The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH – VOL.2, ISSUE #6, DEC/2012-FEB/2013
Freudian anthropology, (1) as the conception of Man which informs psychoanalytic theory, translates the socio-historically situated characteristics of a western bourgeois psyche into “new biological hypotheses” (2) which posit an immutable psychological permanence of universal human nature, a universal human nature which a priori excludes Black people as incapable of human ‘being’. Freudian subjectivity, as consciousness grounded in this Freudian conception of Man, thus finds itself fundamentally without justification when faced with the situated context of Black subjectivity as an ascendant humanity in existential revolt against the fortified socio-ontological horizons of modernity as established through western imperialism.
As such, the human phenomenon of lived Black experience lays bare the neck of psychoanalytic anthropology for a guillotine of existential liberationist critique to slice through the Freudian conception of Man towards that objectifying onus of biological determinism: a vulgar materialist onus of biological determinism which exerts such a profound dehumanizing weight upon not only psychoanalysis, but the entire epistemological trajectory of modernity. For as Fanon roughly anticipates, “what is important to us here is to show that with the Negro the cycle of the biological begins”. (3)
The socio-historical beginning of this “cycle of the biological” is rooted in the ontological cauldron of chattel slavery which systematically attempted to reduce human ‘being’ into mere matter. It cannot plausibly be ignored that this materialist objectification of human ‘being’, this pointed and thorough translation of humanity into commodity, is not only an important epistemological foundation of modernity, but an economic vehicle which generated vast reserves of capital in contributing heavily towards the possibility of a western imperialist ordering of the world. (4)
This “cycle of the biological”, as ushered in by the fulcrum of modernity, eroded vast potentialities of human transcendence under an “avalanche of murders” which culminated in constituting “Man in the technique and style of Europe”. (5) As Foucault clarifies, “the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man.” (6) Often overlooked however, is the imbalance inherent in such a “doublet”, which privileges and grants a deliberate ontological primacy to the empirical or biological at the expense of our consciousness, that spiritual rhythm of relentless transcendence which constitutes human ‘being’.
It is no mere accident that ‘race’, as that rational signification of subhumanity, is explicitly embroiled in this constitution of an “empirico-transcendental doublet” which serves as a potent epistemological referent for western imperialism as natural and ahistorical. For it is only after the initiation of western imperialism as global praxis that it then becomes necessary to posit “the value of the empirical at the transcendental level” (7) in an effort to cement both the freedom of western bourgeois subjectivity and the subhumanity of non-western subjectivity as ‘fixed’ empirical ‘facts’ of modernity.
Freudian psychoanalytic theory, as an exemplary working model of positing “the empirical at the transcendental level”, fundamentally alters and precisely shapes a type of discourse which allows for a gradual displacement of human agency with the power of a deterministic ‘unconscious’ which “expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life”. (8) This concerted war of psychological attrition on human agency continues today in a vast and ever expanding marketplace of therapeutic culture which Freud helped spawn and which still provides psychoanalysis with its popular ideological influence over an ever growing and ever more global public.
At an epistemological level, however, the Freudian hypothesis of a deterministic ‘unconscious’, as an unquestioned dogmatic ‘fact’ of modernity, allows psychoanalysis to continue exerting an impressive theoretical influence on the constitutive hegemony of western imperialist power, as exemplified in the Academy by the effects of the Freudian turn upon the entire field of the human sciences. (9)
Psychoanalysis thus provides established power with an important ideological locus from which to reify the displacement of the socio-historical origins of neurosis, alienation and mental pathology as suffered by Black people within the context of western imperialist globalization. Cloaked in the categorical neutrality of human science applied towards social good; Freudian psychoanalysis allows for an inverted translation of the psychological trauma and ontological wounds of socio-historical oppression against human beings of African descent into biological impulses and primordial drives originating from an ‘individual self’. An ‘individual self’ grafted and informed by a western bourgeois subjectivity which doesn’t exist without Black dehumanization as a fundamental condition of its possibility. This blatant psychological inversion, by positing empirical values at the level of transcendence, reduces the violent imposition of western imperialist standards of human ‘being’ upon Black people into a rather superfluous historical detail to be acknowledged, only the better to be dismissed.
