Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

In this chapter I aim to analyze technology as I did the culture industry in chapter 4: namely, to specify the nature of the psychic gratification that it provides and to articulate how that gratification changes the psyche as a whole. So much has been written about the effects of technological advance on society and the individual, and while we are less likely today to hear talk of the relation between technology and the psyche (as we did not that long ago in the work of Siegfried Giedion, Lewis Mumford, or Jacques Ellul),¹ the idea that technological advance is today constantly revolutionizing our practices and modes of perception is commonplace. Much more interesting to me than the question of how technology is changing the world and us, however, is that of why we have invested ourselves in the world-changing capacities of technology in the first place.² What about the fruit of technological advance is so irresistibly attractive, and why are technological aspirations so unthinkingly affirmed?

There is, of course, the answer that technology makes life better: perhaps it is still “questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,”³ but they have lengthened the human life span, connected us in new ways, and further extended the mastery of the human race. One might counter that they have also imperiled our mastery, displaced and separated us, and introduced ultimate threats to the continued existence of life on earth,⁴ but the platitude that technology makes life better can never really be refuted, especially in a culture where the answer to the woes of technological advance is “More technology!” In any event, it is impossible for the modern subject to avoid all those little things that testify, not in thought but in practice, to the belief that technology makes life better.

My suspicion is simply that there is more to why we think technology makes life better than technology making life better, that technology gratifies a psychic need before it does material ones. Good arguments could be made that contemporary technological fascination is strictly a problem of social theory: for instance, that the technological advance demanded by the pursuit of relative surplus value is reified and transformed into a cultural value in late capitalism or, with Foucault, that the organizing role of life in the modern episteme dictates that its technological extension is revered as an unquestionable good. We can affirm both arguments, however, while also admitting that there may be a distinctly psychological motivation to technological aspiration as well.

My point of departure in this final investigation will be the work of Herbert Marcuse. In many ways, this book could not have come to fruition without his influence, which can be seen in every chapter.⁵ That being said, I am wary, like so many today, of the overall framework of his thought, from his casual equation of material scarcity with Freud’s Ananke to his conception of liberation as an anamnestic return to an “original” libidinal state. For all intents and purposes, I agree with Joel Whitebook that Marcuse’s “pursuit of ‘integral satisfaction’ that disavows the incomplete and conflictual nature of human existence brings us into the register of omnipotence and therewith raises the specter of totalitarianism.”⁶ Thus, instead of looking to Marcuse’s thought as a whole,⁷ I will focus in this chapter on an intriguing and only partially developed cluster of insights that huddle around the topic of technology. Perhaps more than any of his colleagues, Marcuse was highly sensitive to the ways in which technological advance works not only on the world but also on the psyche. Through an examination and critique of Marcuse’s varied thoughts on the matter, I hope to articulate a theory of what kind of psychic gratification is provided by ever increasing technical control, one that centers on the concept of “aggressive sublimation.”

Throughout his corpus Marcuse returns time and again to the idea that “organized capitalism has sublimated and turned to socially productive use” a “primary aggressiveness” by channeling it toward the employment and development of technology.⁸ In “Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Societies” he proposes a theory of “technological aggression and satisfaction” in which “the act of aggression is physically carried out by a mechanism with a high degree of automatism, of far greater power than the individual human being who sets it in motion.”⁹ Human aggression, transferred from subject to object in this fashion, finds “sublimated” expression in being transformed to serve “socially useful” ends. Marcuse claims here simply to be following Freud: “Now the (more or less sublimated) transformation of destructive into socially useful aggressive (and thereby constructive) energy is, according to Freud (on whose instinct-theory I base my interpretation) a normal and indispensable process.”¹⁰

Freud himself has the following to say on the matter: “The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature.”¹¹ Although he does not go so far as to say here that the “instinct of destruction” can be sublimated, Freud would tentatively endorse the possibility of the “sublimation of the aggressive or destructive instinct” in a letter to Marie Bonaparte in 1937 (to my knowledge, the idea is never invoked in his published work).¹² Though the channeling of aggressive impulses toward technological mastery seems intuitively to fit the bill, I want to get clear in what follows about the conditions under which aggressive energy might find sublimated expression and how precisely technological mastery qualifies as an instance thereof.

