[Ed. note: I posted this originally in 2018, but I was reminded of it by Will Arbery's play that I wrote recently about. Both are about challenging in interesting ways the more superficial presuppositions of the late modern cosmopolitan imaginary.]
Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however, becomes enraptured with and starts sleeping with a goat named Silvia, and the play examines how family and friends react when they learn of his breaking the bestiality taboo, and how each falls into a state that I call ontological dizziness.
I'll come back to the play, but first a few words about Ontological Dizziness (OD). It is an experience that many people are having with increasing frequency: one is walking along in a world that seems securely grounded in reality, but then finds that all the while he was walking while balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead. Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in this country in their different ways experience themselves walking on firm ground, but they have been doing it in what I like to think of as Reality Simulation Orbs, and these orbs for both groups are breaking down.
By 'simulation' I mean that people, all of us, live in symbolic systems that provide models of reality that work with data given by Reality, but these symbolic systems interpret the data in any number of possible ways depending on the cultural download that runs the simulation. It's a simulation because it gives us a model of reality and not reality itself. Our acculturation runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it. The best simulations work with the broadest range of accurate data, but even when a simulation works with good data, it always filters out more than it lets in.
We know there's real data, and we know when our simulation fails to interpret it correctly. How? Well, when we make mistakes, i.e., when our simulation isn't reflecting accurately what's there, we pay the price. For instance, Neocons were working with a Reality Simulation in which invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein would be a cakewalk. Their reality simulation worked with some data that was accurate, but their simulation failed because it filtered out too much data, data that was actually readily available, and that's what made their plan so egregiously foolish. We can't know everything, but the definition of foolishness is to reject good data because it challenges the assumptions that govern our simulation orb. Reality has a way of asserting itself when we filter out the parts of it that insist on being taken seriously.
I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulation orbs--even the best of them--work with incomplete data, and so the programs that run the simulation can only provide best guesses in their interpretation of the data available to it. If the simulation program seems to work, we assume its interpretations of the data are good enough, at least until they don't work. And because Reality is dynamic and continuously transforming, sooner or later simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. So, for instance, it no longer works for most of us to think that the woods are full of spirits, that the gods control our destiny, that the sun rotates around the earth. Or more recently that Blacks and Native American are subhumans who deserve to be treated like animals if not wiped from the face of the earth.
Most people live in simulations that have made the appropriate adjustments, but many have not. Those who operate in simulations that filter out important data given in a particular society's historical reality have a harder time navigating in the real world. They experience OD with greater intensity than others, and substance abuse, joining cults, or engaging in extremist politics are coping mechanisms for some victims of OD. And some feel OD with such intensity that they will do anything they think necessary to restore the simulation that gives them a sense of security and order. Some of the mass shootings we've seen in recent years are motivated by vengeance, but many of them are motivated by a need to restore the old Reality Simulation that the shooters feel is being undermined by those they shoot.
Capitalism and technological innovation are amoral, anarchic forces that have, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, destroyed every traditional culture into which it has come into contact. Either the people who live in those cultures adjust to the new data or they don't. Liberals are people who have adjusted, and Conservatives are people who have not. The strength of operating within the Liberal Reality Simulation is that it's better adapted to the creative destructive forces of techno-capitalism; the disadvantage is that is that its adaptation has left behind aspects of the older simulations that worked with real data regarding transcendent dimensions of Reality, aspects of Reality that transcended randomness and anarchic change.
The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that transcendent data has been filtered out. But that doesn't mean there is no such data available. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of the older reality that affirms transcendence, but they do it in a a way that is deeply maladapted to Reality in a reality shaped by the creative destructive aspects of contemporary techno-capitalism.
Progress, until recently, has been intrinsic to the Liberal program, but the new data given by the reality of the World Wars, the dropping of the atom bomb, the unraveling of traditional American cultural norms in the sixties and seventies, the failure of the Political Left almost everywhere since the 80s has led the Progressive Left to surrender to the anarchy of markets and to a rejection of any grand narratives that suggests there is anything but anarchy. And so at least among the elite in the Cultural Left, their simulation Orb no longer allows for narratives in which some kind of better future is a possibility, because the word "better" really is a word fraught with metaphysical assumptions that are no longer part of their simulation. Randomness is all, so learn to live with it.
