“The unconscious is very serious today — even a little bit sad — because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and off-handedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which would surface in our dreams and our slips, in our neuroses and madness. But isn’t it already that way, in a sense?” — Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
Feelings we attach to the uncanny are often the cause of laughter as much as screams or chills. I’m wondering to what extend Baudrillard’s musing relates to the humorous side of the uncanny affect; that is, the “ironic breezy drives and fantasies” we might see expressed on popular television or in bestselling fantasy fiction. Taking his thoughts to the psychosocial level seems warranted, I think; it may be productive to substitute “political unconscious” for “the unconscious” in his quotation.
I’m musing over whether Baudrillard’s quotation, too, is the product of a philosopher searching for happiness (or whatever the antithesis of “seriousness” and “sadness” is) in the workings of the psyche. He seems to be searching for the unexpressed wish as a carefree desire (as oxymoronic as that sounds); the wandering non-aggressive stuff of the animal daydream. His final musing — “Isn’t it already that way, in a sense?” — begs the question, but he’s got me wondering to what degree the promises of advertising and the fantasies of fiction manifest this “new unconsciousness” in the way that he is framing it, and whether this might move us closer to understanding the domesticity of horror and the uncanny, the rending “familiar” of the unfamiliar, through a highly self-conscious and ironic detachment. In other words, that element of the uncanny that is not necessarily sad, serious, or scary.
