Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is one of the few serious assessments of comedy in the Western philosophical tradition. SuSigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is one of the few serious assessments of comedy in the Western philosophical tradition. Surprisingly, the text is not nearly as dirty or quacky as one might expect. Instead, what you will find here is an intellectually rigorous deep-dive into jokes and their subconscious cathartic function. A fascinating, if somewhat dry, exploration of this overlooked dimension of the human experience. ...more
As the title suggests, Angela Davis asks, Are Prisons Obsolete?, and answers in the affirmative. The very question of prison abolition is a thorny morAs the title suggests, Angela Davis asks, Are Prisons Obsolete?, and answers in the affirmative. The very question of prison abolition is a thorny moral and political issue, which, at the bottom, asks us to interrogate ourselves. How we identify and manage transgressive behaviour can reveal so much about our collective values, our sense of justice, and our definition of normalcy. More than that, I think the question asks us to fundamentally reflect on the ways in which our legal institutions treat the least advantaged and the most vulnerable populations within our societies. This is hardly a peripheral concern.
Davis is at her most thought-provoking when she is discussing the ideological dimensions of prisons. For instance, she identifies the taken-for-granted nature of prisons as a form of punishment, and then describes how they exist within an ideological blind-spot of sorts. She argues:
“The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted.”
Paradoxically, prisons are physically imposing, highly visible structures from the outside, and yet their interiority is virtually unknown to the average member of the public. They are, so to speak, visibly invisible. Davis elaborates on this point:
“To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce.”
Prisons are married to the social fabric of our lives in such a way that we tend to forget that they are institutional constructs with a history, and that the trajectory of punitive justice could have been otherwise. The historical is, in a sense, de-historicized.
This process of naturalization, Davis suggests, is a direct result of the ideological status of prisons. They maintain a quality of social givenness which asserts their apparent monopoly over the good. “The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense,” she notes. “It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison.” That is absolutely true, and Davis correctly observes that the prison, as an ideological construct, sets limits on the possible. It naturalizes the status quo and banishes all other alternatives to the periphery, outside the realm of possibility or imagination.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what the United States would look like if prisons were abolished. Even more dramatically, what would happen if the United States abandoned capitalism for some other arrangement? Not only does capitalism create actual poverty, it creates a poverty of thought as well. I think the same could be said for the role of prisons in the punitive justice system.
This is where Davis is at her most compelling – at the level of social criticism. She does a fantastic job pointing toward the deficiencies in the system, drawing on a range of issues where gender, race, class, and power all intersect with one another. However, she is far less persuasive as a social engineer. Ironically, apart from gesturing at a few nebulous left-wing values, and making some vague recommendations, it seems as if Davis also has a hard time imagining what exactly a post-carceral world would look like. Perhaps that reinforces her point about the imaginative limits placed on the public by a ruling ideology. Still, it doesn’t do us any good to cop-out when we need concrete solutions to the problems she correctly identified.
Toward the end of the book, she places a tremendous amount of emphasis on the school as a corrective measure in this post-carceral landscape: “Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. […] The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles of decarceration.” Unfortunately, she never fleshes out how (or why) that particular institution should (or can) do that much heavy-lifting. What would stop schools from becoming de facto carceral institutions in the absence of prisons? And how would we address crime, morally abhorrent behaviour, and the human desire for retribution?
I agree that systemic issues demand systemic solutions, but I disagree that the systemic solutions must always be revolutionary or abolitionist in nature. In most manners of socio-economic and political change, I tend to side with Karl Popper’s notion of “piecemeal social engineering”, as opposed to outright revolution, coup, or social demolition. Utopian visions fail to grasp the reality of justice, which isn’t Platonic, but is rather something imperfect that you wrestle with, redefine, and defend endlessly. No system is perfect and harmonious in practice, the least of all the prison system. Everything takes work. Every ship sailing into the night has barnacles stuck to its hull. The very fact of systemic imperfection is in itself not a good enough reason to throw away an entire system. Complex systems have complex problems, and they need to be tackled piecemeal through specific and measured reforms, not sudden wholesale tectonic shifts.
Surprisingly, Davis is uncompromising on the subject of prison reform, which she dismisses outright as an unproductive approach to the prison justice question. She writes:
“As important as some reforms may be – the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for example – frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage.”
Personally, I don’t quite see how reform would be counterproductive to achieving justice, unless the stated goal was already assumed to be abolition. The circularity of such an argument strikes me as more ideological and dogmatic than philosophic.
Indeed, Davis doesn’t just prefer abolition over reform. She goes on to argue that it should be seen as the only reasonable option. “The most difficult and urgent challenge today”, she says, “is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.” Again, my problem with this sort of reasoning is that it tries to do precisely what it criticizes the penitentiary system of doing in the first place. In other words, it restricts the horizon of social possibility to one singular fact of life. It appears that Davis welcomes a future in which we cannot fathom any other way to live, other than one in which penitentiaries no longer exist and, perhaps, never existed at all. This just replaces one form of ideology for another, whereby abolition topples over the penitentiary and erects yet another unquestionable, brute fact of our social environment in its place. To borrow her words, it would simply exchange one taken-for-granted dimension of our “image environment” for another.
