On the Purpose of Art: Orpheus, Eurydice and Social Media
A commentary on Footnote 34 of Sadly, Porn
Well, now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies
someday comes back
– Bruce Sprinsteen, Atlantic City
"Any attempt at repressing a thought is never fully successful, there's always a leftover. This leftover is misleadingly called “the return” of the repressed, but it doesn't return so much as transmute into a different form. You can reliably identify something as “the return of the repressed” because repression is an identifiable process, it causes the leftover to appear in typical ways-- for example, as a negation or an excess." – Sadly, Porn
The repressed always returns, but transmuted into a different form? You mean, like a metamorphoses?
Let’s begin with pornography.
“The smiling sorority girl pictured laying out on a beautiful beach may appear to be enjoying her life, yet you have no problem agreeing the candid picture of her enjoyment is staged. Why fake it, if she's enjoying it so much? Because she's an artist trying to 2D represent an incommunicable inner sensation? That's not how it works. The purpose of art is to repress the truth, so it can return as art. She cannot enjoy the beach as much as she believes she should be able to (i.e., as much as some other person would enjoy not the beach but the experience of being “a smiling sorority girl on the beach”); so she performs the enjoyment for others because she-- wants-- the reactions. The fact that she knows everyone knows the photo is staged makes sense only in this context: fooling the public would be a trivial satisfaction if the real enjoyment was the real experience.”
There’s been a few attempts at explaining this quotation on the last psych subreddit, none of which have, for me… satisfied. The answer comes a little further into the footnote. As always, the issue is reading comprehension, the issue is that we (myself included) didn’t look at the words. The most important part of dream interpretation is to listen to the words.
What is the sorority girl’s problem? What is the issue she directly faces? In this case its that she can’t enjoy her own experience. This is not uncommon, I would wager that everyone reading this knows the feeling exactly: you do the thing that you desired, you have the experience, you fuck the hot girl or win the game, but it does not… satisfy. It doesn’t take. Why?
“It's an obvious cliché that the whole point [of social media] is to share experiences, but what the experiences have in common is that they are inner experiences: enjoyable in themselves. Publicizing these experiences suggests-- in fact, what it has defended against-- the inability to enjoy the experience. Including sex: nothing in the universe was ever more desirable than having sex with that person in that position on that beach... and then the enjoyment fails to match the desire. Why did it fail to satisfy? “Here's a picture. I was hoping you could tell me.” – Sadly, Porn
What we have here is an enjoyment problem. We cannot enjoy private experiences. Specifically, the enjoyment fails to match the desire we felt for the experience. In your head, it was better. You do not enjoy fucking the girl as much as you are supposed to. Similarly for negative experiences: at a funeral, you don’t feel as sad as you are supposed to feel. “Why aren’t I crying?”
Being a smiling sorority girl on the beach is something that should be enjoyable, it is something she wants. Except it isn’t, its something others want of her. She never learned how to want, she has no superego of her own because she was raised by media, so she wants the way she thinks others want of her. Consequently, when she gets what (she thinks) she wants, it fails to satisfy.
“The reason what she wants doesn't satisfy her is because it isn't what she wants-- it's what (she thinks) others want of her. […] She wants what others want of her because she has never learned how to want on her own, she can't assess what she wants, so she goes with “social norms”=media because they're louder than the alternative.
Meanwhile she has to pursue psychic satisfaction elsewhere. The payoffs are different. She pursues enjoyment in order to be satisfied; she pursues what she wants in order to avoid anxiety. Those are two very different force vectors with different magnitudes and directions, you should draw them out every time you make a decision of your own and see which of them is driving your purchases.” – Sadly, Porn, Section 26.
