On Learning How To Act:

  With Adam Phillips extensive analysis of “The Pleasures of Censorship,” I am struck above all by his observation that Freud’s super-egoic “censor” may function like an actor. Phillips notes how this censor cultivates the self into a “master of dissimulation” — one that smiles when angry and seems affectionate when it actually wishes to destroy — and how this insight may reflect something of Freud’s identity as an “uneasily assimilated” Jew. “Immigrants need, whatever else they need, to be good actors. And actors, one might say, are master censors. They have to censor all the words their part does not require. And yet, of course, we don’t think of actors as censoring themselves, or engaged in dramatic acts of self-censorship. The capacity for survival, Freud intimates, depends upon a capacity for cunning self-censorship.” The shape of this claim puts me in mind of two other authors, namely Nietzsche and Shakespeare.
  First, Phillips’s argument recalls a story told in the fifth book of The Gay Science, in passage 361, titled “On the problem of the actor.” It is a problem, this text declares, that has “troubled” its author “for the longest time” and one that Nietzsche will, like Phillips, ultimately link to the figure of the Jewish immigrant. Where does the human animal’s instinct for acting, for theatricalization, come from? It is an almost inexhaustible question entertained in many places across Nietzsche’s vast body of works. Here his speculations take a shape whose general contours are similar to those of Phillips’s essay.

Such an instinct will have developed most easily in families of the lower classes who had to survive under changing pressures and coercions, in deep dependency, who had to cut their coat according to the cloth, always adapting themselves again to new circumstances, who always had to change their mien and posture, until they learned gradually to turn their coat with everywind and thus virtually to become a coat … until eventually this capacity, accumulated from generation to generation, becomes domineering, unreasonable, and intractable, an instinct that learns to lord it over other instincts, and generates the actor, the “artist” … (translated by Walter Kaufmann)

  In this genealogy of coat-turning, as in Phillips’s reading of Freud, the self that appears as something substantial, coherent, and abiding is only the dynamic effect of an ongoing process of play, one that occurs in a situation of “deep dependency.” (Many of Phillips’s writings explore this more performative idea of the self, in particular his dialogue with Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power.) Jews and other territorial migrants, like anyone rendered economically precarious, often need to perform and transform in order to survive under hostile conditions, every bit as much as infants do under the watchful eye of their parents. (Parenting, the paradigmatic mode of censorship for the psychoanalyst, is a fundamentally aesthetic enterprise.) This means that, at least in some cases, we can usefully regard the super-ego’s censorship function as a multifaceted performance negotiation, something like an “acting coach” in Phillips’s analogy, rather than simply as a “tyrant.”
  All this returns me to Hamlet, psychoanalytic criticism’s most privileged literary text and one of Phillips’s frequent touchstones in many of his writings. In the play’s third act, the scholarly prince gives acting advice to the itinerant players who have arrived at his doorstep. Oddly enough, this aspiring philosopher-king is also an aspiring amateur actor. He has been “acting mad” to buy himself time and avoid detection of his secret, murderous intentions, and the fact he has mostly convinced his loved ones that he is “actually mad” suggests he harbors some “natural” theater talent. In a quiet moment before the play-within-the-play, he functions as a dramaturg, coolly giving rehearsal notes:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trip-pingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. … Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor.

  Considering Phillips’s essay, what comes into view here is censorship as a supportive, though not uncritical, collaboration. (“What else can we do with the unacceptable but blame it, scapegoat it, evacuate it, abolish it?” Phillips asks. “Could there be a gentle, a sympathetic, a differently imaginative super-ego?” These can be life-giving questions, to be sure.) It is a notable fact of theater history that, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, acting companies were not led by professional directors. Instead, all decisions of staging were handled internally and collaboratively by members of the acting company, usually led by one peer who was a combination of actor, playwright, and manager, as Shakespeare was. What if one’s internal censor were not a dictator, lording over the intimate theatres of the self, but were instead a primus inter pares? Hamlet is effectively repressing the player’s instincts about what might produce a worthy stage performance, and he maybe even censors something of the player’s very passion itself. Still, this act of censorship feels cordial, friendly, a moment not of abuse but of “temperance.”
  In this moment, Hamlet’s censorious advice functions not only to produce “artfulness” and so to “make desire, and therefore pleasure, plausible,” though he may be doing both of those things as well. Revisiting Hamlet in this context, my attention is arrested as never before by this moment’s imagery of hands. In my mental staging of the scene, Hamlet guides the player’s gesture with a touch, manipulating the palm and fingers directly, feeling the pulsing wrist. Perhaps I might say “I want to censor you,” when I mean to say I love you.
  Rather, what’s at stake in this moment of one player teaching another how “gently” to temper his tempestuous instincts is their combined power to “catch the conscience of the king.” In this most mournful play, the theater is not only an artistic enterprise, nor is “The Murder of Gonzago” just another one of Hamlet’s doomed methods to ensure his own survival amid the hostile territory of the court. Rather, their playing ultimately works to ascertain the truth of a hidden criminality. It becomes a device that exposes and helps end a tyrannical regime. Maybe some forms of censorship possess a more radical potential than has previously been acknowledged.