Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh

TABOO

Sigmund Freud, the great sexual democrat of the early twentieth century, relies upon the speculative field of nineteenth-century ANTHROPOLOGY to illuminate his findings in Totem and Taboo (1912). The etymology of taboo bears witness to the history of European imperialism (although a secular Jew, Freud retained a quiet pride in Austria's EMPIRE) entering the English language via colonial explorers and sailors. A taboo (originally tabu) within indigenous tribal life of Africa and the South Sea Islands referred to a system of self-imposed prohibitions relating to a sacred object, around which tribal life was organised. Anyone deemed to have transgressed a taboo, touching a consecrated object for example, was also considered taboo, thus demonstrating how taboos carried a potency linked to contagion. The most important injunction in ‘PRIMITIVE’ cultures, according to Freud, was the taboo prohibiting the ‘horror of incest’ and the killing of the TOTEMIC animal.

Freud observed that some of the RITUALS associated with taboos ‘still exist among us’, discernible in the peculiarly ritualistic symptoms of the obsessional neurotic. The ambivalence generated by the sacred object is internalised to become a source of fear within the psychology of both the group and the individual. The main difference, however, is that taboos are adopted by the tribal collective as a means to structure society so that it functions for the benefit of the greater good.

READING

Freud, Sigmund (1955) Totem and Taboo, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 1–165.

TAYLORISM

The term refers to the system of scientific management pioneered by the American mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor with the goal of maximising the productivity of industrial labour. Taylor divided tasks into their constituent motions, analysed the SPEED and efficiency of these motions and excluded any unnecessary elements so as to arrive at the optimal routines for individual tasks. Workers were instructed to perform these routines repetitively, incentivised by the linkage of output to remuneration. Two masterpieces of modernist CINEMA, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), powerfully portray the dehumanising effects of Taylorist-style industrial workplaces.