• It interests me how some groups respond first to the content and others first to the style of your writing. On this occasion I think you balance successfully on the edge of the precipice of just a little too much, stylistically, but I think the substance is invaluable and goes further than the readers have allowed for. The issue becomes clearer when one considers the theory behind the advertising. You might find it useful to spare a few words to draw those inferences.

• I think you might go so far in the project of adjoining Marx and Freud as to point out that what is advertised by the dream is not only consumption but debt. In fact, until the moment before yesterday, people had been referring to mortgage debt, the American's endlessly subsidized middle-class religious offering on the altar of suburbia, quite without irony, as "the American Dream." Debt is the essence of unfreedom from the distinctively American, Jeffersonian, point of view.

• I think you put a foot wrong when Justin asked you about the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents. I wish it were possible to assume that people have read the thinkers (Darwin, Marx, Freud) who cut the pathways of thought that led to the twentieth century. It should be possible, because people like the people we live with should have encountered those thinkers first hand. They shouldn't want to let others mediate their experience of the ideas that set fire to so many extraordinary minds. But, because taking it all predigested and imagining you know what the ideas in their real form would do to your head is so much easier, people don't read these incomparable thinkers anymore. You have to give people a few words more, or link to something explanatory. And when you cite to a great work, you don't have to assist the Google Books surveilled-reading approach. In addition to using them when you only want a page of something, you can always point the reader to a copy of the full free text online, if one exists, at Gutenberg, The Internet Archive or elsewhere. The wonderful works that everyone can now carry everywhere all the time in her free book reader should always be only a click away.

Dana,

This is a great essay. I've looked at your paper now a few times but still I have no substantive edits. I did find the final paragraph to be suddenly faster-moving than the rest of the essay, and thus somewhat harder to follow. But that is minor at most.

I agree with Gavin, the style of the writing, this approach, is refreshing. I am inspired to try something similar in my next paper. Very nicely done.

-- BrianS - 03 Dec 2009

Dana, I love this paper. I never knew that I wanted poetry in my legal writing until now. Thank you for enlightening me! This is such a refreshing change from slicing away all adjectives and adverbs!

However, the paper kind of made me want to submit myself to Facebook (or whoever else can divine my digital dreams). I want to know what my subconscious wishes are! I want to have my hidden dreams fulfilled! It doesn't sound so bad to me :). People spend tens of thousands of dollars to try reach the nether recesses of their mind through psychoanalysis...

-- GavinSnyder - 03 Dec 2009

Dana, great piece; and the penultimate sentence (when you speak of losing oneself upon waking from the dream) was evocative of Plato's myth of the caves in The Republic, and the Matrix movies. I have not read Freud so the impact of the last paragraph might have been lost on me!

-- AllanOng - 30 Nov 2009

Justin,

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I concede that my paper assumes the reader is at least familiar with Civilization and Its Discontents, an assumption I don't think is entirely unfair, given the sophistication of my audience and what I think of as Freud's place in the canon of Western thought, but you are completely right in saying that I can do a much better job of making the links clear. I'm still thinking about a way to do that, but your comment has made it possible for me to do so, so thank you!

-- DanaDelger - 28 Nov 2009