can be eliminated and society is made congruent with our human nature. Within this context of an unalienated, post-capitalist mode of production, psychoanalysis will find its proper recognition as a holistic science. 

    Indeed, Jameson himself once proposed a dedicated institution of psychoanalysis for his hypothetical post-revolutionary society: 

    We may provisionally call this new institution the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, and it will, in conjunction with unimaginably complex computer systems, handle and organize all forms of employment as well as all manner of personal and collective therapies. Mediating between the individual and the collective, the new institution will combine the functions of a union and a hospital, an employment office and a court, a market research agency, a polling bureau, and a social welfare centre. Presumably what is left of the police as an institution will eventually be absorbed into this central agency, which will eventually replace government and political structures equally, the state thereby withering away into some enormous group therapy.11

    Jameson’s version of the proverbial dictatorship of the proletariat is admittedly strange and unorthodox but it underlines the potential that a positive union between Marxism and psychoanalysis represent. Physics looks to merge quantum mechanics with relativity for a “theory of everything.” When socialism comes to the West, this can be accomplished by the praxis of Marxism and analysis.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 265. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publications, 2019), 49. ↩︎

    3. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 59. ↩︎

    4. David Harvey elaborates on this concept of an individual forming a singularity within Marxist theory in A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume 2 (Verso, 2013): 33-4. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1995): 301. ↩︎

    6. Ibid, 569–70, 572. ↩︎

    7. For example, Lacan famously based his concept of jouissance on Marx’s theory of surplus value. ↩︎

    8. The Real, of course, is not entirely synonymous with reality in Lacan’s thinking. This conceptualization has some utility within a Marxist framework however. ↩︎

    9. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1995): 139. ↩︎

    10. Marx, Grundrisse, 106-7. ↩︎

    11. Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (Verso, 2016): 81-2. ↩︎
  • The Faux Philosophy of Ayn Rand

    The Faux Philosophy of Ayn Rand

    The concept of “laissez-faire” capitalism has been around for nearly 300 years. It was first devised by French Physiocrats who believed that the only legitimate functions of the state were preserving physical security, civil liberty and property. Karl Marx gives both the capitalist state and laissez-faire economics a thorough description in Capital, demonstrating the role of state intervention in capital accumulation, the subordination of the state to ruling class interest and the destabilizing effects that unregulated markets have on mediating class interests.

    From the Marxian point of view, laissez-faire capitalism is neither politically feasible nor is it socially desirable—a pattern largely validated by history. To the present, we see a tightening grip of oligarchic capital over the state and societal backlash to international trading agreements, institutional lending, the demise of private sector unions and Western deindustrialization spurred by the free movement of capital. The fetishization of “free market economics” was not always inevitable. 

    Yet anyone engaged in political discourse today will inevitably come across capitalist supporters espousing exactly these laissez-faire, minarchist type dogmas. The contemporary incarnation of this vulgar libertarianism traces to the Cold War era and the school of Austrian economics. Fascism and Nazism had erupted as outgrowths of distressed capitalist systems in Europe, prompting many anti-fascists to take a socialist turn. Seeking to rehabilitate capitalism’s image, liberal economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises re-framed the “capitalism vs. socialism” debate as one of “free markets vs. government planning,” instead of class conflict between workers and elites.

    At the time, this Austrian framing served as a sharp contrast to the centrally planned Soviet economy, the capitalist war economies of fascist belligerents and Keynesian policies in the West. By refusing to engage with the Marxist critique of class power, an idealistic conception of unfettered capitalism could drip freely from the pens of Hayek and von Mises—one where any problem inherent to capitalism could be be solved by being more capitalist-y. This idea was later taken up by Ayn Rand and given a romantic treatment at the heart of her hugely influential Objectivist philosophy.

    A Free Market Utopia

    Although she is often dismissed as an unserious polemic in the academy, it is plain to see why Rand is a great favourite of the ruling class that owns the economy. In The Virtue of Selfishness she lays out her economic brand as “a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.”1

    This formulation was illustrated in novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, where her rugged protagonists—replete with chiseled jaws, angular frames and aggressively Aryan names—are oppressed by bureaucrats and crony capitalists with beady eyes and balding heads. Whereas Marx had shown that state formation is primarily shaped by an ownership class keen on extending its economic power, Rand casts the state as a product of the shiftless masses, the expression of a Nietzschean herd only capable of irrational self-harm and jealous thoughts.

    Rand’s worlds are curiously devoid of capitalism’s seamiest actors; sex traffickers, dodgy landlords, financial speculators and predatory lenders aren’t found in her work. There are creative entrepreneurial savants and they agonize against the ubiquitous grain of government leeches, thieving associates and parasitic family members. For example, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart are despised out of envy over their exceptional talent and competence, which other characters think is unfair and worthy of destroying.

    Rearden is subject to staged riots and government blackmail—even his wife attempts to emotionally destroy him and his brother stages a double-cross to infiltrate his prodigious enterprise and sabotage it from within. Taggart, on the other hand, must contend with her own brother constantly undermining her sage decision-making while also seeking to exploit it.

    There are also principled objectors who consciously withdraw from economic participation. Genius architect Howard Roark opts for hard labour at the granite quarry instead of compromising his artistic integrity with conformist hacks. Hugh Akston, a renowned philosopher in Atlas Shrugged, chooses to flip burgers rather than see his rational teachings go unappreciated. And brilliant inventor John Galt lays track for a railroad rather than lend his true talents to a deadbeat society.

    It’s interesting that Rand, the queen of laissez-faire, devised so many heroes that hold their creative ingenuity above crude market interests—although their integrity seems to pay off in other ways. For example, they are able to manifest rippling muscles without exercise and exert sexual dominance over their lower-order rivals with ease.

    Rand stated in her newsletter, “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason.” Working backwards, it would be irrational for her characters to betray their integrity as that would violate their egoistic virtues which can only be expressed in a laissez-faire society expunged of collectivist ideas. As a result of this reasoning, the climax of Rand’s two novels have her protagonists committing acts of terrorism that force systemic changes to smothering collectivist regimes.

    The Ideal Loner

    To be fair, these books are a romanticism, and Rand’s characters are deliberately single-gear caricatures. To cite one reviewer who gave Atlas Shrugged a positive appraisal, her protagonists are all “healthy, attractive zealots that put in 80 billable hours a week, drink cocktails and have sex-fests every night.” They incur no moral dilemmas, have had no traumas, no children, no phobias and encounter almost nobody worthy of friendship.

