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DanaDelgerFirstPaper 14 - 07 Sep 2011 - Main.IanSullivan
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The Death of the Dream Censor | | | The dream censor is responsible for the distorted vision of dreaming. When is a cigar not just a cigar? When your subconscious wish cannot be fulfilled in the context of the social mores of the world in which you live--- here enters the dream censor. It is by this light that we can understand the digital dream. When the Facebook machine looks at your profile, reads your digital memory and aggregates the small movements of your day-to-day life to produce the target ads which reveal the subconscious wish, it is dreaming. But where the biologic dream is opaque, the digital dream is crystalline. What do you want? Ask your dreams and come up with only a handful of runes. Ask your Facebook, and all your wants are known. It reveals the wish before you know you had it, but here there is no censor to keep you from the truth. | |
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< | On the surface, this may not trouble. There is perhaps an autonomy interest lost in giving control of the digital dream to another, but who indeed feels that he controls his bodily dreams at all? For many, the gee-whiz world of new products meant just for you! is a sufficient trade-off for all sorts of losses to privacy and freedom more tangible than the harm to the “digital dream.” But this misunderstands the equation, for there is a real and heavy price for the loss of our control over what may seem an ethereal fiction. Return to the question: Why does the dream censor keep us from the true nature of our desire? Why do we dream at all? We dream, and we dream obscured, because not all wishes should be fulfilled. | >
> | On the surface, this may not trouble. There is perhaps an autonomy interest lost in giving control of the digital dream to another, but who indeed feels that he controls his bodily dreams at all? For many, the gee-whiz world of new products meant just for you! is a sufficient trade-off for all sorts of losses to privacy and freedom more tangible than the harm to the “digital dream.” But this misunderstands the equation, for there is a real and heavy price for the loss of our control over what may seem an ethereal fiction. Return to the question: Why does the dream censor keep us from the true nature of our desire? Why do we dream at all? We dream, and we dream obscured, because not all wishes should be fulfilled. | | |
In Freud's view, the dream-wish is suppressed because of its awful nature; the dream wish is incest and murder, sexual depravity and blood. In order for civilization (not civilized society, but civilization ) to survive, these desires, which all men share, must be constantly suppressed. To Freud, no world which gave form to the terrible dreams of man could sustain itself, and the satisfaction of every man’s desire would lead to the total dissolution of society. Man shouldn't have everything he wants, because the things he wants, deep down, are poison to his body and his world, and this is as true for those dreams of endless consumption as they are for those of violence and death. |
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