First, with regard to the idea of sublimation itself: in “On Narcissism” sublimation is defined as a “process that concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct’s directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual satisfaction.”¹³ Freud would later add that “sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life.”¹⁴ Combining these two claims, we can say that sexual energy is “sublimated” when it takes a socially beneficial and nonsexual aim. For reasons that will soon become apparent, I want to stress the importance of this latter criterion: since direct sexual gratification can also be “socially productive,”¹⁵ the libido should only be considered truly sublimated when it has taken a nonsexual aim in addition to a socially useful one. With this in mind, if we want to take seriously Freud’s suggestion to Marie Bonaparte, it would have to be possible for an aggressive drive to find a socially useful outlet that itself involves no necessary aggression.

Many of Freud’s immediate heirs, greatly expanding the concept of sublimation to include “every successful defence effort not producing symptoms or necessitating counter-cathetic energy expense,” saw no impediments to this possibility.¹⁶ Ernest Jones, for one, speculated that “a child…who has conquered a sadistic love of cruelty may, when he grows up, be a successful butcher or a distinguished surgeon, according to his capacities and opportunities.”¹⁷ The model is simpleminded, but the idea acceptable enough: when channeled in the proper manner, aggression could indeed take a new, socially useful form. Later generations of psychoanalysts nonetheless developed a marked resistance to speaking of sublimation proper when it came to the aggressive drives. F. J. Hacker succinctly summarizes this opinion: while the aggressive drives “can be expressed in very different ways and forms, directly and symbolically, internally and externally, destructively and productively,” they unfortunately “cannot be sublimated.”¹⁸ Why? Because even in the cases where it is put to productive use (butcher, surgeon), where it is directed internally (masochism, asceticism) or where it is symbolic (derision, humiliation), it retains an aggressive aim (hacking at a dead animal, cutting open a human being, self-torture, “symbolic violence,” etc.).

Surprisingly, and despite his frequent invocation of the idea of aggressive sublimation, Marcuse is at one with the predominant Anglophone psychoanalytic opinion of his time in rejecting the idea that aggressiveness truly finds its aim changed in supposedly “sublimated” forms of expression.¹⁹ In Eros and Civilization, for instance, he proposes the notion of “destructive sublimation” only immediately to recoil from it: “The development of technics and technological rationality absorbs to a great extent the ‘modified’ destructive instincts…. Is the destructiveness sublimated in these activities sufficiently subdued and diverted to assure the work of Eros?…To be sure, the diversion of destructiveness from the ego to the external world secured the growth of civilization. However, extroverted destruction remains destruction.”²⁰ Marcuse thus finds no psychic transformation, only new avenues for different expressions of one and the same drive. In “Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Societies” he takes this argument a step further: not only does destruction remain destruction, but the attempt to sublimate it technologically results, in fact, in a “supersublimation,” a sublimation that does not actually gratify the original impulse, and thus one that leads to “repetition and escalation: increasing violence, speed, enlarged scope, etc.”²¹ Technology only pushes aggressive energy around, finding new ways to redirect, diffuse, and, in the process, inflame it.

Marcuse was thus far from endorsing the “normal and indispensable process” of aggressive sublimation that he touted, even further from it than the person to whom he credits its initial formulation. Indeed, he lays down a formidable challenge to its possibility: Is not socially useful aggression—as found, for instance, in the mastery of nature—still aggression? In artistic creation, the paradigmatic case of libidinal sublimation, sexuality takes a decidedly nonsexual aim. In the productive consumption of nature, by contrast, aren’t we still destroying, albeit in an inhibited and controlled fashion?²²

On behalf of an idea that Freud himself only tentatively proposed, I want to take up Lacan’s distinction between aggressivity and the aggression it conditions in order to attempt to formulate what a “non-aggressive aggression” might look like. In chapter 3 I defined aggressivity as a drive to subjective omnipotence, a drive to the reduction of self/other tension to zero through a silencing engulfment of the other and the establishment of the “I” as self-sufficient. In childhood this drive most certainly manifests in physical acts of domination and aggression, but it is nonetheless theoretically separable from those acts. Might technological mastery involve the satisfaction not only of aggression but rather, and at a more basic level, of aggressivity?