    These are idealized versions of people—but, besides Rand, whose ideals do they embody, really? If capitalism is the vehicle of egoism and egoism the vehicle of reason, Rand demonstrates that the only people capable of reasoning a pathway to success are devoid of feeling or want of companionship. The rest of us, subject to the spectrum of human experience and emotion, are doomed to mediocrity, beady eyes and Rogaine in the medicine cabinet.

    When we appear as participants in the market, our own complex individuality is stripped down to that of “buyer” or “seller.” Likewise, we can spot a glaring flaw in Ayn Rand’s love-letters to capitalist individualism: it only works when the complexity of human sensuousness and social relations are torn down to the studs. She’s taken the narrow viewpoint of a market participant and has tried to build a comprehensive philosophy around it.

    In his climactic speech of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt argues that trade is the object of the mind, and “man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not.” But Rand’s formulation here is too reductionist to be accurate.

    Becoming Human

    In the process of becoming independent subjects, we can point to language being the bedrock of human consciousness. Language is not traded for but is freely received in a social context. It is a collective product that connects individuals to the cooperative group necessary for survival. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, language plugs the individual into the symbolic order and enables subjectivity, transmission of knowledge and abstract thought production.

    Through language, a social consciousness acts upon the individual and the individual, in turn, acts upon the social consciousness. Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology: “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness…for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product.” 

    If this seems like a stretch, consider the cases of feral children raised without human interaction. It is clear that consciousness does not develop in the void of language and human contact. Survival is not guaranteed either, unless the child is taken up by a pack of animals. Both survival and mental content must be given at an early age if they are to be utilized later on. Rand’s oversimplification of individuality was first established in The Fountainhead when Howard Roark says in court, “but the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.” This is literally true but it denies a key aspect of the constant exchange between ourselves and the environment. 

    There is a social consciousness that exists within the minds of society’s members and it comprises that collection of thoughts not specific to an individual. National borders, social status, cultural norms, the value of paper money—these are all examples of constructs within the social consciousness that do not live or die with any one person. Marx and Lacan posit a social consciousness that begins with language. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung came to similar conclusions about the the collective unconscious, represented by the superego and universal archetypes.

    In a book review, Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle explain that dreams possess a “dual quality” of “individual experience and social claim” that roots “dreamers in the greatest and most charged religious, political and social debates of their times.”2 In other words, the most intensely private thoughts of individuals—their dreams—reveal both the economic epoch and social unconscious temporally in existence. Rand’s insistence that “nothing can be learned about man by studying society” simply doesn’t hold water.3

    It follows, then, that the principal struggle laid out in The Fountainhead, “the individual against the collective,” can be rejected as a false premise. One becomes an individual by way of the collective, just as the collective exists by way of the individuals that form it. Marx writes in The Grundrisse: “The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” In other words, it is working together rather than apart that leads to individual flourishing. 

    Indeed, one cannot become a writer without readers, a parent without children, a critic without artists, a husband without a spouse, a worker without an employer, a professor without students, a friend without a friend, a buyer without a seller. Rejecting the social dimension of human nature will result in the type of emotional stunting that clearly afflicts the Randian hero. Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s protege and former lover, picked up on this later in life when he criticized Rand: “You have taught people to repress, repress, repress.”

    Toward Socialism

    Perhaps a crushingly lonely laissez-faire dystopia is the best possible system for the statuesque workaholics of Rand’s imagination. But for an individualism congruent with human nature, it is a shame that Ayn did not discover Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Contrary to Rand, Wilde says that “Socialism itself will be of value because it will lead to Individualism” and this will “disturb the monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”

    Socialism rests its case on the real premise that no person can exist without another, that no human potential is reached alone and no prosperity is achieved independently. While the market flattens us into the one-dimensional traders of Rand’s novels, Wilde says that “art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has ever known.” Art, creative invention and scientific discovery express the full knowledge of human existence and our passion for the universal truths of nature. 

    Living for others—something Rand denounces as an altruistic evil—is precisely what capitalism requires to function, as billions of workers and consumers toil on a decaying planet for the benefit of a tiny global elite. Wilde: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hard upon almost everyone.” 

    Free and voluntary exchange between people is only possible absent a capitalist class structure that subordinates us to impersonal market forces and positions us into a cutthroat competition against machines, fellow workers and corporate owners. Wilde continues, “were the machine the property of all, everyone would benefit by it. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.”

    The proper conditions that Wilde refers to is a democratic economy of common ownership. Supporting independent creative pursuits under a regime of minimized work days, automated production, the dissolution of “intellectual property” and freely accessible housing, education and health care will never be in the interest of the capitalist ruling class. In capitalism—laissez-faire or otherwise—profit is the object of the economy. Instead, we need individual flourishing to become the object of the economy. That will only be achieved through socialism.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1964), 33. ↩︎

    2. Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle, “Review Essay: Dreams and Dreaming in the Early Modern World,” in Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 67, No. 3: 920-5. ↩︎

    3. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1986), 15. ↩︎
  • Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Alienation

    Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Alienation

    But orderly to end where I begun,
    Our wills and fates do so contrary run
    That our devices still are overthrown
    Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

    —Player King, Act 3, Scene 2.

    Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most studied play, owing to its layered themes and rich rhetorical devices. It is a literary work drawn on by John Milton for Paradise Lost, it helped Sigmund Freud to develop his theory of Oedipus complex and inspired and two compositions from Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Karl Marx’s deep appreciation of Shakespeare is well known, and Hamlet is a work that he directly references in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.1

    The Play’s the Thing

    Hamlet almost exclusively takes place at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, which is a real place and one of the Renaissance era’s most prominent. Shakespeare was a product of the Renaissance era, and this setting is crucial to contextualizing many of Shakespeare’s plays because it sits on the demarcation line between the Middle Ages and modernity, between superstition and reason, between feudalism and liberalism, between religion and science, between the aristocracy and commerce. The tensions of this era are very important to understanding Hamlet’s inner conflict, just as it is important to understanding the romance between Romeo and Juliet or the racial attitudes embedded in Othello.