However, “the root of mental pathology must be sought not in some kind of metapathology, but in a certain relation, historically situated, of man to the mad man and to the true man.” (10) Unraveling this Foucauldian knot requires a socio-historically situated understanding of “man” as the dominated non-resisting masses in relation to “the mad man” as Black subjectivity which must be portrayed as ‘insane’ for daring to resist the socio-ontological standards of “the true man” as incarnated by western bourgeois subjectivity. An almost literal exemplification of this occurred during a previous era of massive social unrest when all of sudden cases of “protest psychosis” innocently and spontaneously appeared as “a term used in psychiatric literature in the 1960’s by white doctors in New York. It basically categorized Black men who were participating in civil rights as insane. It was a way to pathologize the civil rights protest.” (11) Clearly, Freudian psychoanalytic theory socially functions as an omnipresent godhead, an ideological arbiter which assists established power in determining just what exactly constitutes the psychological attributes of normative human experience. A normative human standard against which “African-American men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at rates four to five times more than other groups”, and since “Schizophrenia is a biologically based disease, with no genetic links to ethnicity or gender” the question of “are Black men inherently crazy” is generated frequently enough to find a prominent place in the ideology of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization. (12)
This omnipresent godhead of Freudian subjectivity, which plays a vital role in continually reconstituting and maintaining a western imperialist value system which brashly advertises ahistorical notions of universal equality as it silently reinforces structural-inert norms of racist dehumanization as part and parcel of a long evolutionary path which begins with the ‘savage’ primal hordes of a mythic past and culminates into an even more mythic present of a ‘civilized’ West. (13)
The uncritical epistemological acceptance of the Freudian postulate of an ‘id’ and its complimentary psychological categories of an ‘ego’ and ‘superego’ in an ongoing melee with a ‘life instinct’ and a ‘death drive’, contributes towards a normative anthropological model which reasserts the ontological dominance of western bourgeois subjectivity as a universal standard of human ‘being’. Such ontological dominance allows the systematic rigor of western imperialist power to appear simultaneously as both historical banality and evolutionary triumph. (14)
The hypothesis of a deterministic ‘unconscious’ continues to be extremely influential and is THE fundamental characteristic of Freudian anthropology. This hypothesis constitutes an essentially unquestioned dogmatic ideological presupposition of modernity and functions as an ahistorical burial ground of existential freedom and social responsibility for each ‘individual self’. This psychological ‘fact’ of an ‘unconscious’, cushions the fall from grace inherent whenever western bourgeois subjectivity takes account of its own bloodstained hands which ontologically fasten a white mask upon the face of humanity. A pale mask of ‘race’ which alienates and objectifies humanity in adherence to false standards of human ‘being’.
The collective historical memory of western imperialist savagery and barbarism against humanity finds in Freudian psychoanalysis an effective pillar which provides some much needed anthropological support against the socio-ontological demands of Black subjectivity-as-ascendant humanity in choosing to rebel against our overdetermination-from-without by a western imperialist continuum.
Furthermore, the methodological postulation of an ‘unconscious’ which can only be accessed with professional assistance by a psychoanalyst, at once establishes a potent formula for social control in which the very “core of our being . . . has no direct communication with the external world and is accessible even to our own knowledge only through the medium of another agency” (15) which just happens to be complicit with and legitimated by established power.
Suddenly however, an odd experience of déjà vu overcomes human beings of African descent when realizing that Freudian psychoanalysis dogmatically suggests that authentic knowledge of self is only attainable through the mediation of an ‘other’ who is socially sanctioned by established power. Is this not that Duboisian ‘double consciousness’, (16) which Black people experience within the lived context of human ‘being’ overdetermined by western imperialism, ontologically watered down and packaged as a psychological breakthrough?
Indeed, by imposing the necessity of mediation by a socially sanctioned ‘other’ as the key to knowledge of one’s ‘individual self’, Freudian psychoanalysis replicates a vulgar facsimile of ‘double consciousness’ for the western bourgeois psyche to experience as a “decisive step towards a new orientation in the world and in science”. (17)
In both instances a socially legitimizing authoritative gaze overdetermines consciousness in a concerted attempt to subdue and pacify human agency. Yet while Black subjectivity-as-ascendant humanity grows by resisting forms of overdetermination-from-without imposed upon our human ‘being’ through structural-inert violence by western imperialist power; western bourgeois subjectivity-as-normative humanity grows by embracing modes of overdetermination-from-within introduced to one’s ‘individual self’ through hegemonic influence as a therapeutic validation of universal social standards of human ‘being’. (18)
Hence, the philosophical weight and socio-ontological implications of Freudian psychoanalysis must be thoroughly examined, even in the face of any alleged therapeutic relevance for an ‘individual self’ which recognizes no capacity of Black people for human ‘being’ outside of loyalty to the hallowed standards of western bourgeois subjectivity. This ontological blindness, often masquerading as color blindness (19), eliminates the possibility of epistemological neutrality with regards to the development of psychological categories which purport to reveal a universal human nature. Such psychological categories, at best, provide tenuous guidelines for a specific socio-historically situated and politically motivated anthropology. As such, critical interrogations of a conception of Man implicated by its reliance on psychoanalytic theory are vital precisely because the supposed epistemological gulf which distinguishes between psychological and political categories is merely a hegemonic illusion in the service of established unjust power. “The traditional borderline between psychology on the one side and political and social philosophy on the other side have been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era: formerly autonomous and identifiable psychical processes are being absorbed by the function of the individual in the state – by his public existence”. (20)
For human beings of African descent, this loss of autonomous subjectivity as indicative of the “condition of man in the present era”, has been a consistently imposed social reality long synonymous with the lived experience of Black people, for whom psychological categories have never existed in a vacuum outside the political; nor have such psychological categories ever been immune to the currents of racist socio-ontological pollution inherent in modernity. (21) Therefore, questions rooted in the socio-historical conditions of Black existence are inverted as psychological disorders and hence come into immediate confrontation with this “traditional borderline” of established power; a “borderline” which discursively frames our “public existence” as indicative of a restless, untamed and permanently ‘fixed’ subhumanity.