Freud himself, in a memorable passage from Civilization and Its Discontents, appears to answer in the affirmative: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent.”²³ The aim of donning our “auxiliary organs,” he tells us, is to be as “magnificent” as our father and thus to occupy his place. It is not exactly aggression that he is talking about, but one could certainly say that the kind of power described here is a manifestation of a drive toward omnipotent control, a drive to be like the other, that I have argued is definitive of aggressivity.²⁴ For Freud, then, while the use and development of technology often provides a means of directly satisfying aggression, it is itself a form of sublimated aggressivity, inasmuch as it provides gratification of urges for controlling dominance at a socially useful level, and, in theory, regardless of whether or not the kind of activity enabled serves as a channel for aggression.

No doubt Marcuse had good reason to think technology satisfied aggression in a direct rather than a sublimated manner: for him, as for most thinkers of his generation, technology signified, above all, the bomb. The variety of networked personal computing devices that is the natural referent of the word today was still a distant possibility. But with the practices enabled by the various technological innovations of the last fifty or so years in mind—walking down the street and making plans on one’s cell phone, scrolling through songs on one’s iPod, hurtling down the highway at eighty miles per hour, accessing information from around the world on the Internet, etc.—it seems reasonable to say that technology does allow for an increased potency that transcends the simple aim of mastery and that does not lead necessarily to the negative consequences about which Marcuse is concerned.²⁵ This thesis is, admittedly, a difficult one to maintain: if one wants to find violence in something, one will find it. It nonetheless seems like a stretch to say that the abovementioned activities are “violent” in the same way that butchering an animal, torturing oneself, humiliating others, or dropping the bomb are violent. If we are willing to admit this, then it is possible to affirm the proposal that the “magnificence” of donning auxiliary organs offers a socially productive gratification of aggressivity acquired without necessary aggression or violence, thereby salvaging the notion of aggressive sublimation.²⁶

Marcuse addresses the problem of technology throughout his work, but his most sustained effort appears in One-Dimensional Man, where he contends that advanced capitalist society is governed by a “technological rationality” wherein “rationality assumes the form of methodical construction; organization and handling of matter as the mere stuff of control, as instrumentality which lends itself to all purposes and ends—instrumentality per se, ‘in itself.’”²⁷ This purportedly “value-free” rationality is in fact a historically specific “capitalist rationality” and is thus employed toward the creation of “ever more efficient instruments of social control” (for example, the dehumanizing mechanization of the labor process) as well as the intensification of the typical hazards of capitalist production (“waste, planned obsolescence, superfluous luxury items and poisonous chemicals which pollute the environment and destroy human beings”).²⁸ What is truly horrifying about technological rationality, however, is its erosion of the promise of liberal modernity: namely, authentic, creative individuality. In a social situation that demands that its subjects become efficient users of a rationality detached from human needs, “it is no longer possible for something like an individual psyche with its own demands and decisions to develop.”²⁹

At the same time, however, technological rationality develops the productive forces and our technical capacities in such a way as to make liberation possible, even while its progress continues to increase domination.³⁰ It is for this reason that Marcuse finds it important strictly to separate technics and technology:

Technology is taken as a social process in which technics proper (that is, the technical apparatus of industry, transportation, communication) is but a partial factor…. Technology as a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices, and contrivances which characterize the machine age is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination. Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil.³¹

Technical progress is life protecting and life enlarging to the degree to which the destructive energy here at work is “contained” and guided by libidinal energy. This ascendancy of Eros in technical progress would become manifest in the progressive alleviation and pacification of the struggle for existence, in the growth of refined erotic needs and satisfaction. In other words, technical progress would be accompanied by a lasting desublimation that, far from reverting mankind to anarchic and primitive stages, would bring about a less repressive and yet higher stage of civilization.³³