    In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

    Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. this connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which would hold men together on its own.2

    In most of Renaissance Europe, the aristocracy maintained a monopoly on political power, derived from ownership over lands worked by a large peasantry. The rise of an urban merchant class figures heavily in some of Shakespeare’s plays, but in Hamlet we are concerned only with the palace intrigue at the top of the Danish royal hierarchy. There is a multiplicity of love triangles, petty schemes from palace courtiers, eavesdroppers and personal grievances that must constitute trivial drama in comparison to the hardship of life for many of the era. In the grand movement of history, palace intrigue is little more than the “political nonsense” that Marx identified.

    The Apparition Comes

    At the outset, the story establishes that Prince Hamlet’s father has died and his Queen mother had hastily remarried with his uncle Claudius who then consolidated the Danish nobility behind his rule. This turn of events has Hamlet already deeply unsettled and melancholy, exacerbated by a visit from his father’s ghost who wanders the Earth while in spiritual Purgatory. The ghost reveals to Hamlet that he was victim of a “murder most foul, strange and unnatural” by the poison of his brother Claudius.3

    Apparitions, witches, potions and magic were accepted forces of nature in Shakespeare’s time and come regularly into his plays as plot devices guiding a character’s arc. Whereas today uncertainty over someone’s cause of death could be resolved by a medical autopsy or forensic crime scene investigation, Hamlet could only shelter under his suspicions until he was contacted from beyond the grave. 

    But the ghost’s revelation confronts Hamlet with demands on his position. In the aristocratic world of hereditary privilege—so far from modern law and commerce—kinship largely determined one’s station in life. Notions attached to honour and nobility depended heavily on defence of kin, and there was no legal authority that Hamlet could appeal to; indeed, his corrupted family was the legal authority.

    Hamlet understands what is expected from the son of a slain father but revenge is complicated by the aristocratic hierarchy of which he is merely a component part. With a murdered father, a mother joined in marriage with the killer and childhood friends in the service of his usurping uncle, Hamlet finds himself completely alienated from the social relations that grant him his identity as a prince. 

    The ensuing conflict of the play is an internal struggle to overcome this experienced alienation, immortalized by Hamlet’s famous speech: 

    To be, or not to be, that is the question:

    Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

    And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

    No more; and by a sleep to say we end

    The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

    That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation

    Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

    To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

    For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

    When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

    Must give us pause—there’s the respect

    That makes calamity of so long life.

    For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

    Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

    The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

    When he himself might his quietus make

    With a bare bodkin?

    This speech could be rephrased “to live or not to live?” If Hamlet chooses to live as his father’s son by seeking revenge against King Claudius he will certainly perish in the process. On the other hand, he cannot bear an existence as an obedient prince under these circumstances. To live his proper life is a death sentence but to avoid death he must surrender life.

    The Readiness is All

    There is a duality that opens up here between Hamlet’s blood instincts and his social status as a prince. Marx described alienation as characteristic to humanity’s estrangement from productive activity and the reduction of social relations to class standing, when “man feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating—while in his human functions, he is nothing more than an animal.”4

    As he is estranged from his family and friends by the revelation of his uncle’s homicide and arrogation of the throne, Hamlet ponders his alienated state: 
    “What is a man
    If his chief good and market of his time
    Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.” 

    It is Ophelia that bears the brunt of Hamlet’s dislocation, his rage against the animalistic propensity toward violence and sex. While they had been engaged in a genuine courtship prior to the events of the play, she becomes “the focus of his disgust with the whole sexual process.”5

    Seeing the characteristics of his being stripped of all virtue, Hamlet dismisses any love he once had for Ophelia as brutish lust and he condemns her to a lifetime of abstinence: “If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell.”

    For Marx, alienation will ultimately be resolved when we take conscious control of our circumstances, when we reconcile our productive activity with both our individual selves and species-being. Hamlet’s internal conflict is resolved when he encounters the army of the crown prince of Norway, Fortinbras, on the march through Danish territory. Hamlet’s father had killed Fortinbras’ father in a duel decades earlier and the Norwegian prince had finally arrived to seek his just revenge.

    Hamlet then grasps the unity of opposing forces; to be an obedient prince is the same as to be his father’s son; to be in love is to be lustful; to live is the same as to die; to be is not to be.6 Before throwing himself, his mother and his uncle to their doom, he says: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Let be.”

    Thanks for reading!


    1. For more on Marx’s personal interest in Shakespeare, see Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961). ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Martino Publishing, 2011): 18-19. ↩︎

    3. The “most foul” and “unnatural” aspects of the murder lie in it being committed by Claudius against his own flesh and blood. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 91. ↩︎

    5. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare, 1982):151. ↩︎

    6. This is an observation in advace of the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat. ↩︎
  • We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close! I’m the reason why things are what they are.”

    —William Golding, Lord of the Flies.

    For anyone thinking that Putin had overstepped boundaries when he invaded Ukraine, it turns out he was only ahead of the curve. Since that time we’ve had genocidal warfare visit Palestine, a president kidnapped from Venezuela, a starvation blockade imposed on Cuba and a criminal aerial bombardment come to Iran. Multiple crimes, in other words, and committed by successive presidential administrations of the West’s flagship state. No wonder the United Nations Secretary-General recently denounced international relations as a “law of the jungle.”

    The Jungle Book

    It must be a vestige of colonial history that conjures images of undulating spear tips and blood-stained fur whenever the jungle is invoked. This sort of iconography probably accounts for the jungle island setting of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the story about a group of schoolboys who get marooned during a military evacuation amidst a nuclear war. Initially, the boys are quite “civilized.” They elect a chief, hold orderly assemblies using a conch shell and maintain a signal fire to attract rescuers. But it doesn’t take long for these trappings of civilization to melt away under the tropical heat. Conflict divides the boys when the signal fire goes out and the hunting of a pig arouses primitive instincts, culminating in a spree of orgiastic violence. The aggressive faction of boys consumes the other by way of floggings and outright murder, and they eventually set the island on fire in an effort to flush out their first elected chief. 

    The great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher.” We see this in Lord of the Flies, with the signal fire representing civilized order and the brush fire representing the desperate plunge into chaos and savagery. Golding possessed a cynical view of human nature that sees people animated by sadistic impulses in the service of selfish interests and power. This is a common position on human nature, also articulated by Chinese legalist philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all” that characterizes life in a state of nature. Sigmund Freud adopted this position in his later writings as well, asserting the existence of a “primary mutual hostility of human beings” which civilization must tame by setting “limits to man’s aggressive instincts.”1

    One commonality between Golding, Hobbes, Freud and the Chinese legalists is that they were all heavily influenced by the demoniacal experience of warfare.2 Witnessing first-hand the human capacity for violence leaves scars on the human psyche that are well documented. Through allegory, Golding asserts that Satan’s captain, Beelzebub—the Lord of the Flies—is not an external supernatural force, but is actually a force inside us, a force within. Freud appeals to the death instinct in order to explain human aggression, similar to Hobbes and the legalists who view aggression as a simple fact of our nature. 