My audience is male, so I’ll put it in male terms. The hot girl everyone wants to fuck (“dude, did you see her ass in those pants? Jesus Christ, I’d let that woman do anything she wanted to me.”) comes onto you at the bar, you take her home and rail her. Sure, ass is ass, but the next morning hungover and walking home, you realize it wasn’t as good as you imaged it to be. It didn’t take, it failed to satisfy. Why? Everyone wants her and she wanted you, shouldn’t the sex have been better than any before? Ay, there’s the rub: everyone wants her, and she wanted you: I don’t see you desiring at any point in that sentence. You wanted how others want, i.e., how your friends/society wants, “She’s hot (=everyone thinks she’s hot) so yeah, of course I would fuck her”. Then she comes onto you. “The hot girl wants me? Well, I guess I have to have sex with her now.” Once again, its someone else’s desire: she came onto you and then you were turned on. Your sexual desires aren’t even your own – you want, sexually, how the other wants. You have no superego. “I mean, it just turned me on how much she wanted me.” What are you, a girl?
I’m not saying don’t smash, ass is ass, I know I would and have in this situation (I’m a fakecel) but remember that you get what you want and you get what you deserve: since you never actually wanted her, you never desired her, the experience will fail to satisfy. Maybe you get sexual enjoyment out of it, sure, maybe you get a lot of enjoyment – but it will not satisfy. You will be left with a desire unmet. This is fine and dandy, who cares how you feel? Where it becomes a problem is for everyone else. We’ll get there.
So the sorority girl has an enjoyment problem, she can’t enjoy the experience of “being a sorority girl on the beach” because she doesn’t actually want this experience. What’s the solution? She takes a photo of herself and posts it online. She trades the enjoyment she fails to have for something she can enjoy: the gaze of others.
“In order to compensate for this inability to enjoy fully, we publicize the experience and offer the enjoyment to unknown others. This is the tragedy of pornographization. The others have to be unknown or this will not count, because the people you know don't count. Some of the individuals can be known, but in the aggregate it has to be “others”. Understood this way, bragging “look how great I look” becomes “you know how to enjoy the experience of looking good-- you'll enjoy this more than I do.” – Sadly, Porn, Section 19
If you think this is a critique of Instagram hoes, I will remind you explicitly that this has nothing to do with gender, or sorority girls, and everything to do with media addicted hominid. Next time you send the boys a picture of something/someone cool you’re doing, try checking the direction of the force vector, it begins not with your own enjoyment but in your anxiety about your inability to enjoy.
So, the girl knows the photo is staged and she knows others know this, but it doesn’t matter, fooling others into believing she’s enjoying herself is not the goal. The goal is only the gaze of others, their reactions. Others are capable of enjoying her experience, but she isn’t, so she pornographizes her private experience into a public one, so that others can enjoy for her. She gets something she knows how to enjoy, the gaze of others, in return. Well, there we go, case closed, right?
Of course not, too easy. Something smells funny, something is off, why stop digging here? Repression is afoot.
“The purpose of art is to repress the truth, so it can return as art.” So what truth is being repressed by her photo?
I haven’t read Freud yet (I’m getting there, I swear) but I know enough to understand a bit about dream interpretation and more importantly, dream distortion. Dreams do not convey information – the work of a dream is to hide information, to hide from the dreamer their actual wish, the wish they are not allowed to have. Freudian repression is the psychological process that hides an unacceptable wish from the dreamer. The unacceptable wish is repressed and more safely manifested by the dream in a different form such that the manifest content is different from the “meaning” or latent content of the dream.
Everyone agrees social media is fake, but its odd how happy its most prominent users are to admit to this. They are happy to agree to this interpretation, even eager to admit to it. Even if their goal is not to fool the audience, even if they are aware no one is tricked, you would think they would put up the pretence, right? Instead, they are pleased to tell you how toxic and harmful social media is, how it promotes false images and identities, how maybe they really are narcissists at bottom. “Everyone on social media is faking it! It’s a lie, you aren’t really enjoying yourself, you’re doing it all for the camera!" – "well, maybe you’re right, I guess I am a little shallow, I am acting, but at least I’m willing to admit it." As Teach points out: “People will tell you that overexposure on the internet is a way of broadcasting an identity you hope everyone will believe, but we're also told by those same people that nobody believes anything on the internet, everyone knows it's a cesspool of liars pretending to be someone else.” You smell something strange, something off? That’s the smell of repression.