Mass society, which historically emerged during modernity and later ossified into a hyperreal simulation of itself upon the onset of postmodernity, engulfs and overdetermines the nature of psychological independence experienced by an ‘individual self’ and exemplifies the “condition of man in the present era”. This phenomenon of ‘ego’ formation as spiritual conformity to a hegemonic cauldron of mass agency, through which established power funnels and transforms potentialities for genuinely mediated social ‘being’ into consciousness more akin to a bewildered herd of rational animals: is indicative of the tremendous psychological weight imposed upon those who exhibit a socio-historical ambivalence towards that ever present and anonymous structural-inert oppression which thrives unrepentantly within the citadels of a decaying modernity, those global metropoles which exemplify both the dark promise and enlightened threat of advanced neo-liberal capitalist hegemony. (22)
Existential liberation critique provides a pivot from which to confront this “traditional borderline” between psychology and socio-political philosophy; namely through sociogenic (23) interrogations of psychoanalytic theory which critically behead the ontogenetic (24) primacy of mental pathology, alienation and neurosis as sheer irrelevance when faced with lived Black experience in relation to western imperialism. “Reacting against the constitutionalist tendency of the late nineteenth century, Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. He substituted for the phylogenetic (25) theory the ontogenetic perspective. It will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question. Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny.” (26) Black subjectivity does not suffer from the same sources of pathology which afflict the western bourgeois ‘individual self’, for in relation to western bourgeois standards of human ‘being’, Black subjectivity itself is a dangerous wellspring of social pathology which severely unsettles the ontological foundations of a western imperialist continuum. (27)
At once severed from its corpus, the tumbling godhead of Freudian subjectivity finds itself exposed as ontologically frail and epistemologically wanting. “The governing rules of logic carry no weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm of the Illogical. Urges with contrary aims exist side by side in the unconscious without any need arising for an adjustment between them. Either they have no influence whatever on each other, or, if they have no decision is reached, but a compromise comes about which is nonsensical since it embraces mutually incompatible details. With this is connected the fact that contraries are not kept apart but treated as though they were identical, so that in the manifest dream any element may also have the meaning of its opposite.” (28) Why is such a lazy ‘anything can pretty much mean damn near anything’ mode of analytic theory regarded as such a “decisive step towards a new orientation in the world and in science” (29) and for who? What type of subjectivity, what type of conception of Man or anthropology is ultimately reliant on such a “new orientation”?
Indeed, the Freudian turn functions as a “decisive step” which assists in recreating a template of western bourgeois subjectivity which consequently relegates the living memory of its oppressive socio-historical relationship towards human beings of African descent to a vacuous psychological no man’s land, a social ‘id’, or more aptly put; a collective unconscious (30) wherein Black people dwell in a dehumanized paradise of sterile phobogenic objecthood. (31) Within the context of a western imperialist value system which enlightens bourgeois subjectivity, “the Negro has one function: that of symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul”. (32) As such, Black bourgeois consciousness is particularly tortured, for in accepting western bourgeois subjectivity as a universal paradigm for human ‘being’, racist dehumanization becomes self-reflexive as both dehumanizing subject and dehumanized object share the same rational soul.
The normative western imperialist socio-ontological presumption of the Freudian conception of Man as universally binding, silently and consistently militates against any potentially critical sociogenic psychological breakthroughs regarding our urgent need for a more authentic reconstitution of human ‘being’. Accomplished by cementing the appearance of Black dehumanization as a constant historical banality; the maintenance of this anonymity assists in shoring up a hegemonic cognitive barrier against the recognition of any type of existential liberationist intervention as somehow relevant to the human condition outside of the African diaspora. (33) However, the human context of lived Black experience has never been more ontologically viable to a world experiencing drastic socio-historical crises amid a global postmodern structural transition away from the political primacy of nation-states. Indeed, the coming era of geonationalist insurrection bestows Black subjectivity with an unprecedented and avant-garde global relevance.
Foucault, in his ‘archeology of the human sciences’, while indeed recognizing that “psychoanalysis cannot be deployed as pure speculative knowledge or as a general theory of man”, (34) actually suffers from a strain of myopic structuralist influenza, as he blatantly devalues “actual experience” (35) and dismisses a methodology which grapples with the consequences of the reality that this supposed epistemological impossibility is an ‘actually experienced’ socio-historical phenomenon. Indeed, the very fact that psychoanalysis continues to be popularly “deployed” as “pure speculative knowledge” and as “a general theory of man”, speaks to its socio-ontological function as a constitutive influence towards an anthropology, an ‘individual self’, a ‘fixed’ conception of Man which acquiesces to and accompanies western imperialism.
