Unforbidden Pleasures Read online

  Adam Phillips

  * * *

  UNFORBIDDEN PLEASURES

  Contents

  Laying Down the Law

  Tricks of Obedience

  Against Self-Criticism

  Unforbidden Pleasures

  Life Itself

  Coda

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  By the same author

  Winnicott

  On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored

  On Flirtation

  Terror and Experts

  Monogamy

  The Beast in the Nursery

  Darwin’s Worms

  Promises, Promises

  Houdini’s Box

  Equals

  Going Sane

  Intimacies (with Leo Bersani)

  Side Effects

  On Kindness (with Barbara Taylor)

  The Concise Dictionary of Dress (with Judith Clark)

  On Balance

  Missing Out

  One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays

  Becoming Freud

  EDITOR OF

  Charles Lamb: Selected Prose

  Walter Pater: The Renaissance

  Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry

  The Electrified Tightrope: Selected Psychoanalytic

  Papers of Michael Eigen

  Richard Howard: Selected Poems

  (with Hugh Haughton)

  John Clare in Context (with Hugh Haughton)

  The Book of Interruptions (with David Hillman)

  General Editor of the new Penguin Modern

  Classics Freud translations

  For Judith

  – to define – is to distrust.

  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

  This has caused me the greatest trouble and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realize that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

  I suffered

  A terrible hangover

  Of faith.

  Olena Kalytiak Davis, ‘It Was a Coffin That Sang’

  A child always, in part, wants even to be weaned.

  Edna O’Shaughnessy, ‘The Absent Object’

  Laying Down the Law

  We seem never to ask ‘Why do you know?’ or ‘How do you believe?’

  J. L. Austin, ‘Other Minds’

  I

  When Oscar Wilde famously said that the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings, he was reminding us that there may always be things we care about more than the things we care about most; and that, however much we care about something, there are always other things that we want to do. That, inevitably, there is something forbidding about socialism; it may want us to give up too much. Just like any of our commitments there is much that it excludes, and much that it rejects. Whatever we permit ourselves we are forbidding ourselves something else. All our ideals for ourselves – all our aims and aspirations and beliefs – are by definition restrictive. And that is their point and their purpose. But for Wilde, in this all too ordinary fact – we can’t do everything, believe everything, love and desire everyone – there is a troubling and absurd selective inattention. We may be a little too keen to make the necessary sacrifices; we may relish giving things up. Indeed, we may do what we do because of what we have to give up in order to do it.

  Something is made possible – or so it seems, Wilde intimated – by making many other things impossible; or even unthinkable, inconceivable. And yet we are strangely haunted by some of the things and people we are persuaded to exclude. To forbid something is to make it unforgettable (children must not cross the road without looking; adults must not think too much about sex, or the wrong kind of sex). At its best and at its worst to forbid is to coerce attention and to guarantee interest. It is to arrange a haunting. We must always be mindful, somewhere in ourselves, of what we have been forbidden, of what we have forbidden ourselves; being out of control is the way we tend to describe our doing of these forbidden things; though it does not follow that when we do unforbidden things we are in control. It is, in fact, only because we have created forbidden things that we have created the idea of being in control. Our ideas and experiences of pleasure have been muddled by being associated with control. So when we speak of unforbidden pleasures, we should note, we no longer need the language of control, of discipline and punishment. We can forget about those particular words. This is what Wilde was referring to when he wrote, in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), ‘We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.’ We may not be able to teach people how to grow, but in order to grow there are things you need to be able to forget.

  It is, of course, Wilde’s point that socialism interferes with sociability. And that, by implication, we can use commitment, conviction, strong belief – and, Wilde will assert, morals and purposes – to narrow our minds (and stunt our growth). As though there is always a temptation, or a desire, to forget the multifariousness of our pleasures; to simplify (and sanitize) our hedonism in the service of traditional safeties; the forgetting of pleasures being one form that the renunciation of pleasure can take (the one formalized by psychoanalysis). As though we are always laying down the law for ourselves, and the law forces our attention (tells us what we should and shouldn’t be looking at, who we should and shouldn’t be listening to). We are taught to remember everything except our pleasures, Wilde implied. And this is where art comes in: ‘All art is immoral,’ Wilde said, and so it is in art that we recover our real pleasures; we recover everything morality forces us to renounce. What Wilde called ‘recognising no position as final’ means not taking the forbidders too seriously; that is, not taking them on their own terms. Significant changes in manners and morals – periods of significant change in personal and cultural history – always involve the redescription of previously forbidden desires. One way or another the forbidden becomes the less forbidden, or even the unforbidden, and so provides a different kind of pleasure (we are released into enjoying previously forbidden things in different ways: released into what Kathleen Stewart calls, in Ordinary Affects, a new ‘tangle of potential connections’). And some forbidden pleasures remain just that, forbidden, because our lives would be intolerable otherwise. But we should, Wilde suggested, seek out the immoral in order to see what we think and feel about it, and this is where art comes in. We need to be able to think and talk about where our real enjoyment is, and why it might be where it is. We need to find out whether we can replace what we should enjoy with what we do enjoy.