The audience of social media is here acting as dream interpreter. For the dreamer, the utility of having a dream interpreted is that the interpreter of a dream has the power to declare an interpretation to be true. They are omnipotent, they can declare what the dream means. However, the dream interpreter is NOT omniscient – they can be fooled. The dreamer picks the interpreter on purpose (though not consciously), as a further mechanism of dream distortion, hoping the interpreter will interpret the dream in such a way that the repressed wish is not revealed. As Teach explains in Watch What You Hear, this is the same trick Penelope pulls when she asks Odysseus (disguised as a beggar) to interpret her dream – she wants him to interpret it in such a way that her hidden wish stays hidden.
You see the sorority girl’s social media post and immediately say “she’s faking it.” You’re correct, she isn’t actually enjoying “being a smiling sorority girl on a beach,” she’s performing the enjoyment, she’s smiling FOR the camera, but more interestingly she doesn’t mind that you say so. She’s happy to accept this interpretation as long as the repressed wish, the wish she is not allowed to have, is left alone. The viewer feels satisfied in his knowledge (“Ha, I’ve figured it out! She’s faking it! I got her!”) and as an aside you’ll observe here that the interpreter is satisfied BECAUSE he thinks he’s depriving her of her charade, because he’s depriving her of the satisfaction of tricking the audience. Depriving the other is what satisfies him. But what wish does the sorority girl have that his interpretation allowing to remain hidden?
“…I'm going to push the analysis further, past disavowal and denial into repression, to where you will shake your head no and totally disagree, it no longer resonates, I don't know what I'm talking about, it's not true, I am wrong. And yet-- ask everyone else who knows you if I am wrong.
The solution to not being able to enjoy is to push the enjoyment of the experience onto others; but you’ll observe that the “others” do not, in fact, get to enjoy your experience-- more accurately, they suspect you enjoyed it, if for no other reason than you were the one who experienced it. You might even say... that the others were deprived of the enjoyment. So who did enjoy, and what did they enjoy? The reason that sharing is the solution to being unable to enjoy, even though it doesn't help, is that it isn't a solution to being unable to enjoy-- this logic that “rings true” is the defense against what you do enjoy, a defense against what truly satisfies you: depriving the other.” – Sadly, Porn, Section 19
The logical conclusion of envy is deprivation. What the sorority girl has figured out is this: she can’t enjoy, but THEY can. Other people (not her) have desires, other people know how to enjoy inner experiences, why does life feel real to everyone else but not to me? She is envious of their (likely imagined) capacity to enjoy, to live real lives. So she posts her picture that she and everyone else knows is fake, showing her desirable life to an audience that she thinks knows how to enjoy, and then she deprives them of that enjoyment.
“Look how desirable I am! The boys want to fuck me, and the girls want to be me! You’re right, it is fake – I can’t enjoy this – but YOU will never be desirable like this. Even though YOU know how to enjoy, you know how to desire – you will NEVER have what I have.” This is the envy, this is the resentment, this is the rage. She is Aglauros. She is happy to accept the interpretation of “narcissism”, that social media is fake, that she is vain and likes being looked at, she is eager to accept this interpretation if only her hidden wish is never uncovered: that what she enjoys, what satisfies her, is to deprive everyone else. The photo exists to deprive the audience of their enjoyment.
It is the same logic that drives you to send a photo of the Tinder girl you drunk fucked on Friday night to the boys groupchat the next day. “Well, I matched with her, so I guess I have to message her.” Has it ever occurred to you to ask out a girl you actually like? So you fuck her, but the experience does not satisfy because you never actually wanted to fuck her in the first place, you only did because you were drunk/you matched/she messaged back, not because you wanted to, never by your own desire would you do something. It does not satisfy. The solution is to pornographize your experience, that of being “the kind of guy who gets laid off Tinder”, for an audience because you can’t enjoy it, display it to your friends, >2 will do: fucking her didn’t satisfy but deprivation always does.
The wish the sorority girl is repressing is the desire to deprive the other. This is the wish that is unacceptable, this is the wish that must be distorted, this is the desire that cannot be said out loud. But the repressed wish always returns, the purpose of art is to repress the truth so that it can return, metamorphosed, as art: her wish to deprive the other returns in the picture she takes, the picture that deprives everyone else.
