When I was a callow youth – or even, one might say, a stupid
one – I used to take great pleasure in making up prank tapes for my answering
machine. I made one which I considered a true chef d’oeuvre in which, after
saying I was not in, I said: today we are having a great sale on heroin and
cocaine! Its our way of saying thanks to our many customers. Kilo of H at a
mere 100 bucks! We must be crazy to sell it so cheap, but we can: cause of Volume!
My roommates at the time did not think much of this prank.
It was soon changed.
Freedom of speech has always been a bit of a compromise.
Freedom of thought, freedom of speech – both, as we well know, are freedoms you
have to pay for, one way or another. In the lectures to the introduction of
psychoanalysis, Freud uses the image of the customs office as a support for the
observation that the “eigene Ich” – the Ego itself – enters into every dream, “even
where it has hidden itself under the manifest content”. The dream involves a man
who is traveling across a border with a lot of baggage, who claims he has
nothing to declare. The customs officers open the baggage and find contraband.
I think this is a nice instance of the pervasiveness of the
collective ego function. As is my prank answering machine tape, with its jejune
transgression of a taboo. In fact, the total power of the “state” – and I
include in the state the powers that be, the multinationals, the billionaires,
etc., as I find the separation between the powers and the legally instituted
powers to be, for the purposes of analysis, subordinate to their solidarity –
has its nightside in dreams.
Charlotte Beradt, who fled Germany in 1939, made
a survey of the dreams of her colleagues, friends, etc. She worked at the
Fischer publishing house, and in New York was a great and close friend to
Hannah Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Bluecher. Fleeing with her husband to New
York, she lacked the money and patronage to set up shop as an intellectual, so she
made her apartment into a beauty shop. She cut and dyed the hair of
intellectuals. She published her book, The Third Reich of Dreams, in the
sixties, after she had returned to Germany. It struck a chord.
This dream struck me:
"It was about eight o’clock in the evening. As usual at
that time of the day, I was talking on the telephone with my brother, my only
friend and confidant. [This appraisal of the brother’s relationship was a true
one.] After having taken the precaution of praising Hitler’s policies and life
in the National Community, I said, 'Nothing gives me pleasure anymore.’ [In
fact, he had said this on the telephone earlier in the evening.]
"In the middle of the night
the telephone rang. A dull voice [corresponding to the expressionless
faces we have encountered in previous dreams] said merely, 'This is the
Monitoring Office.’ I knew immediately that my crime lay in what I had said
about not finding pleasure in anything, and I found myself arguing my case,
begging and pleading that this one time I be forgiven — please just don’t
report anything this one time, don’t pass it on, please just forget it. The
voice remained absolutely silent and then hung up without a word, leaving me in
agonizing uncertainty.”
This nightmare, and my prank
call, are related structurally in the same way that Freud thought that jokes
and dreams are psychodynamically related. The Ueber-Ich, which can’t allow any
deviations from the rule, actually does allow deviations from the rule – for the
Ueber-Ich, like all policing institutions, is corrupt. The draconian War
against Drugs in this perspective comes out in all its totalitarian glory,
claiming the subject’s very chemistry. And the idea that joy does not come
through strength, through the Fuehrer-prinzip, is so censored that even in Beradt’s
friend’s dream it must be whispered on the phone – and be punished by an even
greater degree of whisper, a mere menacing phone silence.
Is someone collecting the
dreams of the Neoliberal era, which in my case are all about debts and empty
bank accounts? Someone should.
No comments:
Post a Comment