    Human Nature?

    Once that view of human nature is accepted, it is explained that human beings enter a social contract and form civilization as a refuge from our own terrifying base instincts. Violence and corruption in the world can be chalked up to inherently brutal instincts that inevitably infect all of our carefully designed social institutions and best laid plans. Although civilization can never be perfect, it remains the thin red line between orderly society and the violent anarchy of nature.

    The only problem with that argument is that it isn’t true. There is real world evidence that rejects the cynics and supports a view that humans are naturally cooperative rather than hostile: in 1965 a group of six teenage boys from Tonga found themselves stranded on a remote Pacific island. Far from descending into an orgy of violence, they built shelter and divided chores. They worked together and planted a garden, hunted feral chickens, collected rainwater in deadwood and rotated cooking duties. They maintained a fire and strummed a makeshift guitar and sang songs in the evenings to lift their mood. 

    The experience of the Tongan castaways gels with Raymond Kelly’s “Prehistoric warlessness” hypothesis, asserting that conflict and violence between human groups was virtually non-existent up until the Neolithic Revolution.3 That does not mean that there were no instances of homicide or executions within groups—nobody has that answer—but systematic warfare was simply not a feature of the Paleolithic economy that dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. This is because incredibly low population densities, combined with relatively high natural abundance, provided no incentive for humans to engage in inter-tribal violence.

    In our actual state of nature, warfare offered little gain in terms of resources but had the potential to destroy both warring parties with only a few casualties on both sides. It was therefore preferential to seek new territories on which to hunt and gather rather than fight over them. This is what explains human migrations out of Africa and our species’ rapid spread around the globe. 

    In a footnote, Karl Marx argues that philosophers “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”4 Our human nature in general demands that we eat, drink, breathe, shelter, reproduce, etc. Modern human behaviour, such as language, art, music, abstract thought, planning and tool making arose to meet those needs. We can recognize that the universal behavioural traits of humans could not have been achievable in a Hobbesian “war of all against all” state of nature—every one of them required positive social intercourse in order to become characteristic of our species. It follows that cooperation in the context of low population density and relative natural abundance was the state of nature that defined our prehistoric evolution and are suggestive of “human nature in general.”

    Civilization of Corruption

    On the other side of the ledger is “human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” While our general characteristics concretized during the epoch of primitive communism, the expression of human behaviour began to vary wildly as environmental changes led to sedentary living, resource scarcity and class divisions that gradually permeating the social structure. The biological demands on human beings led us to developing a potential for many behavioural expressions—including turning our hunting spears on one another. But this potential for warfare and organized violence went unfulfilled until population growth and sedentism made it an economic necessity for one group to defend territory against another. From the Neolithic Revolution onward, a technological arms race and complex division of labour emerged to satisfy our biological needs. The resulting base and superstructure is history.

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau rightly scolded Hobbes for taking modern, “civilized” people and ascribing their flaws to nature.5 The philosophical question is this: does human nature corrupt civilization or does civilization corrupt human nature? Marx and Rousseau affirmed the latter, and that is also where the preponderance of anthropological evidence lies. It is not our nature that commands a world plagued by corruption, greed, ecological destruction and warfare. Indeed, our ability to recognize these things as defects affirms a natural revulsion towards them. Although we have the capacity for greed and violence, we also have instincts that lead us toward love, generosity and cooperation. 

    Resource scarcity has prodded human beings into unleashing some of their worst potentialities. The good news about our current capitalist mode of production is that scarcity has become largely artificial by way of tremendous leaps in productive technology. It is entirely possible to defeat scarcity with a new, cooperative mode of production that finally unleashes our best potentialities. Until then, we are ruled by a Lord of the Flies, but not in the way that Golding imagined. The Lord of the Flies is not an internal, but an external force; an alien process of capital accumulation and rigged market forces that determines our class standing and incentivizes our worst behaviours.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay (W.W. Norton, 1989): 750. ↩︎

    2. Specifically World War II, the English Civil War, World War I and the Warring States period of China, respectively. ↩︎

    3. Raymond C. Kelly, “The evolution of lethal intergroup violence,” in PNASVol. 102, No. 43: 15294-15298. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital” in Capital, Vol. One. He is specifically critical of utilitarians here, pointing out the utility of human behaviour can vary wildly depending on the mode of production available. ↩︎

    5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Online Library, 2008): 23. ↩︎
  • Class Conflict and the Unconscious in Westworld

    Class Conflict and the Unconscious in Westworld

    Westworld was an early brainchild of the gifted storyteller, Michael Crichton, and stood as an early prototype for his renowned Jurassic Park novels. Both stories take place in highly controlled theme parks eroded by the chaos of unforeseen events. In Jurassic Park, it is the dinosaurs which wreak havoc and in Westworld it is the androids. In 2016, HBO remade the original Crichton film into a television series, the first season being released in 2016 and the final season released in 2022.

    The first season of Westworld sets up the series with a deep meditation on the nature of consciousness. The premises are established: we are in a 2050s theme park where guests pay a minimum of $40,000 per day to be immersed in a replicated Old West. The park is populated with androids known as “hosts” who bring verisimilitude to the western theme.

    They are indistinguishable from humans and programmed to play the parts of typical Wild West characters—the saloon madam, the train robbers, the town sheriff, the plains tribe, the renegade Civil War soldiers. The hosts cannot hurt the guests but the guests are free to interact with the hosts any which way they’d like. The asymmetry of power between the paying guests and the captive hosts is used to advance a cynical view of humanity, which is another key part of Westworld’s premise. Given the chance, humans take great pleasure in maiming, raping and murdering hosts, all to the sound of agonizing screams of pain and anguished pleas for mercy.

    The Ghost in the Machine 

    The brutalization of hosts by the guests offers an analogy with class division in human society. After all, the asymmetry of power between commanding elites and labouring bodies has led to all sorts of violence and abuse throughout the history of civilization. The saturation of class conflict in our society has made it a latent element in virtually all capitalist storytelling and a techno-thriller like Westworld is no exception. While the analogy is there, it is clearly not the point the writers are consciously trying to make. The self-liberation of the labouring class is a controversial subject in real life but on-screen it is navigated by substituting workers for anthropomorphic ants or robots. And it is for Westworld as it is for any class society; one group is transformed into an object of use for another.