  Wilde wondered why we were so impressed by, so serious about, forbidden pleasures; why, that is to say, we might want to be intimidated by morality and tantalized by pleasure, and to so relish suffering the consequences of our renunciations. If we could believe, if we could live as if, as he put it, ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics … Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong,’ he believed our lives would be better. We might, for example, be able to enjoy living in a world of unpredictable consequences, or of what Bernard Williams calls ‘moral luck’, if we preferred aesthetics to ethics. Ethics is prophetic, Wilde implied, in a way that aesthetics need not be; it is prescriptive, it aspires to determine causes and consequences. It attempts to predict the future. By telling us what our lives should be like, morality often claims to be telling us what our lives are really like (even though we are often left feeling that we are failing to live our lives as they really are). What would our lives be like, Wilde’s heroes want us to imagine, if we found the forbidden a little less forbidding; if we used the idea of forbidden pleasure to think with, rat
her than to stop our selves thinking (or talking)? Perhaps the whole idea of forbidden pleasure brings out the worst in us. What could our lives be like if we took seriously what Walter Pater – Wilde’s erstwhile aesthetic hero – wrote in his 1866 essay on Coleridge: ‘Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life.’ The implication being that the subtlety and complexity of our (modern) lives are not suited to hard and abstract moralities.

  What became known as the Aesthetic Movement in England in the later nineteenth century – broadly speaking, the work of Pater and Wilde and their rewriting of the work of John Ruskin, John Henry Newman and Matthew Arnold and the romanticism that preceded them – we can see now as, among other things, an attempt to change an inherited vocabulary; of finding a new way of describing what we are doing and not doing by following a rule (as though we might decide what we want to inherit, and what we want to do with our inheritance: in this case the inheritance of moral vocabularies, of rules and manners, and the forms of life they intend for us, as they speak on our behalf). ‘The Aesthetic Movement,’ David DeLaura wrote in Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England, was ‘a serious and respectable attempt to provide fullness of life to a society increasingly aware, as Arnold put it, that the immense inherited “system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules,” fails to correspond to the wants of modern life.’ An attempt by these late Victorians, as Arnold was to put it in his essay ‘Democracy’, ‘to gain a more vivid sense of their own life and activity.’ If, instead of the words ‘good’ or ‘right’ (or ‘sacred’) we use the words ‘beautiful’ or ‘pleasurable’ or ‘enlivening’ – though not, for Wilde, the other late-nineteenth-century candidates ‘useful’ or ‘profitable’ – how would our lives be different? Once the power of redescription is acknowledged, words like ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘sacred’ – and, of course, ‘forbidden’ – are among the first casualties. You change the conventional absolutes by changing the conventions. Another way of saying this – a less earnest, more casually pragmatic, way – is: forget certain words and use less familiar ones instead, and see what happens. If, as Pater wrote, habit is a form of failure, we should try out new habits, different ways of speaking.

  II

  ‘We are punished for our refusals,’ Lord Henry Wotton says in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); ‘Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us … The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. The glancing allusion to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) is deliberate, Wilde being a keen reader of Blake: ‘He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.’ In these familiar reversals of Wilde’s – ‘We are punished for our refusals’; ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’ – we are being shown language as an area of freedom, and this freedom as a certain kind of amusement. We have been bewitched not by a picture but by a way of putting things; by certain words in a certain order. Particular ways of performing our language have held us captive (habit can be a great deadener of pleasures, forbidden and otherwise). The language that formulates the forbidden can reformulate it: ‘A Truth in art,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Truth of Masks’ (1891), ‘is that whose contradictory is also true.’ Once we start having it both ways we can see how many ways there may be. This is what Wilde wants to impress upon us. We have taken as orders things better heard as suggestions; we have sought information when we might have preferred evocation, or wanted facts when impressions may have been more conducive. Any given vocabulary is a secret and not so secret moralizer of experience, at once a curse and a blessing, a form of instruction. ‘Wilde,’ his biographer Richard Ellmann writes, ‘was a moralist, in a school where Blake, Nietzsche, and even Freud were his fellows. The object of life is not to simplify it. As our conflicting impulses coincide, as our repressed feelings vie with our expressed ones, as our solid views disclose unexpected striations, we are all secret dramatists.’ Even Ellmann, perhaps unsurprisingly, has recourse to what, for Wilde, was the old vocabulary: Wilde, he says, was a moralist (Ellmann uses Wilde’s ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics’ as the epigraph to his chapter on Dorian Gray). But the tradition that Ellmann creates for Wilde – and in this he was preceded by Harold Bloom – is instructive. We could construe each of these very different writers, from very different cultural traditions, as saying: laying down the law, any law, is stranger and crueller than it looks; the forbidden is always a provocation, whatever else it is; and therefore we should forget certain words and try to remember other ones instead. Extricate yourself, in so far as you can, from the vocabulary that doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t get you the life you want. Think of the languages you prefer; think of language as a pleasure and not a penance, as a celebration and not a sacrifice. Each of these writers has their key words, their own distinctive idiom, a vocabulary by which we recognize them; and each of these writers, not incidentally, had distinctive things to say about memory; about the useful, the purposeful, the pleasurable forgetting of words.