However, most of us in the West live in some kind of liberal social democracy, which gives us the right to choose and speak out about punishment. I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of North Americans believe that criminal wrong-doing should be punished somehow. Yet Davis doesn’t seem to think that people really feel this way. In fact, she explicitly states that the desire to punish crime is not a naturally occurring social desire, but rather, it is a function of political and corporate interests:
“This more nuanced understanding of the social role of the punishment system requires us to give up our usual way of thinking about punishment as an inevitable consequence of crime. We would recognize that ‘punishment’ does not follow from ‘crime’ in the neat and logical sequence offered by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but rather punishment – primarily through imprisonment (and sometimes death) – is linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime.”
I am not denying that penitentiaries are connected to the political and the corporate – of course they are, and always have been in some fashion. I’m simply saying that prisons must have emerged from some commonly shared impulse – some extra-political, extra-corporate social desire – for punitive justice. Its existence springs from something far more primal and affective within us than the need for political power or monetary gain.
Although I agree with Davis on a number of critical points, I fundamentally disagree with her on the solution to the problems that she identifies. The result is a somewhat ineffectual, utopian shot in the dark. I want to also note that the historical development of penitentiaries, sanitariums, and asylums in my country (Canada) is connected with that of the United States, though clearly not identical with it. As such, many of her criticisms – and the statistics that she uses to support them – do not necessarily apply to the broader North American context. Her contentions are, nonetheless, poignant and valid....more
With the publication of Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930, Sigmund Freud widened his psychoanalytical lens to include the vast, oceanic tides oWith the publication of Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930, Sigmund Freud widened his psychoanalytical lens to include the vast, oceanic tides of Western civilization itself. This is the version of Freud that I’ve grown to appreciate the most – ‘Freud-as-cultural theorist’.
Civilization and Its Discontents is brimming with fresh and creative ideas. Freud always works from the inside-out, from the psychic dimension to the external world. It makes sense, then, that he understood social groups as projections of individual selves – a ‘mind-at-large’, so to speak. Just as the super-ego regulates and monitors the ego and the id, so too does civilization place restraints upon the collective. The civilizing impulse is manifested through our various laws, ideologies, ethics, customs and norms, which together restrict, repress, judge, police, shame, guilt, and punish our instinctual needs. In a word, he argues that civilization is the super-ego of socio-cultural groups.
However, civilization doesn’t simply impose itself on the will of the people. To function effectively, civilization must be internalized and performed. People become self-regulating as they participate in their own civilizing missions. The problem is that some instincts are so compelling that they cannot be quelled, and, according to Freud, “[…] the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening sense of guilt”. It seems to Freud that modernity amounts to a sort of generalized sickness. He ponders: “If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become ‘neurotic’?” Coming from a German Jew on the precipice of the Second World War, this question is frighteningly apt.
There are other passages in Civilization and Its Discontents that impressed me. Freud beautifully fleshes out the intimate connection between civilization and cleanliness, noting that “[d]irtiness of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilization”. Elsewhere, he even singles out the normative function of soap as a “yardstick of civilization”. The influence of these observations on critical race theory is obvious. Although Freud stops short of extending this discussion to matters of race, eugenics, or social hygiene movements, you can see how his thinking influenced later cultural theorists like Richard Dyer, who claimed that “[…] to be white is to be well potty-trained”.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Freud has become a bit of an intellectual leper in academia. Most think he was a cocaine addicted, sex-crazed quack (he was), and those that appreciate his writing give the impression that they’re scavenging from a dead carcass. Maybe this is all rightfully so - psychoanalysis isn’t scientific. That is certainly true, but it’s a shame that scientific merit has become the main determinant of a work’s value. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter if the ideas are scientifically valid or not. What matters more to me is if the work is interesting. Ask yourself, does the author invite me to think? Do the ideas generate a dialogue which I am now implicated? I think psychoanalysis succeeds on this level – not as a scientific theory per se, but as one of many diagnostic tools at our disposal for cultural criticism.
The point here isn’t to use the same tool for everything, but rather to sift through the toolbox and use whatever may be right for the job at hand. That’s one thing that people tend to underestimate about Freud – he could be very honest about the limits of his methodology and, at times, he was incredibly open to alternative approaches. In fact, Civilization and Its Discontents is proof of his intellectual modesty and theoretical pragmatism. For instance, he writes: “I would not say that an attempt of this kind to carry psycho-analysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless. But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved”. Who would’ve thought that Freud, a kooky theorist basically known for jumping to conclusions, could also practice such intellectual restraint?
As a final thought, although Freud explicitly criticized Marxism, I think a comparison between Freud and Marx is warranted here in at least three ways: both purported to be scientific; both were deemed unscientific and rejected by the scientific community; and both have now been relegated to the humanities. For my part, I continue to recognize the brilliance and utility of Freud’s thought....more
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