2/13/22: The Seventh
Think drunk, write sober, smash publish.
Shorter post this week, more of a ramble. I haven’t been reading, or thinking much about the kind of thing I would want to blog about. That’s why I’m late this week. But it’s publish or perish, and I’m out here trying to survive.
I spent the weekend at my grandparents’ house, a 6 hour drive from my parents’ house in upstate NY. While I was there, I met up with a friend of mine. We had a few drinks, then I drove them home. The ride back was about 20 miles on the Beltway, and driving in a semi-intoxicated state (I was well under the legal ABV, but still felt something) got me thinking…
Notes on “Drunk Driving”
Disclaimer: I do not condone driving in ANY state of intoxication. Had a few drinks? Call a cab. Had more than a few? Don’t even think about it. Just because I made a bad decision that risked the health of myself and others doesn’t mean you should too.
Isn’t it amazing how great at driving we Americans are? We can hop in a car and operate it almost automatically, successfully navigating the roads while holding complete conversations, listening to podcasts, surfing the radio. Highway driving in particular. One thing I noticed—and you can notice this while sleepy, not just while drinking—is how many micro-actions it takes to remain in your lane on the highway. The road is almost never completely straight, and for various reasons you may need to adjust the steering. Doing this well requires making very rapid adjustments based on where you see that you are on the road. And in typical conditions, we do this almost entirely unconsciously, only “seeing” that this is what we’re doing in exceptional circumstances.
A better way to think of it than “driving a car” is that driving is “acting within a cybernetic system” composed of you, the car, and the environment. In normal circumstances, you make an initial conscious judgment about where you’re going and what route you’re taking, and then carry it out without thinking about it, translating feedback from across the windshield into motor impulses that turn the steering wheel and adjust the gas pedals. Driving “flows through you” more than you “do” it… Except in special cases, like accidents, unexpected incidents, etc. Tools like Google Maps or Waze add another element to the feedback system, which lets you think even less, delegating your conscious responsibility for directions.
Alcohol is a depressant. It slows down the transmission of nervous impulses, decreasing the speed of that feedback cycles take place within this system. If you’re used to “automatically” staying on the road, a depressant will reduce the speed of these cycles to the point where you find yourself consciously intervening in order to remain within the white highway lines. The more general point is that what was once automatic, “second nature”, becomes more and more non-automatic.
If we think about when people drink—at social events—it raises the question, of “how do these effects work in social situations, and what’s the purpose of drinking?” (I understand this is a “duh” moment but bear with me, unexamined life blah blah). Similar to driving, we play out social situations by slotting into a “role” which we act out automatically. This is how improv comedy works: you meta-cognitively manipulate the context of the scene such that the role you slot into is absurd or funny. But when you’re “doing the bit”, the role still feels totally automatic: I may be in Ancient Greece, or space, or prison, but I’m still the nosy neighbor trying to sniff out gossip about other families in the area (or polis, or planet, or cell).
The difference between driving and socializing is that when you’re driving, you have no choice as to your role. You need to be a driver, and you need to follow the rules regardless of what state you’re in. It’s the equivalent of coming home drunk to worried parents and having to “play sober”. You need to perform the same role as always (“your parents’ kid”), but now you’re not so good at it. You may also feel an additional layer of guilt or shame, at being in a role when you’re “not supposed to be”. Easier not to get caught at all; climb through the bedroom window.
Most day-to-day socializing is still automatic, like driving, but with a little more flexibility. Now you can be the supportive friend, now you can have a competitive argument or game, and so on. But the set of roles is still generally circumscribed by the historical roles you’ve performed together. It can feel scary to attempt a new role in a long-time friendship: this is one reason why the “friend-zone” exists as a concept; it requires overturning an existing role and attempting to play a new one.
Some roles are maladaptive: you learn to play them at some point as a way of coping, of getting something you need, and then eventually the role stops being satisfying, but you keep playing it anyway, because it’s more comfortable, it’s what you know how to do. This idea of compulsive repetition in general is equivalent to Freud’s “death drive”, and when applied to your thoughts (self-relation), it constitutes a “neurosis”. The pattern here is the same as with driving: the action becomes second nature, but an unsatisfying nature.1
Another way of looking at this idea of social roles is through the lens of “codes” or “rules”. What is a “role”? It’s not exactly a script with pre-determined actions, so much as a set of constraints on ways of speaking and inter-acting. Our goal is often “open-ended”, in that one uses roles to get what they want. We use the rules, language, to make “demands” from others in an attempt to satisfy our desires. This can be as simple as going to the store and playing the “customer” role, where money acts as the source of authority for you to get what you want to buy, to the highly complex situation of dating.
The problem comes when you’ve slotted yourself into a role, compulsively, because it’s the role you know how to play within the friendship, but you have no way of getting at your desire through that role’s permissible actions. You become faced with ambivalence, where on the one hand, you want to remain within the safety of the role, but you also know that the only way to get what you want is to drop that role and find a new one.
