Civilization and Its Discontents
Early on in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud makes an assertion typical of his gesture for its anthropocentric view of man’s relation to animal: “We shall therefore content ourselves with saying once more that the word ‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes – namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (42; emphasis added). The juxtaposition of animal and nature is nothing new, for it remains a cultural myth well into our time. What strikes me as interesting are the numerous grammatical and rhetorical devices he employs in an earnest attempt to set up a clear-cut conceptual faultline between human and animal/nature (e.g.,
“from . . . animal ancestors” and “men against nature”). Thanks to Darwin, Freud has no problem referring to animals as our “ancestors”; his true anxiety, rather, revolves around the overcast prospect of human degeneration, of falling back to the nature of one’s origin, and of an atavistic return to the animalistic way of being. This anxiety is then carried over into the footnote that immediately follows the above quote:
Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless
admits of a conjecture – a fantastic-sounding one – about the origin of this human feat. It is as though
primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected
with it, but 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 modern 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 his 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. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the
connection between ambition, urination and fire as early as in the “Dora” case history. (42-43)
By personifying fire as man’s same-sex competitor, Freud is surreptitiously, if not unconsciously, invoking his own theory of male paranoia, which claims that one man’s fear of persecution by another is bolstered by an unresolved homosexual cathexis.16 The implication of the rhetorical device of personification is that the aggression against fire qua same-sex rival and the fear of aggression by that rival are both driven by a perverse homosexual desire, thereby subject to repression as the (proto-)subject enters the stage of civilization. But in Freud’s conception of fire, it is not just fire that has been figured as threatening. Its paranoid competitive relation with man in effect parallels what he says about primitive man’s relation to animals in the main body of his text, constituting a paranoid chain of equivalences one individual term of which may substitute and account for another.
The metonymic chain of equations runs something like this:
16 See Freud’s famous study of the Schreber case, Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).
(main text) man against nature man against animal ancestor (footnote) man against fire man against homosexual competitor
These equivalences are further informed by a temporal logic of degeneration and an engendered logic of castration fear. That is, if one does not prevail over one’s same-sex competitor such as fire and animals by entering into civilization, one will in turn be returned to a primitive state of being, which, in this signifying chain, is synonymous with failure to set up a masculine culture defined in terms of a distinctly demarcated sphere of domesticity.
Fear of degeneration and fear of castration are thus linked up in close association with one another. Moreover, the imagery of pissing on fire is reminiscent of the cultural imaginary of playing with fire, whose connotation of “wildness” is founded upon the suggestive correlation between “wilderness” and barbarous animality. The proper, civilized way to handle such a fiery enemy is not to enter into penile, that is, explicitly homosexual, competition, but simply to transport it the way a tamed animal is brought home for domestication. The domestic sphere, in Freud’s genealogy of civilization, is defined as a warehouse of trophies that holds up all the animals or animal-like competitors. Woman, the putatively appointed guardian of the hearth, however, continues to be the single exception.
Since her anatomy has a priori foreclosed any possibility of her competition with man, she is deemed as a fixed entity resembling the domestic dwelling itself, always already there by default well before any competition begins.
If in the first footnote Freud is mainly concerned about the role played by the micturating penis in humankind’s movement toward a civilization that requires penile sublimation to precipitate the public/private divide, then in the second footnote, Freud, by a 180-degree turn, switches his attention to the erotic orifices. To register the argumentative itinerary through which these erotic orifices appear or disappear, I quote the footnote at full length:
The organic periodicity of the sexual process has persisted, it is true, but its effect psychical sexual
excitation has rather been reversed. This change seems most likely to be connected with the
diminution of the olfactory stimuli by means of which the menstrual process produced an effect on the
male psyche. Their role was taken over by visual excitations, which, in contrast to the intermittent
olfactory stimuli, were able to maintain a permanent effect. The taboo on menstruation is derived
from this “organic repression,” as a defence against a phase of development that has been surmounted.
All other motives are probably of a secondary nature. This process is repeated on another level when
the gods of a superseded period of civilization turn into demons. The diminution of the olfactory
stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of
an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of
protection, and so provoked feelings of shame in him.
The fateful process of civilization would thus have set in with man’s adoption of an erect posture.