In Graeco-Roman myth you cannot come back from death without a great deal of special help. Odysseus journeys to the edge of the world to reach the entrance of Hades, and he doesn’t go past the uppermost level. ‘Circe, Circe, who can pilot us on that journey? Who has ever reached the House of Death in a black ship?’ he laments, and it is only with Circe’s help, with her magic and spells and libations and sacrifices, that Odysseus can speak to the dead and return. Even still he never crosses truly into Pluto’s house but only stands at its gate as the dead come up from Hades to him. Not even Virgil allowed his hero to enter the underground alone, Aeneas was led by the Cumaean Sibyl, priestess of Apollo, and it is no easy task:
Trojan, Anchises' son, the descent of Avernus is easy.
All night long, all day, the doors of Hades stand open.
But to retrace the path, to come up to the sweet air of heaven,
That is labour indeed.
To enter Hades is Hercules most dangerous labor and he is deified, he becomes a god at the end of his work. He prepares extensively, he is initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and even still he is afraid he will not be allowed to return to the light of day. He fights Cerberus – a giant dog with three heads, the tail of a dragon, and snakes bristling on its back – in order to be allowed to return to the land of the living. Why did the entrance to Hades need to be guarded? Not because people were trying to get in – the gates to Pluto’s house are open all day and all night. It was to keep the dead from going out. The unconscious is guarded by distortions, by projection, by repression – Cerberus is all the tricks the unconscious uses to keep the dead from returning.
There is one Greek hero who can enter into Hades and return without help, but his story is not a happy one. It goes like this: Orpheus, the Thracian bard, is to be married to beautiful Eurydice, a nymph. But the omen for their marriage is a bad one indeed. Hymen, the god of marriage, tries to light his festive torch but it sputters and goes out. After the marriage Eurydice is out walking with her bridesmaids and is bit in the foot by a venomous snake. She perishes and is sent down to Hades.
The kingdom of Pluto is the kingdom of shade and darkness. In Ovid, as in Homer, the dead are shades of their former selves. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is sent to visit the shade of Tiresias in Hades, and there meets his former companions from Troy. Achilles laments to Odysseus when Odysseus meets him in Hades:
No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.
When Odysseus cuts the throat of the ram and the ewe as part of his sacrifice to be allowed to speak with the dead, the shades flock up out of Hades longing to drink. And only after Tiresias has drunk the blood of the living that he can tell Odysseus the future – only after he has taken the blood of the living can he return, briefly, to the land of life, out of the underworld and into the shining sun. His shade is filled with life, if only briefly.
It is to this bloodless land of shade that Orpheus descends in search of his wife. He descends through the Taenaran gateway, he crosses the Styx, he comes to the court of Pluto, Lord of the Shades. Orpheus begins to play his lyre. He begins to sing.
It is the Delphic Prince, Phoebus Apollo, who invented the lyre, but it is said that it was Orpheus, the Thracian bard, who perfected it. When Orpheus plays, all of nature crowds around to listen, his music causes trees to grow and animals to come to him. Orpheus sings. He reminds Pluto of when he, too, was in love, of when Pluto went to the greatest lengths to steal Persephone from her mother Ceres, and Pluto remembers.
You powers divine of the subterranean kingdom,
where all of mortal creation must one day sink to our doom,
if you will give me permission to tell you the truth unvarnished
by shifty pretences, I’ve not come down to explore the murky
regions of Tártarus, nor to enchain the three-headed monster
Medúsa bore, the dog whose coat is bristling with adders.
I’m here in search of my wife, cut off in the years of her youth
when a viper she trampled discharged its venom inside her ankle.
I’d hoped to be able to bear my loss and confess that I tried.
But Love was too strong. That god is well known in the world above,
and I wonder whether you know him here; I divine that you do.
If rumour has not invented the tale of that old abduction,
you too are united by Love. In the name of these confines of fear,
in the name of this vast abyss and your realm of infinite silence,
I, Orpheus, implore you, unravel the web of my dear Eurýdice’s
early passing. We all are destined for you. We may tarry
a little but, sooner or later, we speed to our one habitation.
