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PROHIBITION AS FOUNDATION If today, in the midst of a full-fledged consumer culture, we are surrounded everywhere by the demand that we maximize our enjoyment, this represents a significant departure from the way in which society has traditionally been organized. Prohibition has always functioned as the key to social organization as such, demanding that subjects sacrifice enjoyment for the sake of work, community, and progress. Hence, in order to grasp the significance of the emergence of the society of commanded enjoyment, we must first explore the role that prohibition has played in allowing society to function by investigating thematically the structure of the traditional society of prohibition. In exploring the central role of prohibition in social organization, I will look to three related lines of thought that together will help to shed light on the way that it functions. By laying out these theoretical explanations of prohibition, I hope to provide a foundation for understanding what has changed. The importance of prohibition’s structuring role in society becomes evident in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s discussions of incest, Freud’s speculations about the primal horde and the origins of society, and Lacan’s conception of the symbolic order. Each of these three lines of inquiry emphasizes that prohibition is the sine qua non of a coherent social order, though prohibition’s foundational status becomes most evident in the work of Lévi-Strauss. In Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss notices the presence of prohibition—specifically the prohibition of incest—in every social order. He 11 Chapter One From Prohibition to Enjoyment claims that the prohibition of incest, though a thoroughly cultural phenomenon , has the universality of something natural. It appears across cultural barriers , as the necessary feature of culture itself. Though the definition of incest is plastic, changing from society to society, there is no society, according to Lévi-Strauss, that does not in some way prohibit it. In asserting the universality of the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss is really articulating something even more fundamental about the structure of any social order: every social order depends on a shared sacrifice, something that must be given up by those who enter into it, a societal “entry fee.” As Lévi-Strauss himself puts it, “Considered in its purely formal aspect, the prohibition of incest is thus only the group’s assertion that where relationships between the sexes are concerned, a person can not do just what he pleases. The positive aspect of the prohibition is to initiate organization.”1 The shared sacrifice embodied by the incest prohibition —and not some positive characteristic held in common among all the members of a society—brings unity and coherence to a loosely organized group. If a society were based on only a common positive characteristic (the same language, for instance), this characteristic would not in any way act as a control on people’s behavior. It would not stop them, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, from doing just what they please, in the way that prohibition, and specifically the incest prohibition, does. The incest prohibition creates societal coherence through directing people ’s interest away from what is closest to them (the family) and toward the social organization itself. As a result, for instance, rather than continuing to desire the mother, the subject must desire someone from another family, from the social order at large. This directing of interest away from the family and to the society at large is the most important function of the incest prohibition. Without this redirection of interest, nothing would propel the child out of the family, out of a concern for only her/his immediate environment. As psychoanalysis makes clear, there is no want of passion on the part of the child for her/his fellow family members, no initial revulsion at the familial (or familiar) love object.2 The incest prohibition, then, not only creates a desire for something beyond the immediate scope of the child, but it also produces a feeling of disgust with the idea of taking someone immediately present (a family member) as a love object. In this way, the prohibition opens us up to the social world, freeing us from the narrow focus of our initial interest through a complete redirection of it. This redirection of interest is not simply an even exchange, however. One does not give up one equally enjoyable object (the family member) for another (the member of society at large). Instead, one gives up...

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