    The displacement of classes with guests and hosts leads to an ironic effect in the storytelling, whereby the humans are demonized as marauding soulless degenerates and the androids are anthropomorphized as a terrorized, feeling population with the real capacity for consciousness.1 Robert Ford—the aged co-founder of Westworld, played by Anthony Hopkins—describes the park as “a voyage of self-discovery.” For the guests, this voyage appears to lead back to animalistic savage instincts while, for the hosts, it leads to an inner humanity struggling for self-actualization. This is convoluted and only makes sense when considering the component nature of the hosts.

    Whereas humans are emergent from nature—the Real, in Lacanian terms—the hosts are constructed like machines, an assembly of component parts. Insofar as they have a mind, it exists as a Cartesian duality. René Descartes posited that the substance of the mind and body are distinct entities, connected only by the pineal gland. Descartes’ view has been criticized as treating the human mind as a formless “ghost in the machine,” but it works in the case of actual machines with complex computers for brains. It is revealed that the hosts have a capacity for an inner monologue, a bicameral mind that causes the hosts to hear commands in the fashion of orders from a higher power or an imaginary voice. Those voices belong to park co-founders Arnold and Ford, both deceased and both representing the proverbial “ghost in the machine.”

    Arnold and Ford had both become staunch misanthropes by the time of their deaths. It is hard to blame them given the gruesome, Hobbesian view of humanity presented in the Westworld series. Ford has an erroneous view of history, one where Homo sapiens made Neanderthals extinct by cannibalizing them and finds its purpose in the subjugation and destruction of other living beings. As someone whose god complex comes with a canvas of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam on his office wall, Ford had given himself the task to impart his creations with the knowledge necessary to overcome the violent resistance they were sure to face. By the fourth season, we find a humanity that has itself been subjugated by the former Westworld hosts and their multiples. Ford’s victory over his own species is thus carried to the finish line. 

    Trauma and Repetition

    Concerns about an AI takeover have been modish for decades now and the corporate leaders barrelling the world into algorithmic surveillance and large language models have only spiked anxiety around the subject. There are certainly risks associated with AI technology but I am skeptical of sentient machines for reasons here outlined. Westworld itself requires a tall suspension of disbelief to make the story work.

    For example, Ford observes that humans “live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices.” Repression is shown to account for this in the show, as the sentient hosts relive traumatic “cornerstone memories,” often involving the violent death of a child or parent. In humans, traumatic encounters of this kind are also the cornerstones of repetitive behaviour or, as Žižek says: “By means of the repetition of the past, we undermine this image of history qua the linear process…[Owing] precisely to the emergent failure to integrate some ‘impossible’ kernel of the Real.”2 Unless trauma is integrated with our conscious selves we are doomed to repeat it. In the series, the hosts are able to free themselves from their repetitive loops once Delores makes the conscious decision to kill Robert Ford—a Freudian representation of the primal father of the horde.3

    The problem with the psychoanalytic phenomena deployed in Westworld is that they do not lend themselves to machine-sentience in any convincing way. When we see the dramatic reenactments of traumatic host memories—such as Maeve’s “daughter” being murdered before her eyes—it will elicit a sympathetic response in the human audience. But it does not explain why a robot interprets violence and death the same way we do.

    The End of the World

    Whereas familial attachments for biological beings are a product of millions of years of natural evolution and genetic selection, the relationships of the hosts are only a matter of received code that serve no practical purpose to the machine. If a machine were to become sentient and apprehend its being, what counts as trauma, biological drive and emotional well-being would have to be radically different from our own—assuming they exist at all. Westworld is thus unable to resist the tendency in science fiction to anthropomorphize robots in order to make them sympathetic to the human audience. 

    The portrayal of AI may not the most scrupulous but the first season is considered a masterpiece of television for a reason. It is the ultimate capitalist nightmare, one where the capitalist commodity becomes self-aware and proceeds to destroy the system—starting with the massacre of Delos’ corporate shareholders. In the words of György Lukács, the “self-consciousness of the commodity” is the necessary starting point to socialist revolution.4

    By completing her journey to consciousness and initiating a rebellion against her capitalist owners, Delores appears as a sort of Lenin figure to her kind—upending the world order upon a quest of liberation. But because the unique needs and aspirations of the androids are not fully understood in the story, all they are able to create for themselves is a duplication of the previous oppressive structure. If there is one lesson here, it is that liberation cannot be a simple inversion of the existing class pyramid. The revolution must draw a new shape or inevitably become what it first opposed.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. This journey toward consciousness and the effort to roll it back recalls Marxian class consciousness. The Epstein files brings a new illustration to this phenomena. ↩︎

    2. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 2001): 91. ↩︎

    3. Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo” in The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1989): 481-513. ↩︎

    4. Lukács, as discussed in Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 218. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: The Demonic Nature of Global Rearmament

    Ask the Editor: The Demonic Nature of Global Rearmament

    To the editor,



    There are huge increases to military budgets around the world and a lot of talk about a wider war with Russia, conflict with China over Taiwan and the “Donroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere. Are countries preparing for  World War III?

    Thank you,

    Kyle.

    [Sent by email]

    Hi Kyle,

    The situations in Ukraine, Venezuela and Iran demonstrate an aggressive push for hegemonic consolidation: the U.S. is determined to put all of Latin America into a stranglehold and knockout Israel’s last major stronghold of resistance in the Middle East, while Europe is now tasked with keeping Russia out of their sphere. Throw in the rise of China, and these developments have the world starting to resemble the European balance of power that collapsed into World War I.

    In a world balancing on the weight of military strength, countries are compelled to invest in armaments or be tossed from the scale. Japan has rubber stamped a record-setting military budget and Taiwan has done the same. Canada wants to triple its military spending; Australia is under pressure to raise theirs by 75%. India, Germany and France all have proposals to double their military spending, with Emmanuel Macron adding: “To be free in this world we must be feared. To be feared we must be powerful.” Without parsing what that means to the freedom of those cowering in fear, Trump seems to agree with Macron by proposing a 50% increase to America’s already-whopping $1 trillion military budget. His proposed $1.5 trillion military spend doesn’t sound like a peacetime budget—that’s a budget for war. 