This is the place that we all are bound for, our final dwelling,
and yours is the longest reign that the human race must endure.
Eurydice too, when her due of years has been ripely completed,
shall own your sway. Till then, I beg you to let me enjoy her.
If fate forbids you to show my wife any mercy, I’ll never
return from Hades myself. You may joy in the deaths of us both.’
Orpheus plea and his music “moved the bloodless spirits to tears”:
…For a moment Tántalus
ceased to clutch at the fleeting pool, Ixíon’s wheel
was spellbound, the vultures halted their pecking at Títyos’ liver,
the Dánaids dropped their urns and Sísyphus sat on his boulder.
The Furies’ hearts were assuaged by the song, and the story goes
that they wept real tears for the very first time. The king and queen
of the world below forbore to refuse such a moving appeal,
and they summoned Eurydice.
His appeal succeeds. Orpheus may take his wife. As she shuffles out from the throngs of the dead, Pluto gives Orpheus one condition: that he must lead his wife out of Hades, in front, and he must not look back at her until he has left the underworld. In complete silence he walks, leading his wife up out of Hades. Soon they can see the light of the upper world. But Orpheus becomes anxious that his wife may be falling behind, he doubts himself, fear overtakes him: he looks back.
But Orpheus was frightened his love was falling behind; he was desperate
to see her. He turned, and at once she sank back into the dark.
She stretched out her arms to him, struggled to feel his hands on her own,
but all she was able to catch, poor soul, was the yielding air.
She sinks back into the shade.
It is particular what word Orpheus uses when he asks Pluto for his wife: he asks him to unravel the fate of his wife, in Latin, retexite fata. I thank the gods that men more learned than I have done the work for me:
“To "reweave" the Fates is to rewrite what the Fates have already woven: retexite is linked to the root sense of text as something made, via techne, art. The fate of Eurydice is a text that Orpheus asks Hades to edit. […]
Orpheus, using his music, almost succeeds in recapturing his lost love, then he bends his eyes back to look directly upon the one thing he must not directly look upon, according to the condition (legem) imposed with the prospect of her return: the original referent of that fatal text. The rewrite fails.” (source)
It is Orpheus who has the ability to stop death, to cross over into the Hades without magical aid, from which nothing else escapes, and still return. Hercules, Odysseus, Aeneas, none of these heroes can do what he has done. It is his art that lets him do this, it is his music that even Pluto, the bloodless spirit, is moved by. The music of Orpheus moves – not only the dead but the plants, trees, the animals. Not only can he return from the land of the dead on his own, but Orpheus of all the Greek heroes is also the only one that can take from Hades something dead, a shade, and bring it back to the world of light.
From the beginning something was wrong with Orpheus’ marriage, the god of marriage can’t condone it:
[Hymen] attended, for sure; but the ritual words,
the joyful faces and omens of favour were sadly missing.
Even the torch in his hand kept sputtering smoke, brought tears
to the eyes but never ignited, however strongly he waved it.
Orpheus’ desire – his wife, Eurydice – had to be repressed, the gods alone know why, the marriage torch could not be lit. But by his music can Orpheus stop death and return with her. It is the bard, the poet, the musician who can go into the underworld, the unconscious, and return with the repressed. This is the power of his art.
It is curious that in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice there is no metamorphosis, but this is no accident. When Odysseus pours out the sacrificial blood for Tiresias to drink, Tiresias is imbued with new life. The bloodless spirit of the dead seer can speak. But Tiresias does not truly live, he goes back into the underworld, as Odysseus has missed a crucial component: what returns from Hades must not only be given new life, but also transformed.
This too is where Orpheus fails. In his fear and doubt he looks back, he longs for the original, he looks upon the original referent and as consequence she disappears back into the shadows, the rewrite fails. The truth cannot be directly looked upon by art, art is not a vehicle for the truth. The purpose of art is to repress the truth so that it can return as art. But what is repressed, when it returns, cannot return the same as it once was; it must always be transmuted, distorted – metamorphosed.