In Search of Lost Time

The first volume of Proust's epic is one of those classic masterpieces that actually turns out to be pretty good read as long as some overzealous college prof isn't force feeding it to you in a week.  Also, given that it's a deeply psychological book about the magic of memories built up over a lifetime, it helps not to be 19 years old anymore.  Remind me again why exactly they so often ruin the classics for us the way freshman rush ruins tequila?

The prose itself is truly described by that most overused of adjectives: lyrical.   In the first part of the book (Combray 1 and 2) it is so dense as to border on poetry and practically requires reading aloud to really hear properly.   It's not until you reach the second part (Swann's Way) that you find yourself following something more akin to the plot of a novel.  True, not much actually happens.  But then that's life in a nutshell, no?

What caught my attention even more than the craft of language though, were all the strange shifts in images -- houses that become faces, feelings that become songs, paintings that become people.  The novel has an interesting way of raising every piece of the world to an aesthetic height where it becomes related to every other piece.  This of course is probably the main theme it has to offer; the book in general is a reflection on how our imagination and memory are the submerged iceberg extending far below the surface of our experience and constantly shaping it.

How Buildings Learn

I really enjoyed Stewart Brand's illustrated reflection on the life of buildings How Buildings Learn: What happens to them after they're built.  It is another classic of the anti-architecture genre pioneered by people like Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs.  After reading these books you can't help but look at the building, the neighborhood, and the city around you in a new light, this time from the perspective of their impact on the structures of our everyday life rather than through the house-porn photography that has come to mediate our relationship to most architecture.

Brand has very little love lost for architects, who he portrays as prima donna artists who mostly just make a grand sculpture the client ends up squatting in.  His idea of a beautiful building is a life form coadapted to its human inhabitants, able to expand and contract as their needs change.  In other words, he considers the elements of time and situation as indispensable to the idea of architecture.  This is a controversial departure from Modern or Post-Modern ideas about the subject, but it really boils down to common sense -- buildings hang around for a long time and shape our environment so dramatically that they are almost indistinguishable from a definition of human civilization.  While you may not agree with every idea about how to make an adaptable and enduring building that the opinionated Brand comes up with, you can't help but be compelled by the question he asks about why we seem so intent on building disposable ones these days.

A review of this book would not be complete without some mention of the extensive use Brand makes of historical pictures.  He does an amazing job of digging up documentary evidence of how various buildings change over time.  He shows many many sequences of up to half a dozen interior and exterior shots of buildings of all descriptions, from warehouses to palaces, that give you a view of how they've evolved over decades.  It's just fascinating to watch what changes and what doesn't in these panels.

The Ego and the Id

This is another short gem from the man with the long cigar.  Written just a few years after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud continues his metapsychological speculations.  As the title makes clear, this one sums up his theory of the structure of the mind.  Gradually, Freud came to regard the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious as confusing as well as insufficient to the task of explaining our psychology.  He replaced it with a more nuanced theory where " the unconscious" is defined in a strictly "dynamic" sense as anything we actively repress.  Other things that are, so to speak, accidentally unconscious, like, for example, my peripheral vision operating while I drive, are deemed to be unconscious in a merely descriptive sense, and are reclassified as "preconscious".  This reclassification is important because it helps us understand how the unconscious is different in kind from conscious experience, and is not merely whatever I happen to not be thinking about right now.  Extending this more systematic viewpoint leads Freud to conclude that the Ego is a conscious surface phenomena that surrounds the unconscious Id.  Some things that bubble up from within the Id are able to rise to the surface of consciousness.  Other things are blocked or reflected back by the surface, and hence remain unconscious on purpose.

A more precise view of the unconscious requires us to rethink the relationship between our selves -- our ego as we commonly use the term -- and the unconscious.  Because we now have to consider the ego as responsible for sometimes preventing things from becoming conscious.  It becomes clear that there are things within our ego itself which have all kinds of effects on our actions, but whose workings we are not conscious of.  Freud first discovered this by examining patients exhibiting a resistance to the process of psychoanalytic therapy, yet who remained completely unconscious of their own struggle against his techniques.  More generally, we are often as completely unconscious of the way our moral upbringing shapes our actions as we are of the way the various 'lower', that is to say sexual, drives control our behavior.  In both cases our ego is capable of producing convincing rationalizations after the fact for what our intention was.  But in fact, to use a metaphor Freud employs repeatedly, the ego is like a rider who convinces himself that he wanted to go exactly where the horse was taking him.  Generally, the ego doesn't understand the true motives of the unconscious Id, and it doesn't even understand the unconscious portion of itself -- namely the Ego Ideal or Super-Ego.  Incidentally, in German, this is literally the "Over-I", which lays bare its connection to Nietzsche's Übermensch.  

Freud spends quite some time laying out his theory of how the Super-Ego forms, but I'll stick to the short version here.  Basically, the idea is that we start off as a bundle of sexual drives each seeking some object -- touching, grasping, sucking, each have their correlative erotic objects.  Gradually though our ego develops itself as a substitute for these objects.  We begin to narcissistically love our selves in place of the objects that pleased our senses.  For the male child (and Freud's theory is totally phallocentric) this change plays out through an abandonment of the mother as a sexual object, and the identification with the father -- the Oedipus Complex.  However, this shifting of sexual desire from the object to the self is not without a sort of backlash; in some sense the ego has come between 'us' and our lost object.  In other words, we identify with the father, but within this identification, there is the realization that some part of ourselves (the father) is stopping or prohibiting us from possessing the initial sexual object (the mother).  This part of the ego, which we remain unconscious of, becomes the Super-Ego.  Basically, the Super-Ego is the internalization of both father you look up to and want to identify with, and the scary one who punishes you for trying to score with mom.

Your mileage may vary with that theory.  Honestly, I consider it pretty weak.  The whole Oedipus Complex thing is not the most interesting part of Freud's ideas.  What I find valuable here is the fascinating question it opens up about the formation of our identities.  It also provides an interesting twist to our normal view of morality.  For Freud, all of the 'higher' impulses like art and morality and even abstract philosophical thinking, had to emerge from the 'lower' drives which compose us.  There has to be some mechanism by which these are built, instead of being handed down from above.  Regardless of the merits of any particular answer mechanism he proposed, Freud is valuable for having posed the question to begin with.  (Even if he did crib it all from Nietzsche!)