The novel potentialities of existential liberationist critique, as witnessed in Fanonist and Sartrean interrogations of Freudian psychoanalysis, are paralleled in certain Freudo-Marxist trends within the Frankfurt School’s project of critical theory. Marcuse for example, while in the process of recuperating the relevance of Freud’s body of work into his own critique, is compelled in true existential liberationist fashion to conduct a sociogenic beheading of his own; conceding that although Freudian theory “appears to be purely biological”, it’s actually “fundamentally social and historical”. (36) Indeed, how could it be otherwise for a critical tradition which has been so successful in theoretically transplanting a Marxist godhead upon Freud’s corpus to such great effect? And although the discursive stitching which binds this fusion can at times loosen, become undone and be a bit biologically determinist and unsightly in retrospect, it can still critically function, even if somewhat ungainly so; as clearly evidenced during the transition of this Freudo-Marxist fusion away from an invigorating source of critical theory (37) and towards its eventual collapse into poststructuralist dogma. (38)
An existential liberationist critique of Freudian psychoanalysis severs the godhead of western bourgeois subjectivity from the body of Freud’s work. Yet even more fundamentally, this sociogenic guillotine cuts to the core of modernity itself, challenging the onus of biological determinism which allows Freud’s psychoanalytic anthropology to manifest itself as not only a historical possibility, but as a constitutive socio-ontological necessity which incarnates within each ‘individual self’ a predisposition towards western imperialist domination as natural and ahistorical. Against Foucault, this is the Real of the Freudian conception of Man, the lived “relation of psychoanalysis with what makes all knowledge in general possible in the sphere of the human sciences”. (39)
As Marcuse keenly and prophetically intimated, when seen from a Marxist eye which privileges objective political and economic conditions and traces their postmodern mutation into an expansive globalization of advanced neo-liberal capitalism, the Freudian conception of Man appears to be on well its way towards obsolescence, vanishing ever so slowly from its socio-historical primacy. (40)
A Foucauldian reading however, all too easily dismisses the very possibility of a psychoanalytic anthropology as pious longing, (41) even while adamantly refusing to relinquish a theoretical methodology which would have been an impossibility without the very notion of an unconscious; that fundamental pillar which constitutes the Freudian conception of Man itself. This epistemological parlor trick of dissolving Man, while making full use of theoretical gains which are born of adherence to a specific socio-historically situated anthropology, only serves to collude with western imperialism by reducing the existential significance of the murder of Man. This ill-fated Foucauldian insistence on the dissolution of Man has been co-opted and transformed into an annoying poststructuralist whine which merely obfuscates the symbiotic relationship between psychoanalytic anthropology, western bourgeois subjectivity and Black dehumanization.
Fanon’s sociogenic critique, when coupled with Sartre’s virulent philosophical demolition of the ‘unconscious’, sets the tone for an existential liberationist confrontation of Freud by refusing to ignore or dismiss the overturning of racist anthropological presuppositions by the rebellion of lived Black subjectivity against the universal authority of western imperialist power. Before the might of such a critical tour de force, the Freudian subject, already beheaded, is just a wandering corpse waiting for just enough of a push to collapse and double over itself. However Freudian anthropology remains on its feet, defiantly, doggedly destined to keep discursively treading on and on, for as long as possible; parasitically feeding off that western imperialist continuum from which it ultimately derives its ontological sustenance and socio-historical relevance.
The spiritual proximity, existential severity and social consciousness of resistance against oppression which informs lived Black subjectivity, allows for constant renewal of a penetrating awareness into the human condition which unites us all; providing a vitally rugged counter narrative of ascendant humanity and liberation against a cleanly polished western imperialist narrative of modernity and historical domination. Black subjectivity grapples with existence as human ‘being’ against the ontological gravity of overdetermination-from-without by a pervasive western imperialist continuum. This phenomenon of lived Black experience reveals an inherent totality of dehumanization which affects the entire human family, even as it is rationally masked in terms of racial categories which focus the effects of generalized oppression onto particular populations. (42) As such, fundamental aspects of human ‘being’, overlooked and necessarily avoided by western bourgeois subjectivity, are revealed in the Real of lived Black experience.
With mass incarceration of our people as the lowest common denominator of ‘the freest nation on earth’ and the rampant unrepentant murder of our youth at the hands of those entrusted to uphold ‘law and order’; as Black people, we don’t need any further reminders of the fragile nature of human freedom or the fleeting worldly dance of human mortality.
Accompanying an ascendant humanity in continuous resistance against western imperialist overdetermination-from-without, lived Black subjectivity not only illuminates the Real of human suffering, but also serves as a socio-ontological prelude for what challenges await any genuine attempt at reconstituting human ‘being’ against the growing tide of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization.
