In the ordinary way of things, when people say that they are giving up, they are usually referring to something like smoking, or alcohol, or chocolate, or any of the other anaesthetic pleasures of everyday life; they are not, on the whole, talking about suicide (though people do tend to want to give up only their supposedly self-harming habits). Giving up certain things may be good for us, and yet the idea of someone just giving up is never appealing. Like alcoholics who need everybody to drink, there tends to be a determined cultural consensus that life is, and has to be, worth living (if not, of course, actually sacred).
There are, to put it as simply as possible, what turn out to be good and bad sacrifices (and sacrifice creates the illusion – or reassures us – that we can choose our losses). There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us. What, for example, does real hope or real despair require us to relinquish? What exactly do we imagine we are doing when we give something up? There is an essential and far-reaching ambiguity to this simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.
All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is about sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want. For our health, for our planet, for our emotional and moral wellbeing – and, indeed, for the profits of the rich – we are asked to give up a great deal now. But alongside this orgy of improving self-sacrifices – or perhaps underlying it – there is a despair and terror of just wanting to give up. A need to keep at bay the sense that life may not be worth the struggle, the struggle that religions and therapies and education, and entertainment, and commodities, and the arts in general are there to help us with. For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going. As though we are tempted more than ever by what Nietzsche once called “a will to nothingness, a counter-willan aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life”.
The abiding disillusionment with politics and personal relationships, the demand for and the fear of free speech, the dread and the longing for consensus and the coerced consensus of the various fundamentalisms has created a cultural climate of intimidation and righteous indignation. It is as if our ambivalence about our aliveness – about the feeling alive that, however fleeting, sustains us – has become an unbearable tension and needs to be resolved. So even though we cannot, as yet, imagine or describe our lives without the idea of sacrifice, and its secret sharer, compromise, the whole notion of what we want and can get through sacrifice is less clear; both what we think we want and what we are as yet unaware of wanting. The formulating of personal and political ideals has become either too assured or too precarious. And the whole notion of sacrifice depends upon our knowing what we want.
Giving up is always sacrificing something in the service of something deemed to be better. The question, whenever we want to do anything, whenever we make a choice, is unavoidably: what will we have to give up? Choice is, by definition, exclusionary, and reveals preference. There is always some imaginary exchange at work; something is given up with a view to something being given back. Whether we are giving up on confidence, or on free speech, or on sociability, or on wanting, or on meaning, or on life itself, it is, as it were, the return we have in mind, however unconscious we are of the deal being brokered. What we want from any given sacrifice is always worth discussing. Sacrifice and its discontents is what there is to talk about. Giving up, or giving up on, anything or anyone always exposes what it is we take it we want.
So giving up, in its myriad forms, we need to remember, whatever else it is, is a gift-giving (and it is always up and never down, as though to some higher authority). To give something up is to seek your own assumed advantage, your apparently preferred pleasure, but in an economy that we mostly can’t comprehend, or, like all economies, predict. As though at certain moments in our lives we are given the order “Give up!” or “Give it up!”, and so begins an obscure kind of wishing and hoping and bargaining.
We calculate, in so far as we can, the effect of our sacrifice, the future we want from it (it is never clear, for example, whether a sacrifice is a plea or a coercion or both, a manipulation or a forlorn surrender or both). As though at certain points in our lives we are asking what we have to do to get through to certain people, or to get through to ourselves: to get through to the life we want. We are asking what we are going to have to lose to gain what we think we want. These are sometimes the moves, of course, of an omniscient animal who claims he can know what he wants, and for whom knowing his wants, and having good ideas about how he may gratify them, is the only thing he can imagine doing. Sacrifice, giving up, is a form of prediction.
Children are given up for adoption, armies give up – surrender – in wars once they are defeated, and giving up the ghost is what some people do when they die. And in each of these disparate examples it is as though something is handed over, a necessary deal has been struck, a point has been reached, a crisis has occurred, an exchange has been entered into. As though giving up may be as much about transition and transformation as about success and failure (the whole idea of giving up is a magnet for moralisation: we can never resist assessment, evaluation, when giving up becomes an option). We give up, or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are. And so a giving up is always some kind of critical moment, however tempted we are to minimise it.
But giving up as a prelude, a precondition for something else to happen, a form of anticipation, a kind of courage, is a sign of the death of a desire; and by the same token it can make room for other desires. Giving up, in other words, is an attempt to make a different future.
In her remarkable and orientating book A Life of One’s Own – a book really about how we might sustain our aliveness: the aliveness, the being enlivened, that is the true antidote to giving up – the artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner describes her attempt to “decide what [her] aim in life was”:
“… I found that I had no idea about this. I decided to keep a diary and write down what I thought was the best thing that had happened during the day, in the hope that I might find out what it was that I really wanted. I had also been stimulated by reading Montaigne’s essays and his insistence that what he calls the soul is totally different from all one expects it to be, often being the very opposite.”
