future and the psychoanalytic critique of capitalism

Sometimes, I like to listen to music with lyrics when I read. My brain naturally tries to comprehend written and spoken word together, which can cause confusion, but when records are familiar or mumbly enough, lyrical music enhances my experience of reading. Cadences can change the way I hear sentences in my head, and sometimes I literally read words in the artist's voice—different filters to the same picture. Similarly, the ideas of books bleed into the meaning of the music—and that’s what happened this week, when I accidentally juxtaposed a book I was reading on the political application of psychoanalysis, Enjoying What We Don’t Have by Todd McGowan, with the mixtape I have had on repeat: Future’s Beast Mode. 

The book discusses Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas and how they can be applied to society as a whole. Freud’s main argument is that members of society satisfy psychological needs and obtain enjoyment through an unconscious impulse called the death drive: a tendency to pursue loss, struggle, and destruction. This drive and the satisfaction that comes from it manifests in aggression—either towards the self, or projected onto others—and repetition compulsion, a psychological phenomenon where a person repeats the circumstances of an event over and over again through physical reenactment or dreams. 

On Beast Mode, one of Future’s excellent mixtapes leading up to his critically acclaimed 2015 album DS2, Future analyses the death drive through a discussion of his personal troubles. Though Beast Mode and its lavish, soulful Zaytoven beats make it seem polished and almost romantic compared to 2014’s vengeful and emotional Monster, it marks the beginning of the introspection that makes Future’s music so real. Beast Mode seemingly boasts the excesses of a fast and flashy lifestyle—but Future implies a sinister dissatisfaction that permeates even the brightest of lights, marking the existence of the death drive. 

Crudely explained, the death drive is based upon the idea that the value of an object is derived from what one sacrifices to obtain said object. People pursue hardships and obsess over losses because they unconsciously realize that the value of their satisfaction is simply a product of that loss or sacrifice.  Such a drive perfectly explains cuts like “Oooooh,” where Future nods to the obsession with self-destruction that marks the fast life: spending and drugs. Future consistently refers to pieces of designer clothing in terms of their cost, rather than their other attributes: because the value is only a product of the sacrifice required to obtain those items in the first place. Nobody can lie and say that people seek out the newest Balenciagas for a reason other than the ability to flex how much money they spent: they literally look like the Asics I wore in second grade. And drugs are the perfect example of the death drive: people risk ODing and continue to hurt themselves because harm grants them satisfaction. Even kids are only more incentivized to try drugs when their parents tell them drugs will decrease their IQ, because they unconsciously derive enjoyment from knowing the harm.  

The death drive is often misrecognized for desire. When a person desires something, they pursue the object that would satisfy that desire—in the case of Future, this object is the ability to derive happiness from a lifestyle of excess. However, this all-fulfilling object can never actually be obtained, because the person who desires doesn’t realize the death drive is what motivates them. They think they are dissatisfied because they don’t have the object, and thus fail to see that all of the satisfaction they get from desiring this object comes from the fact that it is desired and out of reach; that obstacles prevent them from getting the object. We don’t watch movies to see the characters get what they want at the end— we watch them to find enjoyment in all the struggles that the character goes through before that happens. * That is why desire the way Freud sees it is perpetual—it sustains itself because desire only works insofar as the object is absent, meaning that people are always unconsciously disappointed and can never obtain their perfect objects of desire even if these objects seemingly fulfill all their desires. 

Future alludes to the invisible disappointment inherent to desire on the track “Aintchu,” which features and interpolates the flow of New Orleans rapper Juvenile over a beat of bells and sparkles. The bars on the surface seem to depict Future’s life as king of the streets, but the constantly repeated “aintchu” adlibs become urgent, ominous questions—wondering whether the extravagance of his lifestyle legitimately produces the happiness that it should. “No Basic” is the logical continuation of this theme, as Future confesses that the fast life of money and drugs poisons his health. “I get exhausted off that red, I don’t need no more,” he cries. 