Marcuse is not claiming here, importantly, that the technical capacities and objects developed in capitalism are simply “neutral” and can be repurposed to different ends. Indeed, what is historically “new” for Marcuse about “technological rationality” is that “domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology, but as technology.”³⁶ The automobile, for instance, necessitates a system of infrastructure that prioritizes private transportation; implied in the technology itself is an ideology.³⁷ This is not to say that it is just ideology: the combustion engine works, it makes possible a form of travel hitherto unknown.³⁸ As Andrew Feenberg summarizes, in technology “neutrality and bias can and do in fact coexist;” thus, in freeing ourselves from the pursuit of surplus value, inherited “technology would not be thrown out, nor would it simply be put to new uses in a different social context, but rather it would be employed to produce new technological means, fully adapted to the requirements of a socialist society.”³⁹

Technology might thus not itself be entirely neutral, but there is a technical aspect of it that need not be employed in the service of domination and, properly repurposed, that could serve as the foundation of a free society. Passé as Marcuse has become since his heyday as champion of the New Left, this vision for technology remains remarkably contemporary, a fact well illustrated in the works of prominent philosophers of technology like Feenberg and Bernard Stiegler. Feenberg, for one, contends that “dystopian critiques” of technology like those of Heidegger and Ellul focus exclusively on the negative and destructive side of technical “de-worlding” to the neglect of the tactical “struggles and innovations of users engaged in appropriating” technology toward unleashing its “democratic potential.”⁴⁰ Stiegler similarly holds onto the possibility of technology creating “new associative environments” even while leading to dissociation and stupidity.⁴¹ As much as these thinkers admit the existence of domination not through technology but as technology, they nonetheless reserve for the simple pursuit of technical mastery a necessary neutrality, i.e., an underdetermination that can be appropriated in the service of both domination and liberation, deworlding and reworlding, dissociation and association. Both would agree with Adorno and Horkheimer that instrumental reason represses dialectical potentiality, and thus that its sole pursuit reinforces present domination, but the simple desire that things work for us at all must be a neutral one, i.e., one free from the interests of domination, for their shared project to be viable.

Here we can see what is (or should be) so devastating in Freud’s admittedly fleeting assertion of an intimate relation between technical mastery and dreams of omnipotence, one grounded in a transhistorical developmental need: to increase one’s “likeness to God” the other. Technical mastery is never simply mastery, i.e., always already technical aggressivity,⁴² because it is bound up in an orthopedic quest to complete a being whose entrance into the world is defined by separation and lack (which is the same thing as saying: a quest to avoid oedipal defeat).⁴³ In articulating this idea in the previous section, I was attempting to formulate a coherent version of the, in truth, rather old idea that technology might serve as a medium of aggressive sublimation,⁴⁴ one with which Marcuse tarries in dismissal.

Within the context of his work on technology that I have just briefly outlined, one can see the source of neurotic misery: the viability of Marcuse’s theory of liberation depends upon technical mastery being a mere channel for aggressive energy, that through which it passes, and not itself a sublimated manner of pursuing omnipotence. If the technical is always already technological, then no “neutral” condition of liberation exists, and, even more problematically, claims about “instinctual renewal”—for instance, that it is possible today for “an ever larger part of the instinctual energy that had to be withdrawn for alienated labor to return to its original form”—look themselves like manifestations of a technological drive.⁴⁵ What becomes clear in these theoretically ruinous consequences is that Marcuse’s varied confrontations with the possibility of aggressive sublimation were not secondary subplots in his works but rather compulsive returns to a traumatic notion that threatened to undo his entire project.

