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- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 369-384
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Summary
Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh
TABOO
Sigmund Freud, the great sexual democrat of the early twentieth century, relies upon the speculative field of nineteenth-century ANTHROPOLOGY to illuminate his findings in Totem and Taboo (1912). The etymology of taboo bears witness to the history of European imperialism (although a secular Jew, Freud retained a quiet pride in Austria's EMPIRE) entering the English language via colonial explorers and sailors. A taboo (originally tabu) within indigenous tribal life of Africa and the South Sea Islands referred to a system of self-imposed prohibitions relating to a sacred object, around which tribal life was organised. Anyone deemed to have transgressed a taboo, touching a consecrated object for example, was also considered taboo, thus demonstrating how taboos carried a potency linked to contagion. The most important injunction in ‘PRIMITIVE’ cultures, according to Freud, was the taboo prohibiting the ‘horror of incest’ and the killing of the TOTEMIC animal.
Freud observed that some of the RITUALS associated with taboos ‘still exist among us’, discernible in the peculiarly ritualistic symptoms of the obsessional neurotic. The ambivalence generated by the sacred object is internalised to become a source of fear within the psychology of both the group and the individual. The main difference, however, is that taboos are adopted by the tribal collective as a means to structure society so that it functions for the benefit of the greater good.
READING
Freud, Sigmund (1955) Totem and Taboo, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 1–165.
TAYLORISM
The term refers to the system of scientific management pioneered by the American mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor with the goal of maximising the productivity of industrial labour. Taylor divided tasks into their constituent motions, analysed the SPEED and efficiency of these motions and excluded any unnecessary elements so as to arrive at the optimal routines for individual tasks. Workers were instructed to perform these routines repetitively, incentivised by the linkage of output to remuneration. Two masterpieces of modernist CINEMA, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), powerfully portray the dehumanising effects of Taylorist-style industrial workplaces.
2 - The Trauma of Form: Death Drive as Affect in À la recherche du temps perdu
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- By Robbie McLaughlan, lecturer in postcolonial literature at Newcastle University
- Edited by Julie Taylor
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- Book:
- Modernism and Affect
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 17 May 2015, pp 39-55
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Summary
Violence appears with articulation. (Derrida 2001: 185)
In the opening pages of Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), a text not commonly cited as a Freudian manifesto on affect, Sigmund Freud recounts how his friend Romain Rolland described religious sensation as a ‘peculiar feeling’. In a section indicative of Freud's methodology that, at times, can appear startlingly unscientific – it is unclear whether this anecdotal speculation is offered as cool empirical fact – Freud communicates a written correspondence that he had with his friend over the affect that has its origins in the religious: ‘It is a feeling which he [Rolland] would like to call a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, something “oceanic”’ (1964: 64). Freud confesses that he ‘cannot discover this “oceanic” feeling’ himself, and admits the difficulty that such experiences pose to the psychoanalytic instinct to classify and pathologise. Rolland's conception of the ‘oceanic’ feeling as a dissipation into the eternal and molecular is interpreted by Freud in terms of his ego economy; Freud speculates that this ‘oceanic’ feeling is nothing more than an example of a primitive-ego that has never been forced to accept the prohibitions of the reality principle. It is further psychoanalysed by Freud as a return to the pre-oedipal stage of infantile narcissism where a child has not yet negotiated the traumatic difference between its desires and the external world. Therefore, Rolland's interconnected transcendental vision is, for psychoanalysis, nothing more than the traumatic moment when the child realises its survival in a threatening world is dependent upon the other. If the oceanic feeling offers affective possibilities, psychoanalysis reads this affective potentiality in terms of a broader theory of infantile sexuality. Freud voices his dissatisfaction at the limits of psychoanalysis in explaining both recondite and sensory phenomena; as he writes, ‘it is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings’ (ibid.: 65).