Choice

Walking past Burger King in town today, I noticed that their current slogan is "Have it your way" (an article on that here - including interesting reading on targeted advertising for BK's demographic; "more important to be provocative than pleasant"). This reminded me of an ongoing conversation with Nick over choice, sparked by me reading Rowan William's "Lost Icons", which discusses the importance given to choice in this culture from a psychoanalytic perspective. As far as I understood it, the argument was that in analysis the analyst stands in for the "unattainable Other", the ideal that we measure ourselves against or wish to become. The Other must always be unattainable, or else there is no desire, no process of becoming, no development (personally or socially). The task of the analyst is to avoid becoming the Other, to resist the urge to satisfy the analysand's needs, and in the transference relationship to enable the analysand to engage with the process of growth through frustration.

Walking past Burger King, I was reminded again how dangerous a culture is that minimises or removes frustration. Rowan Williams suggests that sexualised or violent behaviour is a result of the loss of identity caused by the absence of the Other; I'm sure that there's a good argument for the idea that when there is no frustration of needs to promote my growth as a person, I'm more likely to engage in behaviour that both connects me with another person and which objectifies them, which establishes them as "not-me", something compared with which I can know myself. There's probably a good link here too with racist and xenophobic behaviour. I wonder if a society that promises choices - of goods, lifestyles, bodies - to its members is also inevitably going to be a society that demonises outsiders, such as asylum seekers and those judged to be sufficiently different to be classed as "not-us".

I'm not sure how this fits with the fact that choice is an illusion for many in this culture; that a consumer society promises more than it delivers. Perhaps it is the illusion that's important here; the quaintly old-fashioned notion of "knowing your place" is distasteful to those who believe that everyone can make it to the top, but when the truth is that only a few make it to the top, the many are fed on celebrity gossip dreams, identifying on first-name terms with "ordinary" people who have made it big. When "knowing your place" meant having a realistic assessment of the world and your place in it, frustration, recognition of the unattainableness of the Other, was a key to genuine growth. When everyone believes that they should have whatever they want, and frustration is replaced with over-identification with (fallible, ordinary, destroyable) celebrities, there is nowhere to go to seek the unattainable other except in violence and xenophobia.

I'll try and post more thoughts on this, especially how it fits with my current understanding of the Kingdom of God, sometime soon.