She begins, as a modern person, by trying to work out what she wants and then, by way of qualification, she refers to Montaigne, for whom “what he calls the soul is totally different from all one expects it to be, often being the very opposite”. She thought that her essence, her soul, was to do with what she really wanted, with what made her happy; she assumed that she must have an aim in life, even if she didn’t as yet know what it was. But then Montaigne reminds her that there is a part of herself – perhaps the most important part – that is totally different and may even want the very opposite of what she assumes she wants (that every essence suggests another one). That would mean, in this context, that she also doesn’t want an aim in life; that what makes her happy and what she wants may also not really matter to her. Or there may be other things that matter more to her. The idea that life has an aim, or that happiness is what we want, may be simply a way of narrowing one’s mind, of oversimplifying oneself.
In this extraordinary project, Milner makes a discovery. She realises that for her there seem to be two kinds of attention, “narrow attention” and “wide attention”. It is worth noticing that she needs only ordinary language for what she wants, and wants to say; and that it is attention that has attracted her attention:
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Narrow attention. This first way of perceiving seemed to be the automatic one, the kind of attention which my mind gave to everyday affairs when it was left to itself … this kind of attention has a narrow focus, by this means it selects what serves its immediate interests and ignores the rest. As far as I could see it was a “questing beast”, keeping its nose close down to the trail, running this way and that upon the scent, but blind to the wider surroundings. It saw items according to whether they served its purposes, saw them as a means to its own ends, not interested in them at all for their own sake. This attitude was probably essential for practical life, so that I supposed from the biological point of view it had to be one which came naturally to the mind …
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Wide attention. The second way of perceiving seemed to occur when the questing purposes were held in leash. Then, since one wanted nothing, there was no need to select one item to look at rather than another, so it became possible to look at the whole at once. To attend to something and yet want nothing from it, these seemed to be the essentials of the second way of perceiving … if by chance we should have discovered the knack of holding wide our attention, then the magic thing happens.
The “magic thing” is to “make boredom and weariness blossom into immeasurable contentment”; the second kind of attention “brought a quality of delight completely unknown to the first kind”. Wide attention reenchants the world, narrow attention can diminish it. Narrow attention creates a certain kind of person – is a way of overdefining oneself; wide attention provides alternatives, alternative ways of seeing ourselves and others. Clearly what Milner is describing here as wide attention is a form of attention purged of aims and wants and conventional satisfactions (it is a version of forgetting oneself); and she describes in vivid detail her struggles to attain this wide attention, freed as it seemed to be of Darwinian and Freudian and indeed acquisitive purposes. It is a version, as she acknowledges, of what Blake called “vision”. It acknowledges that any ideology of virtue can only ever be a provocation.
As “questing beasts”, narrow attention is part of a known project, the project of somebody who apparently knows what she wants, and who takes wanting (and the desire for satisfaction) to be her defining feature. In a state of wide attention there can be no knowing beforehand what one wants, and no assumption that wanting is the thing, or that wanting is what one is doing, or the only thing one can do (in this sense all psychoanalytic writings should be read as accounts or experiments in sociability).
Milner is providing us with two alternative points of view, two ways of looking. And it is worth noting that she acknowledges the need for both kinds of attention. Instead of urging us, or teaching us, or persuading us to sacrifice one for the other, she wants us to be able to use both kinds of attention for different things. It is not then a story about giving something up, it is a story about extending a repertoire; or about what the poet William Empson called “straddling the contradictions”. You can’t get the boon and benefit of a contradiction by taking sides.
Can we describe sacrifice without being unduly impressed by it, without glamorising it as either tragedy or farce? Can we be alert to the distraction of inner superiority without the inner superiority of doing so? Or rather, can we talk about giving up – redescribe giving up – as a useful clue to our moral and emotional complexity, rather than merely as another of our favourite ordeals?
People can be found wanting, but they don’t tend to be found not wanting. To be found wanting is to be found lacking in something; and in a by now traditional story we are assumed to want whatever it is assumed we are lacking. Our frustration is the key to our desire; to want something or someone is to feel their absence; so to register or recognise a lack would seem to be the precondition for any kind of pleasure or satisfaction. Indeed, in this account, frustration, a sense of lack, is the necessary precondition for any kind of satisfaction.
“Lack always involves,” Lacan writes, “something that is missing from its usual place.” And if it has a usual place, then whatever is lacking is, in a certain sense, something that can be taken for granted – something that has, or should have, a usual – a familiar, a reliable – place; as a mother might have in a child’s life, as meals might have in an ordinary day. As though a sense of lack is reactive to a sense of entitlement; as though I only feel the lack of what I take to be rightfully and legitimately mine; as though there is a real sense in which I always already know what I want, even if I am unable or unwilling to let myself know.
I want to suggest that there is a part of oneself that needs to know what it is doing, and a part of oneself that needs not to. And by the same token, as it were, there is a part of oneself that needs to know what one wants and a part of oneself that needs not to. There are freedoms attached to both, and both these aspects of oneself are interanimating – our wanting depends on our knowing and our not knowing what we want. There is a sense in which our wanting and our not wanting go together, but as a paradox rather than a contradiction or a conflict.