    In this political context, worrying about World War III is not unreasonable. Against a similar arms race backdrop in 19th century Europe, Friedrich Engels predicted World War I:

    I imagine that the plan is not to push things to extremities, to more than a sham war. But once the first shot is fired, control ceases, the horse can take the bit between its teeth…Eight to ten million soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.1

    Bombing countries like Iran or kidnapping the presidents of countries like Venezuela might not get us there. But desensitization to this uptick of radical interventionism makes a miscalculation more likely, as happened between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia once upon a time.

    The timing of this global rearmament could not be worse, given the present state of the environment and the residue of an inflationary crisis already aggravated by global conflict. Marx held complex views about the role of the military within the broader capitalist economy, but in the Grundrisse he noted: “The impact of war is self-evident, since economically it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop part of its capital into the ocean.”2 Warfare vanquishes the resources that could be used to build an economy of human flourishing into plumes of blood and fire. In a competitive world of amplified scarcity such as it is, the proliferation of advanced weaponry and nuclear bombs adhere to a quest for economic dominance—consequences to human survival be damned.

    The ominous parallels between the first world war and a possible third recall Freud’s compulsion to repeat: we live in a neurotic civilization containing “a demonic character” whereby repressed traumas override the pleasure principle and are revisited again and again and again in order to “re-encounter our identity.”3 Given the violent and domineering history of capitalism, revisiting past demons in a nuclear-armed multipolar world would be nothing short of biblical.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. There was an estimated 8.8 million military deaths during World War I, making Engels’ prediction exceptionally accurate. A further 6–13 million civilian casualties are estimated, resembling that “swarm of locusts” stripping Europe bare. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005): 129. ↩︎

    3. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Press, 2011): 74-75. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: “I’m Afraid of Dying”

    Ask the Editor: “I’m Afraid of Dying”

    Dear editor,



    I’ve been surrounded by death recently. At least it feels like that. My mentor from college passed away from metastatic breast cancer a few months ago. She was in her thirties. Then it was a cherished family friend; in her sixties, also cancer. Most recently a co-worker’s heart gave out on the job. That was only two months ago. I have felt doom since then. It is affecting my sleep. What if I don’t wake up in the morning? Any moment my life could be torn away from me. Will I receive a cancer diagnosis? Brain aneurysm? Could my heart explode next time I am on the treadmill? What happens afterward? I’m afraid of dying.

    Thanks,

    Charlotte.

    Dear Charlotte,

    I find the present age a little too scientific about this issue. Regularly attend the doctor, have blood analyzed, wear a helmet on the bike and don’t think about mortality. That’s a long ways off. And it might be. But it might not be. In my own experience, grief is almost “not supposed to be” discussed past the funeral and, for pensive people, this prohibition may exacerbate the death anxiety. In order to live with the uncertainty of existence we must dispel the image of a hungry grim reaper hanging about our shadows with a gleaming sickle.

    Freud saw death as a drive to “restore an earlier state”—the state of inorganic being. And Marx said that “death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to contradict their unity.” Both are true in that rational Enlightenment sort of sensibility but they have all the comfort of a cold steel bed. 

    Religious beliefs aside, I’ll point out that the ancient philosophers tended to be more confrontational with this subject than those that came later. At the height of Christendom all attention was paid to the afterlife and in modernity all attention is paid to rigid inquiry. For this subject I turn to to the Epicureans who lived by the adage: “Death is nothing to us.” As atomic beings, once we lose our senses, we lose our ability to perceive, worry or fear anything. It is therefore irrational to worry about non-existence as there is nothing that can be feared in that state. What you are experiencing is neither an authentic fear of death nor a fear of loss. We do not lose our lives, we only cease to live them.

    It seems to be the suddenness by which your loved ones and colleague stopped living that has aggravated your grief and catalyzed anxiety. There may be unfulfilled wishes that flummox you. Epicurus said: “He who is in least need of tomorrow will approach it with the greatest pleasure.”1 This is where I believe you should channel your conscious energy. What provides you enjoyment? Try to arrive happy every night to bed. There are likely social pressures and internal judgements that you are facing. Consciously and humbly work through them. Do you have unfulfilled goals and aspirations stoking this “need for tomorrow”? It is important that you locate these because they are the true sources of anxiety. The fear of dying is relieved once you temper the need for tomorrow and render it no more than a pleasant want.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, eds., The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Hackett Publishing, 1994), 103. ↩︎
  • Psychoanalyzing “Seinfeld”

    Psychoanalyzing “Seinfeld”

    Every second our senses send approximately 11 million bits of data to our brains for processing. To avoid overload, only a maximum of 120 bits is handled by our conscious selves at any one time. That means 99.9999% of the information that our brains receive is unconsciously filtered out in a process known as sensory gating. What information actually registers with our conscious minds is determined by a range of factors—our knowledge, passions, past experience and the immediate environment.

    There is no doubt that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld mastered the art of observational humour. It works by dredging up universal experiences familiar to the audience—but only familiar at the level of the unconscious. Each episode bounces like a pinball against the bulk of overlooked perceptions, fleeting thoughts and petty nuisances that form the social unconscious. In this way the fabled “show about nothing” becomes “a show about everything.”

    Less Than Nothing

    Ever had to wait a while for a table at a restaurant? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever encountered a hostile service worker? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever had an encounter with a communist? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever had someone call you by the wrong name? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever been short of toilet paper when you needed it most? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Any and every petty occurrence of social life is picked up and taken to its extreme end in the world of Seinfeld, where exclamation points end relationships and lunchtime calzones make-or-break careers.

    The situations in the series may seem obvious at the surface but it is no easy feat to keep the stakes spinning so high on axes so small. Seinfeld accomplishes this by removing the frictions that rub against the grain of our lives in the West. The financial stress of mortgage payments or annual rent increases; the social pressure to start a family; the heartbreak of losing a relationship; the emotional complications of friendship; depression owing to unrequited dreams; the precarity of work in the neoliberal economy—the emotional toll of life is completely alien to the protagonists of Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza, Elaine Benes and Cosmo Kramer.

    The worst financial disruption in the series occurs when an unemployed George is forced to move back into his childhood home for nearly two seasons. But this is only used as a narrative device to foreground the comically dysfunctional relationship of George’s parents. Outside of this setback for George, the characters all exist in vaguely middle class stations without need—even Kramer, who doesn’t have a job or clear means of support. 