***
This idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat. At first, I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive, HBO-style exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think he's trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing its OD. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition, in that it seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos, because when they are subverted, they experience OD just as their conservative counterparts do. They are more like them than they might want to acknowledge. Whether Albee thinks that's a good or bad thing, I don't know. But the underlying point seems to be that we have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality.
So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Lacanian assumption, as Albee seems to do, that all human beings are polymorphously perverse in their desires but those desires are repressed by the Oedipus Complex, the cultural download of codes and taboos that we all receive as children. Humans, no matter what their culture, have the Oedipus Complex, which generates the codes in the symbolic sphere--the Reality Simulation-- that gives humans their sense of order, an order that no sane person can live without. It creates the program--different for different cultures--that the simulation orb plays for us.
In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation Orb has been shattered with the revelation that her "normal" husband is having an affair with a goat. So, after her violent, dish-throwing, furniture-overturning rant during the middle of the play when she learns about her husband's "infidelity", she goes out to find Silvia, the goat, severs her head, and hauls the carcass onto the stage in the play's final moment. It's pretty horrifying.
After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very urban-hip, intelligent students whether they thought Stevie had over-reacted. "Why couldn't she be more tolerant and understanding of her husband?" I asked. I was curious to see how far their non-judgmental, anything-goes-so-long-as-you-don't-hurt-anybody ethic extended. Apparently it does not extend to bestiality. All the students thought that Stevie's violent freak-out was completely understandable, and that this was not a play celebrating bestiality, which clearly, they all thought was horrifying.
Apparently some sexual taboos are still in place with this generation. But why should bestiality be so horrifying if taboos are just arbitrary social constructions? Isn't that what these students have come to believe about all the traditional taboos that govern the ethos of Rural America? Why is bestiality different? Martin makes clear that his relationship with Silvia was consensual, and that his love for her was reciprocated. Who are we to judge? And by what standard do we judge?
Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if Albee was familiar with Derrida's famous 1969 essay, "Plato's Pharmacy" in which Derrida plays with the Greek word pharmakos and pharmakon. Pharmakos has the ambivalent meaning of a potion that can be both cure and poison; pharmakon is the Greek word for goat. In the play, Silvia, the goat, is a potion that both poisons and cures. It is poison as the kind of potion, like Puck's in Midsummer Night's Dream, that induces Titania to swoon for the ass-headed Bottom.
But is the potion something that creates delusion? Or is it rather something that induces 'disinhibition' insofar as it lets in heretofore filtered-out aspects of Reality? In this case that would be Martin's repressed polymorphous perversity, which is no respecter of taboos in the way it eroticizes everything. Someone like Norman O. Brown (remember him?) would say that a retrieval of polymorphous perversity and its ecstasy is the goal--and even argues that its attainment is the true meaning of the Christian idea of Resurrection of the Body. A guy like Martin is closer to it than Stevie and the others who are so appalled by his breaking of this taboo. Is the pharmakon a blue pill or a red pill? Is it the red pill insofar as it dissolves the Oedipal simulation orb? Or is it the blue pill insofar as it restores the old simulation and the sense of sanity, safety, and order it provides? Or to put it another way, which pill is the poison and which the cure?
So Martin's encounter with Silvia is like his having taken a potion that induces him to leave his particular late-modern, taboo-constrained Oedipal Reality and to enter a kind of Norman O. Brown ecstasy state. Stevie and the others are appalled by the breaking of the taboo, by the disgust that is evoked by the physical act, but for Martin it's all about the ecstasy, an ecstasy he knows the others cannot understand because they have not taken the potion.The old Liberal, taboo-constrained Simulation is dissolved, and he goes into a new, polymorphously perverse orb of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire.
