Happiness: A Prickly Predicament

I am looking forward to hearing the lecture by the latest candidate for the tenure-track position in the department. Ira Hughes is known to be somewhat of a maverick professor of African-American and Black Studies at the University of Chicago who holds unconventional, perhaps even blasphemous views, on various hot-button scholarly topics.

He is also a stalwart Lacanian, which means he’s probably going to couch much of what he is going to present in obscure psychoanalytic jargon, but that’s nothing new. I am, after all, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University’s Alternate Consciousness Department, and obtuse critical theory is the plate du jour in most undergraduate classes and graduate seminars. It’s a dish I used to find savory, but have grown rather bored with. 

Before the lecture, I meet at a café with a fellow doctoral student. After sipping our cappuccinos, we each smoke a cigarette, cross the street and walk to the quaint building where our department is housed. When we finally enter the lecture hall where Hughes is presenting, the air is bristling with anticipation.   

Following an introduction that verges on the ecstatic by Anita Davidson, the department chair, Hughes approaches the podium. He’s an imposing figure and immaculately dressed, looking like an aged, yet pampered, athlete. He doesn’t begin lecturing right away. Instead, he takes a few moments to peer from behind his glasses into the eyes of various members of the audience. You can hear a pin drop before a few attendees, disconcerted by the tension Hughes has created, nervously clear their throats.

Hughes chooses not to read from the paper he has sitting on the podium. The lecture’s title hints his presentation will be about Social Justice. Instead, Hughes begins by saying, disarmingly enough, “I don’t know where to start.”

He walks away from the podium, whereupon sits the paper he has prepared, and states, “But I guess I’ll commence at the beginning.”

“The Real,” he says, using Jacques Lacan’s term for absolute reality, “often brings discomfort to people. Why? Because it defies refutation. The Real is the undeniable truth, and as the adage goes, people often can’t handle the truth.”  

Hughes remains detached from the podium and is pacing from one side of the stage to the other, his eyes no longer on members of the audience, but, for now, on the floor, as if he needs to watch where he’s going.

“Why can’t people handle the truth?” he rhetorically asks, “Well, most people can’t bear to hear the truth because hearing it often brings displeasure.

“What, you may ask, then, do people want?

“My answer to that is ‘people don’t want truth. They want to obey.’

Hughes stops pacing, and now trains his eyes on some object that is both distant and near, located somewhere in the recesses of his imagination.

“Who, you now wonder, do they want to obey? It’s not a question of who, but of ‘what?”

Hughes then makes a statement that is psychoanalytically obvious.

“If Freud was right, people obey the pleasure principle. This is the case even though pleasure often brings pain.” 

Hughes resumes making measured strides, then with a dramatic flourish says, “Even when the pleasure principle dances with Thanatos, or the death instinct, people will still obey it.”

I’ve heard this before. Drug addiction is the most salient example of Hughes’ assertion. In the pursuit of narcotic pleasure, drug addicts will often drug themselves to death, and it isn’t a far stretch to suggest that those who have plummeted to the deepest pits of drug-addled despair, into irremediable narcosis, often choose drug-induced death over the continued pain of living with addiction. 

As if reading my thoughts, Hughes says, “The pleasure principle is the head and Thanatos the tail of a snake that consumes itself.”

Perhaps, it’s the other way around, I think. 

“In pursuit of pleasure we are committing ecocide and killing the planet,” Hughes says as he looks out the windows of the room where we have gathered to hear him speak. The windows provide a view of several towering oaks and assorted other plant species.

“One of the most pressing problems facing humanity is overconsumption. Purchasing consumer goods brings ephemeral pleasure, but the unbridled production of consumer goods is lastingly despoiling the Earth,” Hughes says.

This proclamation reminds me of a line in a song by Kurt Cobain whose music my parents introduced me to when I was still in diapers: “We can ask for more / Nature is a whore.” My dad, more conscientious than the cynical Nirvana front man, said to me when I was an impressionable 13-year-old, “What Kurt didn’t consider is that it takes two to tango.”

Further questioning Cobain’s words, my dad said, “Nature is a whore because humanity thinks she puts out without complaint. 

"A woman,” he continued, wanting to give me some kind of lesson, “is only a whore if a man treats her like one, and the woman concedes to the treatment.”  

I’m shaken out of my reminiscence by Hughes’ ongoing improvisation, “This brings me,” he says, “to the reign of the phallus.”

“This is about to get interesting,” I say to myself.

Hughes goes on to claim that it is no small wonder the mascots of the hegemonic political parties in the United States are two animals, the male species of which are known, or at least rumored, to be well endowed. 

“Republicans are represented by the elephant and a donkey denotes the Democratic party," says Hughes.

Since the night one of my boyfriends once jokingly called his male appendage an “elephant trunk,” I haven’t been able to not see an uncircumcised penis of titanic proportions whenever I regard a pachyderm’s proboscis.  

“The Republican and Democratic mascots suggest phallocentrism,” claims Hughes, “but with the hyper-accessibility of porn, phallus worship has reached unprecedented heights.”

He goes on to somewhat cryptically argue that for Lacan, the phallus was the ultimate signifier. For me, this simply means that the appearance of an erect cock often puts an end to speech between two people and commences something else, namely, carnality. 