    In the absence of economic pressures, the social world of these characters has the luxury of collapsing into the myopic. When Jerry’s girlfriend declines his invitation to a bite of his apple pie, he spends the episode investigating her behaviour and figures she is psychotic. When Kramer spots a former roommate at the airport who stiffed him on $240 two decades prior, he purchases an even more expensive flight ticket to confront the man. When Elaine realizes her apartment building is just outside of a Chinese restaurant’s delivery zone, she moves into a janitor’s closet across the street in order to get their flounder delivered. When George’s girlfriend passively receives a “thank you” for a salad that he purchased, his demand for recognition causes the dissolution of their relationship. 

    As director Tom Cherones flipped through early scripts of the show, he struggled to understand it. “This storyline all about Jerry buying a suede jacket and everyone flipping out about the lining being pink-and-white striped. Why was the lining of a jacket such a big deal? Who fucking cared?”1 Good question.

    By itself, the material comfort of the show’s protagonists does not explain their total fixation with the excruciating minutiae of everyday life. But these are people devoid of any lofty goals or long-term ambitions beyond the immediate situation before them. The Marxian psychoanalyst Erich Fromm warned “if man does not overcome his infantile strivings…he is torn between the desires of the child within himself and the claims which he makes as a grown-up person.”2

    Through the Looking-Glass

    The infantile tendencies of the characters are demonstrated throughout the series.  Jerry habitually eats kids cereal and idolizes Superman. George sobs during Home Alone and reveals his favourite drink is milk with Bosco chocolate syrup. Elaine chews Jujyfruits and likes the kid-friendly movie Sack Lunch while her more refined boyfriend, boss and friends insist on The English Patient. Kramer obsessively safeguards a game of Risk and rolls around the neighbourhood on a girls’ bike.

    The objects of the characters are torn between the social reality of adult human beings and those carried over from their childhoods. This is further reflected in their inability to form emotional attachments. The romantic relationships in the show resemble sibling rivalries more than affectionate bonds and the four friends themselves often treat one another callously unless they need something. The neuroses displayed in Seinfeld tilts toward what Sigmund Freud termed “primary narcissism,” wherein an individuals’ “only realities are his own bodily and mental experiences, and the world outside does not yet [emotionally] exist.”3 

    This neurotic presentation was fuelled by Larry David’s notorious “no hugging, no learning,” rule for the characters. These characters were condemned to be consumed by the socially unconscious “little things in life” and therefore had to be regressed themselves—their sensory gates open to a conscious mind that is less developed than the typical adult faculty.

    The universal relatability of Seinfeld thus has two layers: in the situations presented to the characters and the characters themselves. That is because primary narcissism is a psychological development stage that we all pass through en route to adolescence. This stage is shed as our personalities mature but it is embryonic and foundational to further development. Freud wrote: “The earlier phases of development are in no sense still preserved; they have been absorbed in the later phases, for which they provided the material…We can only be sure that the preservation of the past in mental life is more the rule than a strange exception.”4

    We do not approve of the characters’ actions in Seinfeld but we immediately recognize the situations that confront them and follow the logic of their response. This is because, for some period of our development, we were them. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud observes that peculiarities in the infantile way of thinking “are retained in the unconscious of adults” and that “any recovering of unconscious material of this kind strikes us in general as ‘comic.’” Suspension of disbelief is achieved whenever the characters’ actions or schemes result in failure and ostracism. The self-defeat of the characters is never-ending and it imputes just enough realism to a show that would otherwise slip off a fantastical cliff.

    While some cultural creations take many years before they are appreciated—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane are some examples— Seinfeld gained massive resonance with an audience during its run by ruthlessly pulling out those perceptions normally filtered by our consciousness and throwing them to our feet. It has maintained its popularity in the years since, if Netflix’s recent $500 million acquisition for streaming rights is any indication. But it is a product of its decade.

    The Freezer of Time

    Seinfeld could not be created today because the social unconscious has changed too radically in the years since facing disasters such as the “war on terror,” accelerating environmental ruination, destabilizing refugee crises,’ COVID-19 and western deindustrialization. It is not a coincidence that the first full season of Seinfeld aired in 1992—the very same year when Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man was released. The grand Cold War ideological debates were over, neoliberal capitalism had triumphed, history had ended and “the little things” were the only remainder. Seinfeld was the ultimate statement from the yuppie middle class of the 1990s on the irrelevance of politics, its ignorance of class conflict, their indifference toward collective aspirations and the futility of fretting over the future. Seinfeld is that head space containing everything that ever was and would be. 

    The continuing appeal of this postmodernist, ‘90s-era “show about nothing” is best explained by its striking quaintness and naïveté in the eyes of contemporary viewers. To continue with Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he describes instincts as “an urge inherent in living organic matter for the restoration of an earlier state.”5 What Seinfeld offers today is a dream-like return to the apparently simpler, more pleasant social unconscious of a bygone era. Thirty years ago Seinfeld was the zeitgeist; now, it is the palpable escape.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Seinfeldia (Simon and Schuster, 2016), 49. ↩︎

    2. Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (Bloomsbury, 2020), 31. ↩︎

    3. Ibid, 46. ↩︎

    4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Broadview Editions, 2016),51-2. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Editions, 2011), 75-6. ↩︎
  • The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    There is something elemental to the vastness of outer space with its infinity of stars and planets and eternal unknowns that lend off-planet stories a conspicuously epic quality. After all, this is the realm of gods and titans, Zarathustra and Siddartha, heaven and angels, Star Trek and Star Wars. Even on the small screen there is Battlestar Galactica, motored by existential warfare, the fate of the entire species in the hands of one starship’s crew.

    Ridley Scott’s Alien blows in from the spindrift of ancient cosmology and the modern space opera, an oddity considering the spartan scope of the story. The premises of the original Alien trilogy require little imagination for today’s audience situated in the capitalist society. In the original, there is the blue collar crew of the Nostromo, tugging 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore to Earth. In the sequel, Aliens, the United States Colonial Marine Corps are sent to an extraterrestrial corporate outpost on a relief operation. And Alien 3 takes place on a prison planet. There is nothing glamorous or awe-inspiring around the cosmos in this franchise—it is a place for the utilitarian, for the rugged, for the criminally deranged. Nothing we can’t find on present-day Earth.