In the ordinary language of appetite there is a sliding scale of urgency, from need to desire to want; we can often do without what we want, but we can’t do without what we need; and we are never quite sure whether we can do without what we desire. Desire, we might say, is where need and want become blurred. If we cannot survive without what we need, what is it we cannot do without what we want? What is perhaps notable are the distinctions we need to make, as though appetite – whatever appetite is described as being – requires scrutiny, discrimination and regulation. And it tends to be something about which there needs to be consensus – coerced or otherwise – because the wanting we call appetite seems to be at once imperious and essential. Like Henry James’s definition of the real – “that which it is impossible not to know” – wanting is something that it impossible not to know about. And not something we can supposedly afford to be too uncertain about. If God was once, as it were, the expert on appetite – on what it is and what it should be – in secular materialist cultures appetite has replaced God, or has become a so-called god term in that it seems to organise and run things. When Darwin claimed survival and then reproduction (and natural selection) as the driving forces of evolution, he was, by definition, making appetite the heart of the matter, the real driving force.
Babies, hopefully, are not involved in too much of a debate with their mothers about appetite, though as they grow up they soon will be in that familiar antagonism concerning food and other appetites, like sleeping and aggression, that is called family life. Whatever else they are, and want to be, parents have to take up the position of being experts and managers of appetite, the ones who are supposed to know what we need and want. No other animal finds appetite, finds eating, a problem like this; though all other animals, of course, are exercised by scarcity and threats of competition. Ethology, the study of other animals, has not made us, or helped us to be, happier wanters. It would be crude, but not wildly inaccurate, to see human history as a history of creatures tormented by their appetites, fundamentally unsettled and disturbed by their appetites despite and because of the pleasure they bring; despite and because of the fact that their survival depends upon their appetite.
It was to be one of the contributions of Freud’s psychoanalysis in modern times – which would eventually include stories about child development, and stories about the place and function of language in development – to enquire into the nature of wanting, from a secular, materialist scientific point of view; the appetite radically redescribed by Darwin, and his theories of evolution; the psychobiological wanting of hunger and sexuality, and the acculturated wanting that is now, for us, consumer capitalism. Indeed, acculturation, we can see, has now become the really quite quick proliferation of wants; for us, from the breast to the supermarket, from the mother and father to the infinite array of apparently satisfying objects (it is a crucial moment in the child’s development, the critic Leo Bersani has remarked, when he begins to notice that there are pleasures outside the family); acculturation as the organising and transformation of appetite. Parenting and education teaching us what to want, and what to not want. It has, of course, been the role of the so-called great religions and political ideologies to tell us what we should and shouldn’t want, and how we should do our wanting. Theories of human nature, after all, can only be stories about what people are deemed to need and want. The child-rearing manuals that have been such a feature of modern life have followed in their wake.
The psychoanalytic story then is about how we get from wanting to wanting to be good, or bad, or kind, or cruel, or honest, or cunning; about how biological need (and its attendant emotional engagement) becomes morality (and its attendant emotional conflict). This is the story of how what we call biology turns into, and is of a piece with, viable sociability; how appetite becomes, and fails to become, fellow feeling; how need can make us cruel and kind. Modern people, we take it – at least in so- called de-traditionalised societies – leave home to find, and to find out, what their parents can’t give them; the family circumscribes and defines and tries to fashion the child’s wanting, and then the modern child’s wanting exceeds what the family can provide.
But the family, whatever else it is, is an education in wanting, and so also in frustration; because the family more or less meets our needs and wants, it is, by the same token, where we learn about frustration. Because anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel worse, we are, in Freud’s account, fundamentally ambivalent animals: where we love we must also hate in frustration, and where we hate we presume we are actively being deprived of love, of what we want and need and could have. In this account we are always found wanting – in a state of dependent, and therefore ambivalent, need for others – and we are always and only preoccupied by what we need and want. This is a by now more or less familiar secular and materialist account of what a modern life is. Whatever our ambitions and ideals for ourselves, they are underpinned by survival, and survival is underwritten by appetite.
What Freud and psychoanalysts after him have been very good at showing us is how and why we are so prone to get our pictures of wanting so wrong, and so disturbing. Or if not wrong, at least unduly frustrating. Or, in James’s language, simply mistaken. Wanting may always be to varying extents frustrating, but so may the ways we have of talking about it; or the ways we have of talking about it may promote frustration, or promote the frustration they describe.
There may indeed be a significant irony in the fact that the ways we have found for talking about and describing appetite set up or stage appetite as a certain kind of threat or persecution. Wanting, for example, might be redescribed as experimenting with attraction; or testing preferences. If the very thing that sustains us seems to be also the very thing that undoes us – if our medium of contact with ourselves and others is the source of our formative alienations – we may wonder, as Freud did, what we are wanting appetite to do for us. And we may notice, as Freud did not, how adept we have been at finding pictures and descriptions of appetite that sabotage it.
This is an edited extract from On Giving Up published by Hamish Hamilton on 11 January
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