In the late work, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse would implicitly call into question his own technics/technology distinction through a critique of Marx:

Not just labor as the production of surplus value but even labor as the production of use-value, the kind of labor previously held responsible not for technological domination but mere technical mastery, is revealed here be a form of domination.⁴⁷ Even while advocating the “use of the achievements of technological civilization for freeing man and nature from the destructive abuse of science and technology in the service of exploitation,” the late Marcuse thus gives us reason to believe, against his own persistent assertion to the contrary, that there is no form of technical mastery uncolored by urges for domination.⁴⁸

With this unacknowledged self-subversion in mind, perhaps it is no surprise that Marcuse’s separation of technical and technological, and thus technical and human,⁴⁹ is combined, in a strange return of the repressed, with claims about direct identifications with machines. Extending Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to the late capitalist era, where machines become the primary bearers of this fantastic quality, he writes:

The relationships among men are increasingly mediated by the machine process. But the mechanical contrivances which facilitate intercourse among individuals also intercept and absorb their libido, by diverting it from the all too dangerous realm in which the individual is free of society. The average man hardly cares for any living being with the intensity and persistence he shows for his automobile. The machine that is adored is no longer dead matter but becomes something like a human being. And it gives back to man what it possesses: the life of the social apparatus to which it belongs.⁵⁰

It is one thing if all Marcuse wishes to provide here is an update to the theory of commodity fetishism; it is another, however, to claim that the machine is an object of identification, that it usurps the important developmental role played by other people. In his talk of an “automatization” of the superego, it is clear, unfortunately, that Marcuse has the latter in mind.⁵² In claiming that the superego is not merely diminished but that it becomes mechanical, that the superego, raised amidst “depersonalized images,” becomes a mechanized reinforcer of the status quo, Marcuse thus offers his own psychological explanation of the irresistibility of technology: if we cannot but affirm our technological culture, it is because the psychic agency that keeps us on the straight and narrow is just a series of “unconscious automatic reactions” and thus itself thoroughly technological.⁵³

Insistent as care providers today might be to subcontract their duties to devices, the identifications primary to psyche formation are, according to Loewald’s developmental model and indeed to all psychoanalytic theory, identifications with those care providers, and thus the medium of the internalized products of those identifications—the superego, for one—is unavoidably one of human perspective. Marcuse grossly overestimates the degree to which technology can replace personal relationships with impersonal images. The television in particular introduced a powerful new way to inculcate capitalist values and ideals without the mediation of the family, but to say that it “automatizes” the superego is to misunderstand the nature of its insidious effects. Rather than in positing a direct identification with technologies, the better path toward an explanation of technological fascination lies in the more traditional theory of identification with other people. One of the answers today to the question “What does the other want?” is, invariably, “To be looking at a screen” (or else, following the logic of the previous chapter, “Those same things that the people on the screen want”). Our objects of identification are not machines but people who interface with machines,⁵⁴ and thus the superego imperative today is not itself machinic but rather encourages us to be machinic, to be users, to be efficient executors of devices.

Where technology does have an influence on superego development, it is thus a mistake to say that it leads to “automatization.” The superego is not a “mechanism,” but the internalization of an identification from which the ego looks upon itself. It is thus not the television itself but the people who watch and talk incessantly of television and the characters and roles presented on its screen that siphon libidinal energy. Claiming a direct identification with machines is, in fact, a way of denying that technological fascination is a learned behavior: in the assertion that the appeal of various devices lies in their “spiritualized qualities,” and not in the fact that we are constantly talking about and using them, fetishism is reinforced, not penetrated.

Marcuse is ultimately more of a “topographical” than a “structural” thinker (part of the reason I prefer Adorno and Horkheimer’s more unfinished psychoanalytic work to Marcuse’s).⁵⁵ In his vision of an “objective administration,” there is no drama of conflicting internalized objects, only the elicitation of unconscious impulses and the increasing control and direction of consciousness. His belief, along with Stiegler’s, that “hyperindustrial capitalism hijacks infantile libido, which is normally invested in parents, directing it toward commodities, thus destroying the processes of primary and secondary identification, i.e., the psyche itself” is thus both exaggerated and theoretically regressive.⁵⁶ Part of overcoming Marcuse’s technological neurosis is to reject this simplistic topographical model, as Freud did, for one centered on real psychic dynamism, which means, amongst other things, admitting that it is not just the machine but we who propagate an unconscious technological fascination.

