Straight Male Modern by Brenkman John;

Author:Brenkman, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chatterjee reads here a deflected narrative of community. “Hegel’s arguments on the family remind us,” he writes, “of the irreducible immediacy in which human beings are born in society: not as pure unattached individuals free to choose their social affiliations (whether gender, ethnicity or class) but as already-ascribed members of society.” He also notes the deep resemblance between Hegel’s rhetoric and that “in which, even in this age of the triumph of individualism, all movements which appeal to the ‘natural’ solidarity of community speak. They claim precisely the right against externality and secession, they seek determinate existence precisely in ‘property’ and ‘representation’ through collectively recognized heads, they speak in the language of love and of self-recognition through the free surrender of individual will to others in the community.”7

Freud’s intellectual inheritance includes just this tendency to eradicate community from the mapping of society. The Hegelian topography of civil society, family and state reduced the relevant sites of social life to the market, the household and the polis. The values and attributes associated with community had to be absorbed either into the family or the state; failing that, they had simply to be suppressed. This pattern of thinking Freud shared with Hegel and a whole tradition of social thought from Marx to Max Weber and Georg Simmel.

But the deflection of what Chatterjee calls the “narrative of community” into the narrative of family was not merely an intellectual exercise. For it is also true that the bourgeois family inherited many of the norms and habits, feelings and needs, that had previously structured the religious, ethnic and regional communities which were breaking up, dispersing, migrating throughout the 19th century. The family was in reality as well as ideology a deflected site of communal identities and desires. The bourgeois household was a complex social space. Its inner relationships were determined by its material and symbolic relation to the market and the polis and also, more covertly, to community.

The liberal ideals of the 19th century foresaw a social world in which men were offered precise forms of individuality matched to the market, the family and the polis: namely, the identities of owner, husband-father and citizen (or citizen-subject). Liberalism envisioned a stable society whose institutions would centrally serve the realization of just these roles. The decades that stretch from Freud’s birth to his major intellectual crises and theoretical innovations span the period during which Austro-Hungarian liberalism first flourished and triumphed and then floundered and shattered.

In 1857, the year after Freud’s birth, Austro-Hungarian liberals unveiled their plan to rebuild Vienna. Streets, buildings and parks would fill the massive ring that had always separated the walled city of feudal, dynastic, Catholic Vienna from the suburbs where the lower classes were amassing. As Schorske shows in his study of the Ringstrasse, the liberals projected their ideal self-image into the new architecture and public spaces. The Ringstrasse was a secular city, a large-scale enterprise, a seat of national government, a center of education and the arts. The new Vienna rose up

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