Is Martin ill? Or is Stevie? Or are they both? Now, to step outside the Oedipal Simulation in Freudian terms is mental illness. The degree to which one steps out determines whether one's illness is neurosis or psychosis. So do both need a cure? Which pill to take then--the red or the blue? They both are experiencing aspects of Reality outside the Oedipal System that in their case is defined by the Liberal cosmopolitan Simulation Orb. It has broken down in different ways for both; it's just that Martin does not feel the need to return to the old order whereas Stevie does, and so she acts in uncharacteristically violent ways for a tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.
***
And so it struck me that one of the takeaways for these students--and all Liberal, cosmopolitan audiences--is that everybody has taboo systems, and everybody needs them, and when they are subverted, it's understandable that people react as Stevie did, And it's completely understandable that she wants to go back into the old simulation--she wants that blue pill. But if Stevie's violent reaction to the subversion of the bestiality taboo is understandable, isn't the violent reaction of Red America to the subversion of its taboos equally understandable?
The question here is not about what's right or wrong in any ultimate sense, but in just understanding the role that taboos play in keeping us sane. There is nothing absolute about superego, but we need one. The question is how to transform it so that it does its job of preserving our sanity while at the same time it becomes more permeable to a broader, richer experience of Reality.
And I would add that superego always assumes some kind of grand narrative. Collective sanity--a cure for our chronic OD--cannot be restored without there being some plausible collective imagination of future possibility that is grounded in Reality. The challenge for us is not to live without such a narrative, but to develop a good one, one that works with the real data that Reality provides for us. Reality is in large part chaotic and anarchic, but what's more important is that humans learn how to work with those energies lawfully.
And we don't have a narrative for that yet, at least not one that has broad acceptance. But for me such a future narrative will draw upon the wisdom of the past. We may never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation Orb, but we can keep developing better orbs that use higher levels of good data and are flexible enough to adapt as new, higher quality data becomes available. And that includes data given to us that transcends the anarchic, destructive forces that otherwise will continue to drive history.
12/1/21 Update: I used the play in class I've been teaching this quarter, and there's an aspect of it that impressed me more this time than in my first reading. Albee is at pains to describe how vital, grown-up, and admirable the marriage between Martin and Stevie is.
My first reading of Stevie was that Martin's behavior burst her simulation orb thrusting her into ontological vertigo, a malady that could only be cured by sacrificing the scapegoat. I was trying to make the point that Liberals are just as burdened by taboos as Conservatives are. The problem is that both reject the order of the other, but Liberals have no real appreciation for how disoriented Conservatives feel by Liberals so blithely breaking Conservative taboos.
Albee, in this reading of the play, is trying to give the kind of Liberal who would go to one of his plays an opportunity to empathize with the vertigo Conservatives feel and why that leads them to the kind of extreme, sometime violent behavior they undertake to restore their sense of stability. If we can sympathize or at least come to understand the underlying reasons for Stevie's act of violence, is it perhaps possible to understand why so many stormed the Capitol on January 6 thinking that to sacrifice Nancy Pelosi would restore order? The point here is not to condone the insanity, but to understand its underlying causes. I think all of this is still true, but in my second reading I think a more interesting theme emerged.
In this reading, I was far more sympathetic to Stevie not because her orderly bourgeois life was shattered by Martin's taboo breaking, but because he ruined something that was so rare and vital for both of them--a grown-up marriage. His seeking a bliss that excluded her destroyed this rare accomplishment. What was most devastating for Stevie was his willingness to sacrifice their marriage for the fulfillment of an infantile desire.
It might be understandable if Martin were in a loveless marriage, but clearly this was not the case. The greater moral lapse here was not on the level of taboo, but on the level of taking something sacred--his bond with his wife--and to throw it away, to choose something less valuable. Silvia, the goat, is a stand-in for all the ways we humans choose something easy and regressive for something difficult but which is essential in enabling us to grow in emotional depth and complexity, which is what a good marriage is all about.