Social ambivalence seems unavoidable throughout the course of one’s life, but there’s a trick you can play to sneak out of it. If you retain a belief about what your role should be, then you can “ironically” play out “lesser” roles without ever having to face the deeper conflict, of “how are we relating?” because it’s “not really you” at any given time. The “real you” is waiting for the right time to emerge, like the gifted child within all of us waiting for the moment where we’re seen for our undeniable genius. This constant denial of intersubjective context, and elevation of one’s own internal, detached narrative of how events played out, is narcissism.
I’ve gone on a digression, well away from the subject of this post, which was supposed to be “alcohol”, so let’s use some of this to think about what alcohol does to social interactions. Alcohol makes you worse at performing roles. What is underneath roles, what motivates them? Desire. So we might say that alcohol’s depressant effect on the nervous system makes the cybernetic system = social interaction less “automatic”: people make mistakes, and tend to act more directly. What are we trying to “loosen up” when we drink? Our own subordination to our roles. This is why dates take place at bars: you’re more likely to find yourself willing to act on desire, rather than falling into a desexualized “second nature”.
But wait. The being drunk makes sociality feel more automatic, not less. You (I) just said alcohol makes you worse at performing roles. What the hell? Asking the question differently: people still need to use language and communicate while drunk, so how can they do this if they’re unable to play their normal roles? Is there a second, deeper set of roles, that people can only do when they’re intoxicated?
I spoke earlier about ambivalence, where “you want to remain within the safety of the role, but you also know that the only way to get what you want is to drop that role and find a new one”. My answer to the very aggressive question above is that by making you worse at performing normal roles, the ambivalence “equation” tips over to the side of getting what you want, which means going for it and taking that risk and talking to that girl, even if it’s “against the rules”.
I might even claim that, if we note that desires are always backed by fantasy, which are represented as images (“in” the “image-inary”) rather than symbolic “rules”, language, then we could claim that our behavior while intoxicated tends toward acting out our fantasies, rather than reflexively following the rules (although we may regret it in the morning, when the symbolic returns with a vengeance). Put more simply, alcohol makes us less civil and more ready to act on our (childlike) primal urges. No duh.
The other side of alcohol, complementing the above, is that it’s a form of plausible, socially legitimated deniability (“I was drunk!”)2. In some ways, this deniability is more important than the effects of the drug itself: alcohol consumption is a ritual context where you have temporary permission to overturn existing role relations. Getting trashed with my coworkers is very different than another day at the office. Drinking can function as a festival in Charles Taylor’s sense: a circumscribed chunk of time where existing rules and hierarchies might be overturned. No wonder the Protestants, quietists they are, fought for temperance. This is also why Berne talked about “alcoholic” as being itself a role: it’s a multi-person game that takes place within this ritualized context, with its own set of rules. But most people who drink aren’t alcoholics, so let’s put that aside.
Some people say that you don’t know the truth of someone until you observe them drunk. This seems true to the extent that one’s desires and fantasies “are” them, which is a romantic(ist) idea that nevertheless underpins many modern conceptions of self-hood. Žižek has a bit I can’t find anymore where he counters this, saying he and his friends, when they get together after a while, spend 10 minutes insulting each other, making dirty jokes about each others’ mothers, and so on, after which they can just be normal, civil, friends. For Žižek, the “real you” isn’t the dirty fantasies lurking beneath the mask, but the mask itself. And it makes a kind of sense if you think about time: if you’re only “the real you” for 10 minutes a day, is that really the “real you”?
That’s all I got for now, I’ve gone on too long on this extended ramble. Time for miscellania and then I’ll let you go.
Miscellania
I was asked the following question at 1 AM in a Discord chat: “what sort of task is philosophy for you?” Here was my response:
It's multifaceted but fundamentally archaeological, in an oddly connective way: the enrichment of certain language (ideas) to broaden the horizons of my thought by producing the potential for new relationships. I think a significant amount of contemporary education serves to restrict the possibility of thought rather than enrich it, and the only way to recover the full breadth of certain ideas is to dig into their origins, or else you will reinvent them (but typically less richly).
And the goal ultimately is to change my habitual and reflexive patterns of thought and action, not in a "closed" goal oriented way, but in a way that opens opportunity, especially in terms of understanding (myself and others).
Here’s an interesting conversation on a similar topic, a dialogue from 1999 between feminist philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler. Nussbaum published a negative piece on Butler called “The Professor of Parody”, and Butler replied with “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back”. I feel like I agree with both of them, to some extent, but that Nussbaum’s critique is far more damning, and Butler doesn’t really defend against most of her points in the response piece.
Oh, and last and also least, Scott Alexander wrote a review of Sadly, Porn, and I replied in a comment. You may find it interesting, if you care about that book at all. I know some of you (many of you?) don’t.
Song of the week (Shazam’d from the FM airwaves while driving, sober but elated):
Bonus round: does it not remind you of this classic city pop track?
Next week I’ll be writing from Mexico City! See you all there :)
It may well be that all “cultural conditioning” follows this pattern, that more of our nature than we expect is actually second nature. But the “nature vs nurture” debate is far too volatile for me to want to touch. I’m gonna leave it be. But I think everyone can at least accept that language is, at least, the result of nurture, and becomes second nature (in terms of content, not form, I get it Chomsky).
See Footnote 15 of Sadly, Porn for a much lengthier discussion of the role of alcohol in relation to responsibility and consent.