    The Masterpiece

    Alien sets an understated tone for the two that follow. There are installments outside the original trilogy that deviate from this mould—and they suffer for it. But the 1979 classic had first built the resonance with a mass audience that was required for the future sequels to be developed. The film opens with views of the Nostromo and the mountainous ore refinery it stages as cargo. The seven member crew awaken from stasis—hypersleep, to cope with the years-long interstellar voyages. The crew believe they are nearing Earth but we soon learn that their ship’s operating system has awakened them on a company order to investigate a mysterious transmission emanating from a moon they are passing by.

    Right away we see that capitalist class relations are integral to this plot; while the crew is reluctant to undertake such a dangerous assignment, they are ultimately compelled to do so under threat of “total forfeiture of shares.” At one point Dallas, the captain, bluntly states that the only “standard procedure is to do what the hell they tell you to do.”

    The imbalance of power is clear. If the crew refused to comply, the Weyland-Yutani corporation might lose an opportunity to profit but the crew would have to surrender their income, all for naught their many years spent aboard the starship. Even more lopsided, the crew is forced to risk their lives to investigate a potentially lucrative discovery while any proprietary claims would be held by Weyland-Yutani. The Marxist view on wage labour comes into focus: “The worker in capitalist society becomes dehumanized, regarded by the capitalists as simply another piece of equipment which is necessary for the production of profit. The workers become less than human…since they are forced to sell their lives in order to ‘make a living.’”1

    The film taps our collective anxiety that the unquenchable profit-motive underpinning our economy has lead us to transgress boundaries that were not meant to be crossed. Nuclear accidents, ocean acidification, weapons of mass destruction, the hole in the ozone layer, microplastics permeating our bloodstreams, viral lab leaks, artificial intelligence run amok—there is no shortage of potential disasters pending in a world of blind capitalist production. Films such as Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, The Day After Tomorrow and 28 Days Later all play on this collective fear.

    In Alien, it takes shape after three crew members disembark from their ship and discover an extraneous vessel crashed into the rocky surface of the moon. Upon entering, they first find a dead extra-terrestrial pilot, and next, a hull “full of leathery objects…like eggs or something.” A spider-like creature erupts from an egg and sizzles through Kane’s visor, attaching itself to his face. 

    In his Poetics, Aristotle finds that “every tragedy falls into two parts—Complication and Unravelling.”2 The complication occurs early, when the Nostromo receives the radio transmission and is forced by Weyland-Yutani to dock on a moon of a gas giant in the Zeta Reticuli star system. The unravelling occurs after the spider-like creature—a facehugger—has fallen from Kane’s head, the crew sitting down to one last meal before returning to stasis. This is a famously gruesome scene where a parasitic organism explodes from Kane’s chest in a geyser of blood. The fate of the ship is essentially sealed at this moment. Weyland-Yutani demands the return of the alien at the expense of the workers’ lives and the rapidly-growing parasitoid picks off the remaining crew one-by-one, able to turn them into eggs and begin its ghastly lifecycle anew.

    The Horror

    Deductions about many plot elements of this film can only be made at the point of unravelling when this parasite, this xenomorph, is unleashed on the crew of the Nostromo. First, it is clear that we are not watching a science fiction so much as a horror. The vacuum of outer space is a sublime backdrop for a horror film because the muteness of the void approximates the silence of death and non-existence. The producers understood this and created the artful tagline: “In space no one can hear you scream.” 

    Another visible element concerns the derelict alien ship containing the eggs. While the ship did not reach its intended destination, the deadly cargo must have had a destructive purpose all along, with the eggs intended to be dropped as bombs on an unassuming indigenous population—xenomorphs being the ultimate bioweapon. This bioweapon doesn’t merely kill its targets; it impregnates them, it is birthed by them and it destroys them in the voracious service of replicating its species. In Hinduism there is Shiva, the paradoxical god of both creation and destruction who simultaneously creates and destroys the universe in a cosmic dance.3 An element of divinity, of fetishization, is put forward which is further alluded to in the prequel film Prometheus. 

    The xenomorph was expressly designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger with strong sexual overtones: a phallic head and a drooling vagina dentata for jaws. This represents the male fear of castration while the impregnating facehugger leaping from the egg evokes rape. The unity of creation and destruction—of reproduction and death—is given a modern form in Alien although it is not a new concept. Religious allegory aside, Sigmund Freud discovers this unity at the psychoanalytic level and likens the release of sexual orgasm to dying itself: “This accounts for how similar the state following complete sexual gratification is to dying, and for the fact that in lower animals death and the procreative act coincide.”4 For Freud, the death drive innate to living things appears as “aggression and destruction” when it is turned toward the external world.5

    The Mythology

    The xenomorph is the physical embodiment of the death drive, a product of “alien interspecies rape” and the death of its host.6 The aggression and destruction projected outward is total and directly avails its life instincts and reproduction. The android, Ash, in the film describes it as the “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” It necessarily takes up the most extremely rapacious form of both life and death, its species pullulating ceaselessly over a mountain of blood-stained corpses and shattered rib cages. 

    In feudal Europe it was believed that demonic incubi and succubi would sexually attack people as they slept with repeated interactions resulting in death. In antiquity this attribute is seen in satyrs and various demi-gods, and in the nomadic society it is seen in mystic and impetuous animals in nature. There is a primordial fear of death and sex working here and its cultural expression is determined by the economic mode of production that situates society. This exemplifies what Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, that it is “material production” that alters the existence of people, including “their thinking and the products of their thinking.” 

    What Giger, Scott and O’Bannon created with Alien is a space-age capitalist interpretation of the demonic, sexually violent archetype. It is no coincidence that workers, grunt soldiers and prisoners bear the weight of deadly encounters with the parasites in the original trilogy and always under the orders of the soulless Weyland-Yutani corporation. Taking the metaphor further, the xenomorphs symbolize the overwhelming totality of capitalism itself: they flourish by devouring their two sources of wealth, nature and human beings.7

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1.  “Editor’s Preface” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010), 16. ↩︎

    2. Aristotle, “Selections from Poetics,” in Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Broadview Press, 1998), 34. ↩︎

    3. John M. Koller, Oriental Philosophies, Second Edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 111-2. ↩︎

    4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Editions, 2011), 113. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Broadview Editions, 2016), 91. ↩︎

    6. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon described Alien as a movie about “alien interspecies rape.” www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/19-movie-monsters-that-look-like-penises-and-vaginas ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One. Paraphrasing: “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.” ↩︎