Page 36 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

30 CULTURAL STUDIES

as that structure inhabited the Victorian home. Included also are traces of the
housekeeping practices that supported and/or qualified his theorizations of sexed
positions, practices that also maintained the milieu and provided the leisure time
for these theorizations to take place. We will also find a symptomatic inability to
account for or theorize these practices even as Freud consistently suggests their
importance.
Freud infers the significance of cleaning in his thoughts about the very
beginnings of human sexuality and social organization. One of his theories about
the origins of civilization develops from a complex phenomenal matrix involving
sexual difference, odour, shame, propriety and cleanliness. In Civilization and its
Discontents, Freud contends that the family unit derives from the very different
but mutual needs that bring male and female together. The male, motivated by
the need for readily available sexual objects, joined up with the female, who
submitted to this arrangement in the interests of ‘her helpless young’ (1930/1953–
74:99). In a long, detailed footnote, Freud explains how these prototypically
social motives for permanent sexual coupling came to supersede the transitory
and primarily olfactory biological cues provided by the menstrual cycle. ‘Visual
excitations’ which take over the role of the more archaic ‘olfactory stimuli’ allow
for a more lasting effect. Freud links this transformation with what he sees as the
act that initiated ‘the fateful process of civilization…man’s adoption of an erect
posture’ (1930/1953–74:99).
Profound consequences ensue. ‘[T]his made his genitals, which were
previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked feelings
of shame in him.’ Shame induced ‘devaluation of the olfactory stimuli’ which
then resulted in an ‘organic repression’ leading to menstrual taboos and the
proscriptions against anal eroticism (1930/1953–74:99). As Freud describes it, the
scene involves the transformation of a survival instinct (a sense of vulnerability
and fear resulting from the exposure of delicate body parts) to a more social and
normatively oriented sense of shame. Shame is induced by the threat of another’s
gaze (a social threat), not by direct attack (a physical one). A normative, moral
sense enters this scene not because the genitals are unprotected, but because they
are visible.
The same moral valence infuses the transformation concerning the instigation
of sexual excitation—from olfactory stimuli, which presumably coincided with a
human being’s pre-erect physical postures, to the visual stimuli which will
dominate and organize erotic life in erect civilization. Freud concludes that
cultural concerns with cleanliness derive originally, not from concerns with
hygiene, but from the ‘organic repression’ absolutely vital to the development of
civilization. To be unclean, to smell bad is, by this reasoning, to be aggressively
antisocial (1930/1953–74:99–100). To be antisocial is to oppose civilization, to
stand against the norms that facilitate coexistence in the social order. Thus the
act of smelling bad, of being unclean, acquires negative, immoral or unethical
implications.