The Sign Outside the No Future Nightclub
The end of wishing
The editors
The supposed end of history also announced the death of the wish. Without our utopian dreams, the aftermath of the Cold War left us cold, and, in the twenty-first century, the United States sleepwalks through wars and conflicts without any clear wish. Our collective wishes, we might speculate, have lost their form, and our political dreams all speak of latent apocalypse. Meanwhile, individuals appear seized up, frozen, stuck in place. The resulting meme: no one has sex anymore, no one has any particular desire. We are lonely, we are atomized. We may not wish, we may not dream. There’s no space to. All we have is reality.
The wish is now the stuff of storybooks, of superstition, or has been rebranded as magical thinking and manifestation—a kind of blank vision board of what could be. The dream has been snatched from us, and yet we are commanded to dream when and where capital sees fit. The insipid aphorism of following one’s dreams, the sheer weight of the ideologically freighted demand to imagine anew, the constant clamor to justify our pained American dreams: all of this daydreaming consumes us with images of wellness, eternal health, and perfect, uncomplicated satisfaction. Ernst Bloch, writing during and after the Second World War, argued that, for the ruling class, “change is impossible anyway even if it were desired, which is by no means the case . . . in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental.” Our ambitions now are to stop wishing—to economize our desires, to want for nothing, to arrive pre-fulfilled. Perversely, this is almost right: fulfilling our dreams is already a distorted way to want something else. But to give this voice, we would need to analyze the dreams induced by capital to save our wishes from its demands.
For Freud, the dream’s manifestations place a demand upon the person to articulate what they can’t yet have—what they are in want of. It’s for good reason that the wish is the first psychoanalytic concept: it is crucial to the elaboration of unconscious fantasy, to dreaming. Psychoanalysis, one could say, was originally a science of wishing; the adjustments and maladjustments of wishless daily life screen from us the cause of our suffering. Paradoxically, Freud implies that reality gets in the way of understanding why we are conflicted in and with reality. “Reality—wish fulfillment. It is from these opposites that our mental life springs,” Freud wrote to a friend in 1899, as he reflected on his new taxonomy of dreams and their meanings. Later, Freud would publish a nearly identical statement: “Thought is after all nothing but a substitute for a hallucinatory wish; and it is self-evident that dreams must be wish-fulfillments, since nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work.” To think is to dream, but accordingly, thinking conceals as much as it reveals.
Wishes are powerful things—sometimes too powerful. We have been told since the morality plots of Aesop’s Fables that we have to be careful what we wish for, lest it come true. It is the worst thing that can happen to a neurotic, to experience true wish fulfillment. Oedipus, after all, got his impermissible wish. He then blotted out his eyes. He wished not to see what his life had become, wishing ultimately not to have been born. Poignantly, psychoanalysis is a practice predicated on the possibility that Oedipus could have wished differently, that he might better understand his dreams in order to wish anew.
Psychoanalysis cannot begin without someone bringing their dreams to someone else
Though there are good reasons we don’t allow ourselves to wish, psychoanalysis cannot begin without someone bringing their dreams to someone else. If the wish is foreclosed, if people do not bring their dreams, the analytic encounter itself is impossible. Without the analytic exchange, the unsayable becomes entombed, condemned to the netherworld of the totally repressed; dream analysis requires us to tarry with antagonism. We must look to what is unsaid and unsayable, distorted, remaindered.
In the end, Freud thought dreams served one universal purpose: to keep us asleep. But, today, we sleep furiously. We are so troubled by our dreamless sleep that sleep, along with our wishes, has been robbed from us. If our desires were met in our dreams—the simple need for water, say—we might stay under. What is a wish that doesn’t destroy us, cannot be denied, isn’t repressed or foreclosed, doesn’t keep us asleep but helps us wake up, go find what we need in waking life? People are already bringing their dreams to us: in and of mass protest, utopian thinking, the drive to freedom. We see it too, in our nightmares: the affects central to daily life under capitalism, the wish to destroy the other, be destroyed, to merge, to escape, to possess, be possessed.
Freud struggled with the idea that dreams are prophecies, but the kernel of truth here is that dreams come from the future, like utopia. This is the uneasy principle of hope: that the future of what will have been is where desire resides. In their reactionary fervor, Bloch tells us, the existentially agonized ruling class pulls us into the nihilism of their failures: “The future is the sign outside the No Future night club, and the destiny of man nothingness.” But he continues, “Well: let the dead bury their dead; even in the hesitation which the outstaying night draws over it, the beginning day is listening to something other than the putridly stifling, hollowly nihilistic death-knell. As long as man is in a bad way, both private and public existence are pervaded by daydreams; dreams of a better life than that which has so far been given him.” The fresh, utopian day is listening to our night wishes.
Wishing may be rather plain in its aims for us. It may simply be—as Jacqueline Rose recently wrote, echoing Freud—the wish “to die one’s own death.” We wish to wish and to act like Antigone, not Oedipus—to bury our dead and the curse with them. The wish is to be free enough to die ordinarily. This wish is endlessly, brutally, contested, countermandated by those who control reality. But no one can take the wish engine away from the dreamer: our wishes predict the future because they rework the past in dream. As Tillie Olson had it, a wish is “strong with the not yet in the now.”