To sum up: the rejection of the possibility of aggressive sublimation leads Marcuse to argue for two opposing positions, one more optimistic and the other deeply fatalistic, both of which should be avoided today: on the one hand, that there is an aspect of technological development—the technical—free, at least analytically, from “human motivations”; on the other, that technological development has led to the “mechanization” of psychic processes, that our minds are being “automated.” Although it bears a tendency to stubborn repetition, the human psyche is not, and will never be, mechanized in the way Marcuse worried, given the nature of its formation.⁵⁷ This is not to say, however, that technical development does not alter the instinctual economy. With the concept of aggressive sublimation proposed here, I am trying to take seriously this possibility without then going so far as to say that the superego is itself being “automated.”

In chapter 2 I followed Loewald in arguing that Eros (whose genesis I have attributed to the sublimation of the death drive) is evinced by the use of words to reveal either a latent “thing” that unconsciously structures language use or else a “deficient word” that works to conceal its lack of referent. Sublimation, in this view, is the cathexis of language, the attempt to find drive satisfaction not with language but in language (I take this view of sublimation to meet the two criteria described in the first section). In this chapter I have entertained the possibility of a sublimation of aggressivity and must now confront the obvious conclusion that it is primarily in language that we see the effects of aggressive sublimation, in other words, that there is an intimate relation between technological development and linguistic practice.⁵⁸ Following through the logic of sublimation unpacked in chapter 2, we can tentatively envision this translation as follows: if, in death drive sublimation, the urge to union of subject and object is sought in the union of word and thing, then, in aggressive sublimation, the drive to subjective omnipotence and objective destitution characteristic of aggressivity similarly finds expression in a kind of dominance of word over thing.

In this view, Eros and sublimated aggressivity—perhaps the word Thanatos could be incorporated here—share the aim of seeking a secondary “wholeness,” just as the urge to union and aggressivity both seek a kind of tensionless repose, but, whereas Eros aims to find words for things and things for words, Thanatos aims to render whole by closing off investigation into unnamed things and deficient words, repressing anything that might threaten the cohesion of the present. It draws a circle around what is and claims it sufficient, everything else being extraneous or hostile to the current configuration of the ego.⁵⁹ What is being entertained here is the following: that language is a medium not only to bring about better communication between unreconciled entities (its communicative function) and not only to gain further mastery over one’s environment (its instrumental function) but also to silence, to engulf the other, whether it is a conversation partner or one’s own id, into nothingness (its aggressive function).⁶⁰

Marcuse himself devoted a large number of pages to precisely this problem: that technological rationality enacts a “closure of discourse.”⁶¹ To describe this “language of one-dimensional thought,” he employs three adjectives that adequately cover the effects of aggressive sublimation: “functionalized, abridged, and unified.”⁶²

1. Functionalization: The language of Eros, in seeking words for unnamed things and things for deficient words, necessarily transcends function and is thus seen from the functional perspective as strictly useless. The language of Thanatos, by contrast, is a language that serves the ego in pursuit of preestablished ends and thus one that works at the cost of investigating the purpose of working. It is the language of the subject oriented “straight ahead,” only reflective in its capacity to measure success or failure in living up to goals.

2. Abridgment: Similarly, whereas the language of Eros is drawn out, dwelling on words that have been condensed and deemed outmoded, and blindnesses where words fail, the language of Thanatos is stingily economic. Marcuse focuses his energy on a spatial abridgment: in the acronym NATO, for instance, one can see how the “language of total administration” serves to “repress undesired questions:” “NATO does not suggest what North Atlantic Treaty Organization says, namely, a treaty among the nations of the North-Atlantic—in which case one might ask questions about the membership of Greece and Turkey.”⁶³ I might add to Marcuse’s understanding of abridgment another feature: a temporal abridgment, an increasingly shortened half-life of words, captured in the pervasive term updating (which, as Christoph Türcke argues, has come “to be perceived as the essence of dealing with reality”).⁶⁴ In this dual spatial and temporal abridgment, language’s dialectical potential is subdued, as words both mean less and mean for a shorter amount of time.⁶⁵