The current socio-historical situation is one in which the prevalence of an objective bourgeois foundation is disappearing, even as the necessity for western bourgeois subjectivity has never been more ideologically imperative as a new ‘cosmopolitan’ incentive from which to justify the continuing spread of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization. However, advanced neo-liberal capitalism presents a unique challenge to Freudian subjectivity by undermining the objective conditions (43) which allow for the continued existence of an autonomous economic and political subject, and it is this western bourgeois subjectivity upon which any claim of the supposed universality of Freudian psychoanalysis rests.
This objective socio-historical vacuum, coupled with the overriding ideological need for a globalized ontological re-investment back into western bourgeois subjectivity, provides an impetus for the rise of a hyperbourgeois consciousness which is experienced as a blind refusal to relinquish the appearance of bourgeois subjectivity as permanent, natural and universal. This hyperbourgeois subjectivity, at times even masquerading as ‘cosmopolitanism’, (44) is a conscious postmodern overcompensation for the sense of objective loss created by the continuing erosion of the base socio-historical conditions which psychologically inform western bourgeois subjectivity.
Ontologically sedentary, classic bourgeois subjectivity approaches Freudian psychoanalysis as a constitutive tool for the development of an ‘individual self’ in dire need of a normative psychological reinforcement of its already established socio-historical certitude. Hyperbourgeois subjectivity however, existentially aware of its lack of objective legitimacy, approaches psychoanalysis as a consumer in dire need of ontological security and the socio-cultural recognition which comes from appropriating an established brand name; psychologically purchasing Freudian anthropology as a constitutive logo to loudly and publicly proclaim an affinity with a particular fashion of ‘being’ human.
Although Marcuse claims “Freud’s theory comprehended the past, rather than the present – a vanishing rather than a prevalent image of man, a disappearing form of human existence”, (45) human subjectivity or Man, as constituted by western imperialism, has never been much more than a mere “vanishing” act whenever faced with the existential demands of human liberation. Indeed, “when I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of manand an avalanche of murders.” (46) Is not the much celebrated Foucauldian dissolution of Man a petty and vulgar discursive reflection of this “succession of negations of man” back upon itself, only to reveal an epistemological vacuum from which an alibi to absolve Man’s murderer can be conveniently drawn forth?
Freudian subjectivity functions as a key focal point, a fundamental conditioning potentiality which allows this “succession of negations” to continue reconstituting itself as “Man in the technique and style of Europe.” Hence any claim of the Freudian subject’s gradual disappearance existentially resonates amongst those who recognize the tacit complicity between the original emergence of a Freudian conception of Man and the normative racist anthropological presuppositions of modernity; this in the false hope that the eventual disappearance of Freudian anthropology might indicate the beginning of an ontological domino effect against the hegemony of human subjectivity as constituted by a western imperialist continuum.
As such, Marcuse erred fundamentally in attempting to recuperate an original Freudian subject which he regarded as “not only a past left behind, but a future to be recaptured” (47) against the tide of advanced neo-liberal capitalism. This philosophical blunder is all too common amongst Marxists whose redemptive emancipatory project begins after the inception of modernity, which, in effect, discursively cements the subhumanity and objecthood of the wretched of the earth who were dehumanized to bring modernity into fruition.
Psychoanalytic theory has continued to retain its ideological dominion as THE undisputed anthropological paradigm, an all-purpose metapsychology for interpreting the Real of the human condition while being under siege on at least two fronts: functioning in tandem with advanced neo-liberal capitalism against the socio-ontological demands of an ascendant humanity as explicitly found in Black liberation praxis, even as this very relationship with advanced neo-liberal capitalism erodes its socio-historical foundations and renders the Freudian conception of Man as irrelevant and obsolete.
