The Art of Disavowal
In the 2006 movie Children of Men, which takes place in 2027 and which depicts a bleak vision that our own world appears to be catching up with right on time, Clive Owen visits his wealthy cousin, Danny Huston, who lives in the Tate Modern and who has Guernica on his dining room wall. Clive Owen asks him how he can be so invested in saving artwork when, because of the universal infertility that afflicts the world, in a hundred years no one will be around to look at it anymore. Danny Huston replies with a wolfish grin: “I just don’t think about it.”
While for a long time this remark always struck me as the kind of myopic callousness that only the rich can afford, I have since realized that we all do this, all the time; I’ve realized, in fact, that just not thinking about it is one of the more handy modes of defense for life here on planet earth.
The technical term for this in psychoanalysis is disavowal. This is a particular kind of forgetting that differs from the act of repression in that, while what is repressed remains unconscious and totally oblivious, what has been disavowed remains within the realm of the known but is actively expelled from conscious thought. I know very well that one day I must die, but I just don’t think about it! Of course I am well aware of all the homeless people outside, but I can’t think about that. I know that climate change is making the planet uninhabitable, but all the same, I don’t want to think about it, okay!?
Notice that all of these positions are reasonable, as in it is reasonable to not think about my immanent death all the time, and yet, at the same time, they are a willful, if necessary, ignorance. Once lifted to the scale of society they can pose rather intractable problems, as we can see in the matter of the unhoused, and in environmental politics. Everyone knows that the climate is warming, since like the 80’s, but let’s drill the ocean floor for oil all the same! The frog practices the art of disavowal when they notice that the water is getting hotter, but decide to remain focused upon profit margins. Anyways, other frogs will boil first.
On the other hand, I who am powerless in the face of mass extinction, not to mention multinational oil conglomerates, genocide, immigration raids, and the steadily beating drums of war, allow myself to function at a very practical day-to-day level by practicing the art of disavowal mixed with a good dose of dayglo fantasy. Rather than be blinded by the excoriating light of absolute history I intentionally practice the art of forgetting and draw a limited horizon about myself—in order to be able to think. I am only human after all.
Probably disavowal functions as a protective shield in the manner of space craft on Star Trek. The shield requires energy, and can be turned on or off, should the energy be required elsewhere, as in the firing of phasers or in scientific research; aware that the shield occludes sensitivity and vulnerability, I turn the shield off to sample the environment. But if, for example, I want to let loose at a dance party, I turn the shield back on—because who wants to think about mass extinction at a dance party?
But while disavowal is a common defense, it is not default, nor is it the only kind of defense, but rather one defense among many. It may even be categorized as a mode of attention, and can be contrasted to other modes such as evenly suspended attention, that particular kind of attention specific to the analytic situation. Disavowal, on behalf of the analyst, is counterproductive in the treatment of patients. One instead attempts to keep the field of one’s attention as wide open as possible, while at the same time—and this is crucial—without passing judgement; for nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Outside of the treatment, this kind of attention is known (by the buddhists) as neutral or bare attention and it is a much superior mode of engaging with the world than that of disavowal—if you can handle it.
Yet another mode opposed to disavowal is that of enthusiasm. A mode that was once defined as being possessed by a god, we may now re-define this ecstatic state as being possessed by that which is other than yourself. As we have been exploring on this channel there are a whole host of techniques by which enthusiasm may be achieved.
Danny Huston in Children of Men, 2006
Guernica, 1937