  We want to narrow our minds – we want to speak and write in particular ways – because we want to set limits to our wanting, to our sense of possibility. So it is not incidental that when Wilde came to actually write about socialism, say, in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), he writes about many other things as well, and mostly about Art and Individualism – about Art as Individualism – and about pleasure as the point of the Art and the Individualism that he capitalizes, and capitalizes on, in this extraordinary essay (‘Socialism,’ Wilde remarked in conversation, ‘is enjoyment’). When he writes about socialism he wants to write about what he takes it that the socialists of his day were in danger of forgetting, and what indeed they should forget about. Intimating that the socialists of his day, in their ideological fervour, had misunderstood what kind of sociability socialism might, or could, entail. Or what kinds of things people might really enjoy doing together. ‘The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is,’ Wilde begins his essay,

  undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.

  Living for others is not the same as living with others; indeed, living for others, Wilde suggested, might sabotage pleasurable coexistence. Wilde as a classicist would know that ‘sordid’ – in ‘that sordid necessity of living for others’ – came from the Latin sordidus, ‘dirty’, and was associated with filth and waste matter. A sordid necessity is then at once wasteful and contaminating. Living for others, which ‘scarcely anyone at all escapes’, means for Wilde a range of things, from the Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, through the altruism of utilitarianism (doing whatever is conducive to the greatest happiness of the greatest number), to the more modern-sounding notion of simply being what others want us to be; these others to whom we wish to conform being specific and significant, and to some extent chosen (Nietzsche, another critic of Christian altruism, wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), ‘Please unlearn this “for”, you creators: it is precisely your virtue that you shall do no thing for’). The phrase ‘living for others’ suggests that we can live on behalf of other people’s desires, or that we can live in their place or in place of them, or for their benefit, or for their very survival. That we can, as it were, forget ourselves in order to remember them, those others for whom we are living. As though every life was a sacrifice to both the previous generation and to our contemporaries in some infinite regress of obligation and indebtedness (Freud, of course, would write in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) of societies as profoundly and necessarily compromising for the individual and her desire). ‘Living for others’, with its myriad associations and connotations, is, we might say, integral to the moral vocabulary Wilde inherited; what do these others that we are living for forbid, and encourage? Which othe
rs are we living for, and why? If we are not living for others, what or who are we living for? Why does living involve living for? What is it about life – the then modern life – that required justification, or reasons, or foundations, or endorsements? Is it possible that we might begin to believe that there is nothing or no one to live for? And how, if at all, would we live then? These are the kinds of questions that certain ways of using the inherited vocabulary might dissuade us from asking (and that Blake, Nietzsche, Freud, Wilde and many others were asking). What have we got to do with other people? And what do we really enjoy doing with them?

  In Wilde’s pagan socialism no one would be compliant or servile or modest. They would be, in the very best sense, self-centred, there being no other real centre from which they could live (‘For out of ourselves we can never pass,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Critic as Artist’, ‘nor can there be in creation what in the creator was not’; the creator and creation here secularizing and parodying what Wilde took to be the increasingly outworn vocabulary of Christianity: Christianity being a language – despite, or because of, his youthful flirtation with Catholicism – he found it intermittently more difficult to speak with conviction). In Wilde’s socialism the artist is exemplary, and exemplary in his disregard of what others want from him. One thing the others want from him being a certain way of talking and writing. What Wilde often referred to as ‘Public Opinion’ in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ is always laying down the law; public opinion being defined by Wilde as, ‘an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force’. It is the being forcefully organized that Wilde resents as much as the ignorance cultivated. ‘Whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do,’ he wrote,