Freudian anthropology still functions as an epistemological failsafe, discursively protecting a western bourgeois subjectivity which is underwritten by an “avalanche of murders” and which imposes a stifling objecthood and sedentary semblance of subhumanity on Black people. This socio-historical construction of stifling objecthood or ‘race’, as it is rationally referred to, discursively appeases a western imperialist project of massive dehumanization and global oppression. “The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and inhumanity of the white man lies in the fact that somewhere he has murdered Man.” (48)
This construction of ‘race’ imposes an intimidating socio-ontological distance between diverse peoples, all the while fracturing potentialities of human unity through rational adherence to a mythic biological determinism. An onus of biological determinism which permeates modernity and is the very condition of possibility for both the fact of ‘race’ and the fact of a Freudian ‘unconscious’: two constitutive ‘facts’ of modernity which under close scrutiny reveal themselves as nothing more than two potent myths in the ideological service of established unjust global power. “Psychoanalysis and ethnology occupy a privileged position in our knowledge – not because they have established the foundations of their positivity better than any other human science, and at last accomplished the old attempt to be truly scientific; but rather because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form an inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects to be established. Now, there is a reason for this that concerns the object they respectively give to one another, but concerns even more the position they occupy and the function they perform within the general space of the episteme.” (49)
As a discursive midwife of modernity, Freudian psychoanalysis has no conceptual authority outside of a western imperialist continuum. This epistemological reliance, ontologically limits the scope of its social application and existential relevance to Black people who choose to revolt and undermine the very precepts of modernity by asserting our human ‘being’ against western imperialist power. “Psychology could be elaborated and practical as a special discipline as long as the psyche could sustain itself against the public power, as long as privacy was real, really desired and self-shaped; if the individual has neither the ability neither the possibility to be for himself, the terms of psychology become the terms for societal forces which define the psyche.” (50)
As such, it is only in existential liberationist revolt against the racist “societal forces which define the psyche” that Black subjectivity finds the “ability” for constitutive self-determination and the ontological “possibility” to be ‘for-itself’ as indicative of human ‘being’. However, this human ‘being-for-itself’ finds no self-constitutive agency in deference to a Freudian anthropology which is consistently complicit with a discursive formalization of western imperialist power that promotes racist dehumanization of Black people as a structural-inert condition, an uninteresting banality of its current global hegemony.
The socio-historical manifestation of western imperialism precedes its triumph as an anthropological standard. Hence, the poststructuralist insistence on the dissolution of Man discursively absolves those who “never cease to talk of Man yet murder him on every street corner of the world” (51) by obfuscating the existential conditions which inform the socio-ontological possibility of human ‘being’.
Freudian anthropology relies on the supposed permanence of a mechanistic and determinist conception of human nature which endorses “men who clearly do not find it easy to do without satisfaction of this tendency to aggression that is in them” as a biological ‘fact’ of modernity. Freud claims that “when deprived of satisfaction of it they are ill at ease” and that “there is an advantage, not to be undervalued, in the existence of smaller communities, through which the aggressive instinct can find an outlet in enmity towards those outside the group”. Freud even graciously elaborates that it “is always possible to unite considerable numbers of men in love towards one another, so long as there are still some remaining as objects for aggressive manifestations”. (52)
For those of us who have been socio-historically overdetermined and ontologically designated as exactly such subhuman “objects for aggressive manifestations”, Freudian anthropology inherently lacks a rational soul and miserably fails to account for the relentless transcendence of our consciousness which is indicative of human ‘being’.
As such, this Freudian conception of Man, which necessitates the formulation of a deterministic ‘unconscious’, has been little more than a vast canopy under which the psychological burden and ontological residue of any inhumane, barbarous or savage act could dwell, without western bourgeois subjectivity ever having to confront the Real of existential responsibility and socio-historical consequence. “All the knowledge within which Western culture had given itself in one century around a certain image of man, pivots on the work of Freud, though without, for all that, leaving its fundamental arrangement.” (53)
Freudian anthropology grafts and upholds a “strange representation” of “rigorous mechanistic determinisms” (54) which promote a specific socio-historically situated formulation of human subjectivity that not only creates the possibility of a lie without a liar, but also racism without a racist, and ultimately the murder of Man without a murderer.
However, Freudian psychoanalytic theory is no mere anomaly, the beheading of which will cleanse and redeem an epistemology which aids and abets the murder of Man. Even as Freudian anthropology finds itself back slapped and shoved headfirst into the gallows by Black subjectivity-as-ascendant humanity in socio-ontological rebellion and existential revolt against a western imperialist continuum; one can almost make out a wry smile being evinced behind that beard and cigar smoke by Freud himself. For in truth, modern subjectivity itself remains in his psychological debt, continually suffering in spiritual poverty while blindly shouldering the brunt of an epistemological burden created by such a staunch allegiance to the Freudian conception of Man.
Thus, bereft of any hyperbourgeois sentimentality, and in complete existential liberationist composure, I light my cigar, take a few puffs, and chase it with green tea. Indeed, there are still those of us for whom human ‘being’ is not a ‘fixed’ sedentary deterministic puppet of our unconscious. And even amidst the boisterous discursive misgivings of Lacanian acolytes everywhere, we must remain stalwart: Off with his muthafuckin’ Oedipal head!!!
(1) It is in a definite Foucauldian sense that I use the term ‘anthropology’. “I am not referring to the particular science called anthropology, which is the study of cultures exterior to our own; by ‘anthropology’ I mean the strictly philosophical structure responsible for the fact that the problems of philosophy are now all lodged within the domain that can be called human finitude. If one can no longer philosophize about anything but man insofar as he is a Homo natura, or in so far as he is a finite being, to that extent isn’t every philosophy at bottom an anthropology? This being the case, philosophy becomes the cultural form within which all the sciences of man in general are possible.” Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, (The New Press, 1994, 1998)p.250.
(2)Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, (W.W. Norton & Company, 1949, 1969) p.81.
