I’m no longer convinced of primal aggression as the wellspring of cultural pursuits in light of a claim elaborated by Chakraborti in his 1985 study of the unhappy consciousness (called up from the dusty stacks of the New York Public Library) – a claim that Thomas Mann had already asserted when he called Freud a true son of the Schopenhauer century.

If Freud merely imported the metaphysics of Schopenhauer into his own theoretical framework, and thereby was an underlying aggressive instinct or pessimistic strain made to run through the unconscious, this suggests something closer to an intervention technique, a way to manage a certain conception, than it does a gnostic revelation.

The problem with the idea of a civilization built on the channeling and redirecting of an instinctual and foundational aggressiveness is primarily its literary ambition taken for scientific discovery in the popular imagination. It posits as real a condition of firstness with respect to the character of human instincts and desires conceived as dark and unavowable. It is too ready to give guidance toward an affirmation of a divided self which can never be fully brought within the compass of reason and understanding.

A similar forced affirmation found protest with Edward Dorn, who exposed as method and on that basis refused the placement on this earth of a zebra among the elk – not because the social engineering involved might produce after all “an environment in which things are pronounced,” nor because this would not be natural, but because it is passed off as natural (Allen and Tallman 303). Yet, Dorn’s cri de coeur seems a bit thin and prone to doubt as to whether restoration of a higher order unity to the whole of mankind can be “guaranteed” to result from such plain artifice. Francisco Lorca, who really did survive the tyranny that did not spare his more famous brother, did not let artifice stop him from observing the pleasures puppet theatre affords as popular art form, or the heightened delight at the puppeteer who occasionally reveals himself.

No one claims Freud’s narrative is not without art, given especially where the source of displeasure has more to do with the nullity of effort in the face of that which has been given. In that case, the laying down of a foundational discourse is a corrective whose performativity, whose expenditure of effort, recreates what’s already given yet overlooked from a view in which only exertion has currency.

The Brazilian artist makes this point by commissioning an airplane to skywrite a picture of a cloud. The result functions triply to reclaim and harness excess effort while at the same time sending up the notion that any such harnessing of the will can prevail over what has already been gifted, which realization is barred owing to a certain orientation on your part. To re-direct interpretation from such feelings as being cheated by the illusion is therefore the third function. The overall aesthetic of the work effects movement from the skeptical ‘if not for you I wouldn’t be in this mess’ to a conscious reclaiming of the romantic impulse ‘I owe my existence to you.’

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