I’ve long thought that even though it’s considered anathema to the therapeutic relationship, sexuality suffuses most interaction between therapists and their clients.

I attribute this primarily to a client often seeing what Carl Jung called an anima or an animus, the feminine or masculine ideal of desire, respectively, in their therapist. “I’m every woman / It’s all in me,” a line in the chorus of a popular Whitney Houston song my mom used to listen to at full blast when in a feminist mood, distills Jung’s concept of the anima. 

My mind is wandering again as it often does during most theoretical talks. I’ve missed about half a minute of what Hughes has said.

When I return to attention, he is still on the topic of sexuality. Now he is referencing Julia Kristeva’s argument in the book Powers of Horror. In that book, Kristeva discusses the emotional and spiritual state of abjection.

“Feminine abjection,” Hughes claims, “is of a physical nature and comes from surplus pleasure, pleasure which can ultimately lead to degradation or humiliation. Masculine abjection comes from not being able to give pleasure, from being deficient in the ability to satisfy a feminine sexual partner’s physical cravings.”

I assume this statement links his introductory claim that people can’t handle the truth to his claim that America is in the throes of a phallocentric moment.

In somewhat of a non sequitur, Hughes begins a tirade against poststructuralism. 

“Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of structural anthropology had what was in the 1960s a rather conservative theory of mind. Levi-Strauss argued that mental constructs were binary and that humans were born with these constructs. He went on to propose that binarily opposed concepts like 'male and female,' 'left and right,' and 'raw or cooked' are inherent to human nature and they reflect the division of the brain into two mirroring hemispheres.

“For Jacques Derrida, the patriarch of poststructuralism, no such cognitive distinctions are inherent to human nature. Derrida’s argument somewhat relies on Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism and the Marxist dream of the end of history, the end of class struggle.

“In the democratized West we’ve added the dreams of the end of sexual difference and the end of racial difference to the Marxist vision of a classless utopia.” 

Hughes then throws a curve ball. 

“We’ve all heard of white supremacy, but there is a such a thing as black supremacy. Certain black nationalist movements not-so-covertly espouse it. There are prison gangs who live according to a black supremacist credo. The existence of black supremacy lends lucid retrospective meaning to the title of Public Enemy’s album Fear of a Black Planet. That record was controversial in the 90s because it spoke to the reality of genetic dominance, to what is known as the “one drop” rule.

“The platitude often spoken when a non-black person has sex with a black person is ‘Once you go black, you never go back.’ But the kernel of truth in the statement is not only carnal, it’s cultural. If a mixed-race couple in which one partner is black decides to have a child, the child is conventionally considered to be racially black. Given this social fact and the current propagandistic pandering of televised and filmic images of cis-gendered interracial couples where one partner, more often than not the male is black, the notion of a black planet is something that understandably causes anxiety in some white people.” 

What Hughes goes on to say confirms that in the ivory towers of liberal academic ideologues, he is the maverick many intellectuals claim he is.

“Most people can agree that natural diversity needs to be respected,” he says, “But what of genuine human diversity? Wokeism extolls people of color and denigrates whiteness. There’s no real respect of diversity there, especially when we consider that globally speaking, and due to historically declining birth rates, people of European descent are a dwindling minority.  Many of those who embrace the Queer agenda rail against cis-gendered or straight people. No real respect of diversity there, either.

“It seems that today we are moving towards a new norm. Especially in scholastic environments where LGBTQ+ and BIPOC identities are clamoring for their piece of the democratic pie. We are approaching a future where cis-gendered people, particularly straight, white males, will be required to feel guilty for not being dead, alienated due to alleged privilege, or abnormal as a result of their amorous preferences.

“Turning the tables is not my definition of Social Justice. If this is the case, Social Justice becomes a euphemism for vengeance.”

Hughes now has the undivided attention of the students and professors gathered to determine whether he will join the Alternate Consciousness faculty.

“If the LGBTQ+ movement denounces the reign of phallic irresponsibility, the unbridled pursuit of bigger and better pleasures, all for the better. If the queer agenda perpetuates the reign of the phallus, may a nonexistent God have mercy on us.

“The same could be said of Black Lives Matter. If rap, trap and some R&B music provide the soundtrack to the movement, a soundtrack in which masculine sexual prowess is lionized and the misogynistic terms “bitch” and “ho” are still used, and even embraced, without shame, the reign of the phallus is likely to go unchallenged there also.

“Capitalism protects the pursuit of happiness: a state of mind, heart and spirit that brings pleasure to the person experiencing it. We often hear, “All I want is to be happy,” but happiness is the most elusive and evanescent of human pleasures. Chasing after happiness amounts to chasing after the wind. Today, the pursuit of happiness needs to be qualified and measured. If democracy is to survive, the pursuit of everything, including the happiness that comes from triumphs in the arena of identity politics, should proceed with the utmost caution and moderation. Caution and moderation should become the foremost ethical goals of responsible global citizens.  

“In conclusion, the current regime of phallocentrism, the pursuit of ever bigger and dubiously better pleasures plaguing American society, a society that seems to become more uncivil and uncivilized as time marches on, will most surely lead to continued social degradation if it remains unchecked and not made the topic of ethically-minded political and cultural dialogues.”

With the end of the lecture, Hughes resumes his place behind the podium and asks, “Are there any questions?” A bevy of eager hands are raised.