(3)Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (Grove Press, 1952, 1967) p.161.
(4)Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery,(University of North Carolina Press, 1944, 1994)
(5)Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press, 1961, 1963) p.312.
(6)Foucault, The Order of Things, (Vintage Books, 1966, 1994) p.319.
(7)Foucault, p.320.
(8)Freud, p.17
(9)“This problem of the unconscious is really very difficult, because apparently one can say that psychoanalysis is a form of psychology that is added to the psychology of consciousness, doubling the psychology of consciousness with a supplementary layer that would be that of the unconscious. And, as a matter of fact, it was realized immediately that by discovering the unconscious one pulled in at the same time a lot of problems that no longer involved either the individual, exactly, or the soul opposed to the body; but that one brought back inside the strictly psychological problematic what had previously been excluded from it, either on the grounds that it was physiology, reintroducing the problem of the body, or sociology, reintroducing the problem of the individual with his milieu, the group to which he belongs, the society in which he is caught, the culture in which he and his ancestors have always thought. With the result that the simple discovery of the unconscious is not an addition of domains: it is not an extension of psychology, it is actually the appropriation, by psychology, of most of the domains that the human sciences covered – so that one can say that starting with Freud, all the human sciences became, in one way or another, sciences of the psyche.” Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, p.252.
(10)Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology,(Univ. of California Press, 1954, 1987) p.2.
(11)From “Schizophrenia as Political Weapon”, an interview by Felicia Pride of Jonathan M. Metzl author of The Protest Psychosis: How Schizofrenia Became a Black Disease,(Beacon Press, 2011) for The Root magazine(www.theroot.com), January 25, 2010.
(12)ibid.
(13)Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents,(Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958).
(14)“Psychoanalysis, in pertaining to non-Western countries, is always imbricated with anthropology(as ethnopsychology), which largely precludes the specificity (and thus normativity) of the object of study.” Then after backtracking a little bit, things get very interesting from an existential liberationist perspective: “. . . this exclusion need not mean that we should jettison psychoanalysis since it is perhaps our most elaborate language of subject constitution.” Kalpani Seshadri-Crooks, “The Primitive as Analyst: Postcolonial Feminism’s Access to Psychoanalysis”, Cultural Critique #28, p.175-218.
(15)Freud, p.84
(16)W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk,(Dover Publications, 1903, 1994).
(17)Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,(Pocket Book, 1924, 1975) p.26.
(18)“There or here, it’s the same thing: Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial education.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Penguin Books, 1972, 1977) p.170.
(19)The oft stated disclaimer “I don’t see people’s skin color, I just see people”, is basically a subtle rewording of the more accurate and racist statement: “I don’t see people of your color as representative of what it means to be human, so please allow me to ignore the color of your skin so I can proceed to regard you as a normal person(colorless ie. White enough) and we can go on about our day without unnecessary incident”.
(20)Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, (Beacon Press, 1955, 1966) p.xxvii.
(21)Hussein Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, (Plenum Press, 1985).
(22)“Thus the masses are no longer simply those who are dominated, but rather the governed who are no longer in opposition, or whose opposition itself is integrated into the positive whole, as a calculable and manipulable corrective that demands improvements in the apparatus. What was previously a political subject has become an object, and the antagonistic interests that were previously irreconcilable seem to have passed over into a true collective interest.” Marcuse, Five Lectures,(Beacon Press, 1970) p.16.
(23)Sociogenic refers to “explanations that are attuned to the social origins of human problems.” Lewis R. Gordon, “The Black and The Body Politic: Fanon’s Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis”, included in FANON: A Critical Reader, (Blackwell Publishers, 1996) p.77, edited by Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T. White.
(24)Within a Freudian anthropological context, Ontogenic refers to “the growth of the repressed individual from early infancy to his conscious societal existence”. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, (Beacon Press, 1955, 1974) p.20.
(25)Regarding the Freudian conception of Man, Phylogenetic refers to “the growth of repressive civilization from the primal horde to the fully constituted civilized state”. Ibid.
(26)Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.11.
(27)I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt writing about Black student social unrest of the late 60’s as a violent pathogen infecting the intellectual purity of the Academy as she contrasted “Negro demands” as “clearly silly and outrageous” versus “the disinterested and usually high moral claims of the white rebels”. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1969, 1970) p.19.
(28)Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, p.43. Sartre’s critique is unsparing: “Thus I would reproach psychoanalytic theory with being syncretic and not dialectic thought. The word ‘complex’, indeed, indicates this very evidently: interpenetration without contradiction. I agree, of course that there may exist an enormous number of ‘larval’contradictions within individuals, which are often translated in certain situations by interpenetrations and not by confrontations. But this does not mean these contradictions do not exist. The results of syncretism, on the contrary, can be seen in the idea of the Oedipus complex, for instance: the fact is that analysts manage to find everything in it, equally well the fixation on the mother, love of the mother, or hatred of the mother, as Melanie Klein argues. In other words, anything can be derived from it, since it is not structured. The consequence is that an analyst can say one thing and then the contrary immediately afterwards, without in any way worrying about a lack of logic, since after all ‘opposites interpenetrate’. A phenomenon can mean this, while its contrary can also mean the same thing. Psychoanalytic theory is thus a ‘soft’ thought. It has no dialectical logic to it.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, (Pantheon, 1972, 1974)p.38.