The expensive flexes of wealthy rappers like Future are coded in the essence of capitalism, an ideology based on the same misrecognition of the death drive as desire. This is because capitalism is essentially unrelenting desire— the idea that accumulating many objects will make the capitalist subject satisfied. The perpetual dissatisfaction associated with this desire for accumulation is what causes capitalist society to look to the future (no pun intended) and constantly seek out new chains, new clothes, new cars—because the allure of the new creates the sense of a current lack of enjoyment that desire feeds off of. Capitalist subjects are tricked into believing that their inevitable dissatisfaction once they obtain the object of their desires is not due to the death drive and the fact that obtaining the object rids it of its desirability, but rather that there are new, better objects that can finally fulfill all of their enjoyment. “The more we accumulate, the more we see there is for us to accumulate,” writes McGowan. 

Future, whether intentionally or unintentionally, admits that the accumulation-based relations of capitalism has fully pervaded his own life. “I spent a check on that pussy,” he repeats on “Peacoat,”exemplifying that even the personal, private enjoyment stemming from his relationships is transactional—rooted in the idea of acquiring more objects of desire. 

While the idea of the death drive is awfully pessimistic on the surface, psychoanalytic theory still believes in intervention that could cause change. Even Future’s diagnosis of his own unending pain is in of itself indication that he wants to lead a better life. The psychoanalytic diagnosis aims to change the relationship between the dissatisfied patient and their satisfaction— so that they can see their life in a different light and find enjoyment in their death drive, i.e. live with the aspects of their life that they hated. Beast Mode mostly finds Future trying to articulate his dissatisfaction, but he also demonstrates that his relationship to his life does not have to be toxic and saturated by capitalistic desire. 

In terms of capitalism, McGowan’s analysis of Marx’s Capital posits that the alternative to assuming that enjoyment comes solely from accumulating objects of desire is recognizing that our satisfaction stems from loss and the death drive. This means focusing on the means rather than the ends: consciously enjoying the experience of not having objects of desire in life instead of maintaining the illusion of a neon light at the end of the tunnel. “Giving up hope — and yet continuing on, enjoying continuing on — moves us from desire to the drive,” he writes. This recognition of an enjoyment based on loss does not mean that subjects would become ascetics and not pursue anything—instead, they would redefine their relationship with objects of desire and see them for the fool’s gold that they are. They would refuse to see these objects as commodities with intrinsic value, and emphasize labor or losses sustained by producers of these objects and assign enjoyment value based on their judgement of those sacrifices. Thus, consciously linking enjoyment with loss disrupts capitalism’s ability to invest subjects in infinite accumulation-based pursuits of enjoyment that ignore the often terrible sacrifices made to obtain commodities. ** Simply put, people who cognitively readjust in this way would see that a life of riches is not actually more enjoyable than a life without.

In this fashion, Future acknowledges the sacrifices that his enjoyment comes from: the tracks “Where I Came From” and “Foreva Eva” renounce the fame, instead uplifting the struggles that made him who he is today. ”I'm true to the game, and fuck all that playin,” he raps, indicating that despite material differences, Future empathizes much more with the risky life of dope-selling he was forced to lead prior to his rap career. 

        "The hope of future enjoyment—the belief in a future—is what sustains capitalism," McGowan writes. Oddly enough, the rapper named Future doesn't seem to believe in the premise of future enjoyment, instead choosing to explore the muck of material wealth and mental deterioration that the process of making it out the streets threw onto his plate. Beast Mode, with its jazzy Zaytoven keys and compact runtime, has become a favorite in my book because it realizes the possibility of moving forward without optimism: refusing the sheen of a capitalist lens to speak on account of personal fears.

*You may respond to this by saying “hey, there is no enjoyment if the object is never gotten in the first place,” but then why do people love movies that don’t end in satisfactory ways? Why do people who can never buy fancy cars or own expensive shoes still enjoy looking at those things? Those examples show how the circulation of the drive, i.e. the means to the end rather than the end, are the way we obtain true enjoyment. 

** I don’t believe that this is an argument to tell poor or marginalized people to be happy with their lives— those people are the producers whose sacrifices capitalist subjects need to be aware of. Emphasizing the sacrifices of these groups would lead to increased equality and freedom for these people who are currently always treated as means to an end under capitalism.