3. Unification: Finally, while the language of Eros recognizes a noncorrespondence between words and things, the language of Thanatos stresses unification, by which Marcuse means not a dialectical reconciliation but the imposition of a false totality. One of the ways in which this unification is accomplished is by prepackaging phrases so that they already contain their own judgment: contradictions that were once inimical to logical thought are reified in constructions like “clean bomb” and “harmless fall-out”;⁶⁶ words are given a false familiarity through personalization (“It is ‘your’ congressman, ‘your’ highway, ‘your’ favorite drugstore, ‘your’ newspaper, it is brought to ‘you,’ it invites ‘you,’ etc.”).⁶⁷ The space for assessment is closed once the object is already characterized as “clean” or “harmless” or “mine;” things are “pre-judged,” already processed for consumption, requiring no work to be metastasized by the subject. A unified language gives answers to “questions in advance of their being posed.”⁶⁸ What is eliminated in this transformation is the space between the “is” and the “ought” designated by concepts, and thus the possibility of dialectical movement. In Marcuse’s words, technological rationality “leaves no space for distinction, development, differentiation of meaning: it moves and lives only as a whole.”⁶⁹

These three features combine in Thanatos to rein in the self-undermining thrust of language, to rob language of its capacity to point beyond itself.⁷⁰ While Eros, working through the superego, challenges the ego to push beyond the fragile boundaries of its own world, Thanatos presents the ego with a clear path to anxiously pursue and a unified world whose loose ends have been neatly tied off, thus leading to the “affirmation and intellectual duplication of what exists anyway.”⁷¹

In this view, language is not a medium with an “inherent telos” but the site of a struggle between competing instinctual interests.⁷² Whatever “resources” it contains for rendering ourselves “communicatively fluid” are always in competition with other resources that work against that fluidity.⁷³ It is a widely accepted point amongst critical theorists after the communicative turn that the first-generation Frankfurt school thinkers generally confused reified language for language as such.⁷⁴ Given the fact that they preempted quite explicitly the turn to intersubjectivity and ordinary language philosophy,⁷⁵ it might be better to see them as asserting that the dialectical possibility implied in all language use is something that can go away and, in fact, is going away. Distinguishing between the languages of Eros and Thanatos is one way to codify theoretically the great alarm and urgency with which they greeted this eclipse. For the Frankfurt school, the ultimate question concerning language is the same one that Freud asks of civilization: not “What is its value?” but rather “With what success will Eros combat Thanatos?”⁷⁶

What is perhaps most remarkable about late capitalist society is its provision of the means, on the one hand, to sublimate aggressivity, to technologically shore up the self and silence the other, and, on the other, to gratify the death drive in fantasy, to “lose oneself” in a confusion of subject and object. Though it is by no means the only experience wherein one finds a conjunction of self-erasure and omnipotence, I have in mind the paradigmatic case of using a smart phone, the technology that is for our current regime of capital accumulation what the automobile was for the Fordist-Keynesian era.⁷⁷ On a smart phone, I feel capable of doing just about anything with a touch of a button, and yet, at the same time, the activity enabled by smart phone use gives rise to experiences distinctly lacking in self-presence. Either I am in control or I am absent: this oscillation between “the two alternatives of no-self and all-self,” characteristic of what Isaac Balbus calls the “infancy of modernity,” defines subjection in late capitalism.⁷⁸

Although I have tied technical development to aggressivity in a way that Marcuse doggedly avoided, I am not denying that increased technical mastery creates new possibilities that can be exploited to varying ends, only that that exploitation could ever be liberating without first working over our investments in that mastery. In itself, the view that technics is always already technological is no more pessimistic than the idea that art is not the product of a free creator but a libidinal sublimate or that the way in which we love is unavoidably structured by past relationships. That we are driven in a particular way does not preclude the possibility of coming to a greater consciousness about that determination, partially freeing ourselves of its influence and even harnessing it toward different ends.