From that point the chain of events would have proceeded through the devaluation of olfactory stimuli
and the isolation of the menstrual period to the time when visual stimuli were paramount and the
genitals became visible, and thence to the continuity of human civilization. This is only a theoretical
speculation, but it is important enough to deserve careful checking with reference to the conditions of
life which obtain among animals closely related to man.
A social factor is also unmistakably present in the cultural trend towards cleanliness, which has
received ex post facto justification in hygienic considerations but which manifested itself before their
discovery. The incitement to cleanliness originates in an urge to get rid of the excreta, which have
become disagreeable to the sense perceptions. We know that in the nursery things are different. The
excreta arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body
which has come away from it. Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course of
development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and
abominable. Such a reversal of values would scarcely be possible if the substances that are expelled
from the body were not doomed by their strong smells to share the fate which overtook olfactory
stimuli after man adopted the erect posture. Anal erotism, therefore, succumbs in the first instance to
the “organic repression” which paved the way to civilization. The existence of the social factor which
is responsible for the further transformation of anal erotism is attested by the circumstance that in spite
of all man’s developmental advances, he scarcely finds the smell of his own excreta repulsive, but only
that of other people’s. Thus a person who is not clean – who does not hide his excreta – is offending
other people; he is showing no consideration for them. And this is confirmed by our strongest and
commonest terms of abuse. It would be incomprehensible, too, that man should use the name of his
most faithful friend in the animal world – the dog – as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred
his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and
one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions. (54-55)
Ascending in the “upright gait” toward humanity, human beings have to go through organic repression and renounce the olfactory stimuli, first represented by menstruation, then by the anus. At first, the exposure of genitals in the human assumption of the upright posture is considered to be the very genealogy of shame. As Freud proceeds, however, the anus comes to take on an even more shameful role than the frontal genitals due to its overdetermined implications. Working by way of metonymy or physical contiguity, the anus supersedes the genitals as the arch emblem of shame. As Lee Edelman argues in “Piss Elegant,” Freud’s postulation of an opposition between “anal inferiority” and “urethral greatness” is constantly subject to collapse: “’[T]his effort to historicize the anal as a phase (whether of the species or the individual) that disappears in the face of libidinal redistribution through investment in erection cannot exempt the organ of erection, the genital that would put the anal behind it, from its merely intermediate position. . . . As anal and genital resist absolute differentiation in the sexual, so the urinary and the fecal, the urethral and the sphinctral, between which the genital is located, confound any polar interpretation” (151). For all the efforts Freud has
made to “put the anal behind,” the very physical proximity between penis and anus has persistently threatened the former with the shameful shadow of emasculation, with its repressed erotic functions and its subdued implication of sexual passivity, which never ceases to send off the message that any male subject could potentially be penetrated like women and that they might even enjoy such penetration. In Freud’s understanding of sexual shame, the anus thus becomes a master trope that subsumes the penis’s sexual function as it comes to signify the shameful status of the lower body part tout court. Likewise, at the level of the olfactory function, the bad smell of excreta emitted by the bottom also substitutes for nearly all other kinds of bad smell. The confusion or synecdochization is illustrated by Freud’s slippage, say, from “a person who is not clean,” to “who does not hide his excreta,” or, as an interesting parallel, from “an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell,” to “which has no horror of excrement.” By way of metonymy, the anus first takes over the shameful function of frontal genitals of both sexes, then encapsulating all the repulsive olfactory stimuli through its production of shit. And, finally, as if to explain why he prefers to use the term “anal erotism,” he supplements the clause “that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement” with the following words: “and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions.” What sexual functions is Freud referring to here?
Freud’s ambiguity is suggestive, for by dog sex or animal sex he seems to mean more than some degraded kind of eroticism chiefly motivated by the olfactory stimuli. As we will see momentarily in the Wolfman case, Freud does willfully conflate animal sex and anal sex, treating one interchangeably with the other.
In summary, the anus enjoys a privileged or paradigmatic status in Freud’s conceptualization of shame. Conceived of as a perverse trinity, the anus is shameful postures/movements (including, of course, but not limited to anal sex), shameful odor, and shameful body part all in one. Substituting the part for the whole, it functions not least like a trope in his theory of sublimation as a result of its encompassment of a whole cluster of metonymic and
synecdochic associations with, say, the animal, menstruation, genitality, shit, bad smell, anal sex, stooping, crouching on all fours, and so on, and so forth. The list is inexhaustible.