Freud: On Technology and the Body

This week we read Freud's famous passage from Civilization and its Discontents where he discusses modernity and its understanding of the relationship between technology and tech body.

This relationship between technology and the body emerges out of last week's readings on Marx. For Marx, the horror of the factory system is that it implies a reciprocity of persons and machines, subordinating the former to the latter and "converting the worker into a living appendage of the machine". A "machine system" yokes such machines together in a series of interlocking parts, producing a "mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories” with “working organs”. Taylorism was to posit the body as a component so that the worker “ suffers form the divorce between that part of his body which has been instrumentalised and calibrated and the remainder of his living personality”. (See discussion of Marx in Tim Armstrong, in Modernism, Technology and the Body, pp. 77-8)

While Freud appears to posit a different view of technology, he too is ambivalent about the implications of technology. He describes the “omnipotence and omniscience” embodied in the gods as representing “cultural ideals” now realized by technology” “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent. Sight is extended by the telescope, hearing via the telephone, memory by the gramophone, digestion by the fire. But those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Thus Freud writes of technology under the sign of mourning. It supplies deficiencies and makes up for absences, correcting defects in sight, replacing a lost loved one; the house replaces the original loss; the womb. Lost body parts and objects are compensated for.

Tallying up the net profits, write-offs and forfeits exacted by the technological extension, Freud takes a call from the voice of pessimism: “But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most f these satisfactions follow the model of the ‘cheap enjoyment’ extoled in the anecdote- the enjoyment of putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winters night and drawing it in again.”

In The Telephone Book (pp. 89-90) Book Ronell writes:

The economy of the cheap thrill seems to come from out f the bed clothes in the form of a bare leg extended to test the threshold of exteriority. The pleasure comes cheap insofar as its discovery takes place in negativity, being reactively dependent upon a cold winters night to know itself. The body’s limb momentarily self-extends beyond the comfortable zone of enclosure to meet, in the blindness of telephonic night, the biting cold. The “cheap enjoyment” actually covers over the cost of anxiety’s epistemological retreat, for the leg of Freud that protrudes beyond the clothes t be nipped, retreats in blindness form the memory of castration anxiety. Always ready to kick up metonymically, the bare leg suffers form exposure – but what it suffers is enjoyment. The leg that he in the anecdote draws back should never have left the cover, like the child for which the telephone extension became a sorry substitute.

Freud writes (p. 25):

If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage and, have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

Ronell continues:

Freud’s argument sums up the comfort afforded by the telephone as the effect, in fact, of the losses for which it stands. Initially his reckoning tended to accumulate a sense of profit, fitting a posture of gratitude towards the prosthetic God we have projected. But this amounts to the gratitude felt towards a reprieve, shaky and unstable, which briefly functions as a simulacrum if that which is no longer there while it also announces its not being there… The problem is that technical advances multiply needs, hence their self-engendering character... The more advances are made, the deeper the wound of renunciation.

Renunciation and cultural conquest go hand in hand:

Freud appends a bizarre footnote pointing out the connection between “primitive stories of putting out fire with urine and fire as a tool. It is only when the masculine desire to demonstrate sexual prowess in “homosexual competition” is renounced that fire can be “carried off”. “This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for the renunciation of instinct.” Tim Armstrong, in Modernism, Technology and the Body (pp. 77-8) writes: “The tool is, in this case, less an extension of the body than that which subsumes it to a larger entity; an entity which demands a sacrifice.

Freud, page 27:

It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating - a theme to which modem giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais' Gargantua, still hark back - was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for is renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.

Ronell (p. 93-4)writes:

“Woman, prisoner of her anatomy cage, tends to the fire held captive. But submission is no easy thing. For if the fire held captive by the captive woman has indeed proven containable, this is because in the first place the phallus was subdued, so that the phallic tongues will have been assimilated t the woman, tamed and kept low under her supervision. Beyond the scene of multiplied captivity within which one anatomy encapsulates another, and whose minimal episode involves the anatomy of a dwelling place, the major difference asserted in this passage appears to be set forth between zoning laws legislating outside and inside, or, more precisely, public and private. Giving up the public contest among the many phallic tongues, man, subdued, retreats into space governed by private, inwardly turned, and largely feminised tongues. The movement compelling homosexual publicity toward a feminised domesticity, which in fact preserves the man, comes about after the “fire of his own sexual excitation” has been damped.

The woman, appointed guardian of the dephallicized tongues, will have bee henceforth structurally bound to “being there”. The scene reports the difference Lacan maintains: men have the phallus, while women are the phallus. Except that one never seems able to “have” the phallus in the first place (assuming such a place exists).

Turning down the but sparing the fire, restraining himself from competing with the phallus which threatens to consume and destroy him, the man takes it home with him, to tame it. But in order to bring it in he has to put it out -  and this fire that he puts out is the one within, the “fire of his own sexual excitation”, but also the feminised other, engulfing, and which by dint of renunciation he can piss on. The fire spared, the sent man will be brought inside, which is the starting point of the domestic: “The great cultural conquest [of fire, of femininity] was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct.” The fire, inside, under control, will not spread to an infinite outside; the woman has been appointed guardian of its captivity, two subdued entities sitting watch over one another, trimming the silhouette of an original couple equally tamed. Technology would be responsible for this scene of sublimated interior decorating, promoting the internalising primacy of the dwelling place. Everything is to be brought in. The outside is to be located, colonised, contracted; and so the telephone, to recruit our example from its station, was advertised as the “annihilator of time and space”, the conquest of savage intensities. Technoculture can barely abide an outside. Nor certainly an outside that stays out all night. Thus Freud’s footnote on the renunciation of instinct falls under the “activities and resources which are useful to men for making the earth serviceable to them… If we go back far enough, we find that the first acts of civilisation were the use of tools. The gaining of control over fire and the construction of dwellings” (Freud p. 27). Arising with the fire whose place is now in the kitchen, the question on the tips of the flamed tongues, always prepared to ignite and spread, concerns the movement in which interiorization and instinctual renunciation become coconstitutive. The tongues, as with the suppressed instinct, fall silent. The concept of an inside has been won technologically, space and libido, contracted (by marriage).