(29)Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p.26.
(30)“The collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity; it is the result of what I shall call the unreflected imposition of a culture.” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.191.
(31)“The choice of the phobic object is therefore overdetermined. This object does not come at random out of the void of nothingness; in some situation it has previously evoked an affect in the patient. His phobia is the latent presence of this affect at the root of his world; there is an organization which has been given a form. . . . In the phobic, affect has a priority that defies all rational thinking. As we can see, the phobic is a person who is governed by the laws of rational prelogic and affective prelogic: methods of thinking and feeling at which he experienced the event that impaired his security.” Fanon, p.155.
(32)Fanon, p.190.
(33)This socio-ontological anonymity is articulated brilliantly by Lewis R. Gordon in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences, (Routledge, 1995).
(34)Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.376
(35)Foucault, p.321. This thinly veiled upbraiding of the existential phenomenological methodology which was dominant in France before the French Academy’s embrace of a rabid structuralism is indicative the beginning of Foucault’s move away from the existential phenomenology which informed his early works towards the poststructuralism which would establish his world renown. For more on the inherent philosophical tension between Foucault’s early structuralism and Sartre’s existential Marxism check out Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Post-War France, (Princeton, 1971).
(36)Marcuse, Five Lectures, p.1.
(37)The Frankfurt School’s use of psychoanalytic models to critique fascism notwithstanding, this Freudo-Marxist fusion peaked with the publication of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
(38)“All that blew away after 1970 with all the business about desire and revolution and the mixing of the two . . . Some saw an extreme radicalism in that. But the mix sounded the death-knell of both desire and revolution. The blending of the two led to each being neutralized by the other. There are many who based themselves on this idea for a long time. . . . A whole generation based themselves on this terrible ambiguity, on things that had, to all intents and purposes, already disappeared. . . . The political and libidinal dimensions lose their singularity. It was their singularity alone that gave them force. To mix the two was to contravene their irreducibility. It was after all, one hell of a misappropriation of Marx and Freud.” Jean Baudrillard, Fragments,(Routledge, 2001, 2004) p.18.
(39)Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.376.
(40)“What are the historical changes that have made this conception obsolete? According to Freud, the fatal conflict between the individual and society is first and foremost experienced and fought out in the confrontation with the father: here, the universal struggle between Eros and Thanatos erupts and determines the development of the individual. And it is the father who enforces the subordination of the pleasure principle to the reality principle; rebellion and the attainment of maturity are stages in the contest of the father. Thus, the primary ‘socialization’ of the individual is the work of the family, as is whatever autonomy the child may achieve – his entire ego develops in a circle and refuge of privacy: becoming oneself with but also against the other. The ‘individual’ himself is the living process of mediation in which all the repression and liberty are ‘internalized,’ made the individual’s own doing and undoing. Now, in this situation, in which the ego and superego were formed in the struggle with the father as the paradigmatic representative of the reality principle – this situation is historical: it came to an end with the changes in industrial society which took shape in the inter-war period. I enumerate some of the familiar features: transition from free to organized competition, concentration of power in the hands of an omnipresent technical, cultural and political administration, self-propelling mass production and consumption, subjection of previously private, asocial dimensions of existence to methodical indoctrination, manipulation, control.” Marcuse, Five Lectures, p.46.
(41)Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p.379.
(42)This point is illustrated diligently and thoroughly by Reginald Major in his seminal work on the Theory and History of the Black Panther Party, A Panther is a Black Cat, (Black Classics Press, 1971, 2006).
(43)“Some of the basic assumptions of Freudian theory both in their orthodox as well as revisionist development have become obsolescent to the degree which their object, namely, the ‘individual’ as the embodiment of id, ego and superego has become obsolescent in the social reality. The evolution of contemporary society has replaced the Freudian model by a social atom whose mental structure no longer exhibits the qualities attributed by Freud to the psychoanalytic object. Psychoanalysis, in its various schools, has continued and spread over large sections of society, but with a change in its object, the gap between theory and therapy has been widened. Therapy is faced with a situation in which it seems to help the Establishment rather than the individual.” Marcuse, Five Lectures, p.44.
(44)Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Stangers, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006) and Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, (Routledge, 2001) are interesting examples.
(45)Marcuse, p.45.
(46)Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.312.
(47)Marcuse, p.61.
(48)Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.231.
(49)Foucault, p.374.
(50)Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p.xxvii.
(51)Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.314.
(52)Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.64.
(53)Foucault, p.361.
(54)Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, p.37.
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