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

5. As opposed to aggression (agression), which “originates in the frustration of a [biological] impulse,” aggressivity has its origin in psychic conflict. Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (London: Routledge, 1991), 38. Although this term is admittedly rather awkward, I find it better than Bruce Fink’s translation, “aggressiveness,” which erases some of the distinction Lacan was trying to impose. At times, Fink himself tellingly translates agressivité as “aggression”; see, for instance, Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 387.

6. The best treatment of these influences of which I am aware is Dany Nobus, “Life and Death in the Glass: A New Look at the Mirror Stage,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1999), 101–38.

7. Lacan typically situates the death drive in relation to the symbolic (“the death drive…is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain”), though a good case could also be made for its more essential relation to the real. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1997), 211; Lionel Bailly, Lacan (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 99, 140. Although I would agree that investigating these other connections (between Freudian death drive and Lacanian symbolic/Lacanian real) rather than the present one (between Freudian death drive and Lacanian imaginary) might more adequately elucidate Lacan’s own understanding of the death drive, this task, as I explain here, is not the one I take up in this chapter.

8. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 148.

9. Jonathan Lear recognizes this fact in “The Thought of Hans W. Loewald,” but argues that faulting him for this “grievous lapse” is “not a good way to read him:” “Rather, we should see Loewald as struck by the beauty of an ur-observation: that when human beings are located in a field of psychological complexity, there is a tendency for them to grow in complexity themselves. The differential in complexity thus serves as the occasion for dynamism. Psychological growth is regularly blocked, inhibited and sometimes attacked; but the tendency toward it is there.” Jonathan Lear, “The Thought of Hans W. Loewald,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 93 (2012): 178. It seems to me, however, that the theorization of a major developmental obstacle to this growth should be part of his conception of growth. Furthermore, it is difficult to avoid those passages where he goes out of his way to avoid any talk of hatred and aggression: for instance, in “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” when he interprets parricide (a rupturing of the “sacred bond” tying the child to the parents) in terms of guilt over one’s autonomy and not in terms of any aggressive urges.

10. What I say of the concept “mother” in n5 of the previous chapter goes here as well.

11. Lacan, Écrits, 75–76.

12. Lacan, Seminar I, 79. Or in Philippe Julien’s: “The mirror effects a victory over the fragmentation of the disjointed members and assures motor coordination.” Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, trans. Devra Beck Simiu (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 31.

13. Lacan, Écrits, 120. Although his exemplary case is a nonvisually impaired child before an actual mirror, Lacan would claim both that “all sorts of things in the world behave like mirrors” and also that merely knowing that one “is an object of other people’s gazes” is a sufficient condition of imaginary identification (and thus, contrary to the claims of some critics, that the blind do indeed have egos). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 49; Lacan, Écrits, 56; Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 153; Richard Webster, “The Cult of Lacan: Freud, Lacan, and the Mirror stage,” richardwebster.net, 2002, http://www.richardwebster.net/thecultoflacan.html.

14. Lacan, Écrits, 78. Without investing itself in this image, the child would lack a “bridge to the Symbolic” (Bailly, Lacan, 96).

15. Lacan, Écrits. 94, 92. Julien argues that around 1964, the function of the mirror stage is detached from the task of “mastery through vision” and situated in the gap created by the gaze of the Other (Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud, 161–62). As I will argue in a moment, Lacan was already focusing on the gap created by the gaze of the Other as early as the 1956–57 seminar, not as an alternative to the mastery paradigm but as a supplement to it.

16. Lacan, Écrits, 89.

19. Boothby, Death and Desire, 39. Boothby makes it seem as if the second interpretation of aggressivity is a gross misconstrual of Lacan’s intentions, but there are passages to support both positions: though there are times when he speaks of a “need to aggressively strike out at this ideal,” there are many others where he finds aggressivity in the pursuit of an ideal, most notably in “good-Samaritan” activities: “[aggressivity] underlies the activities of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer” (Lacan, Écrits, 138, 79, 81).

20. Ibid., 286; Boothby, Death and Desire, 45.

21. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 32. Cf. Lacan, Écrits, 55–56.

22. Bailly, Lacan, 36.

23. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre IV: La relation d’objet, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 186.

25. Ibid., 193. A child’s relationship with its mother is, according to Lacan, “constituted in analysis not by the child’s biological dependence, but by its dependence on her love, that is, by its desire for her desire,” spurring the child to identify “with the imaginary object of her desire insofar as the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus” (Lacan, Écrits, 462–63).

26. Lacan, Séminaire IV, 194.

28. Lacan, Seminar I, 81–82. Cf. “What the subject finds in this altered image of his body is the paradigm of all the forms of resemblance that will cast a shade of hostility onto the world of objects, by projecting onto them the avatar of his narcissistic image” (Lacan, Écrits, 685).

29. Quoted in Boothby, Death and Desire, 43.

30. Lacan, Séminaire IV, 194.

31. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 37. Samuel Weber and Jacob Rogozinski express similar concerns: Weber sees the symbolic as but “a lure of the Imaginary, the discursive continuation of the ambivalent strategy of narcissism,” and Rogozinski wonders “why we do not stop identifying ourselves with these scintillating figures that are projected on the screen of the phantasm or the scene of the Spectacle, as if they are projected on the wall at the bottom of a cave where we are held prisoner.” Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 98; Jacob Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to Egoanalysis, trans. Robert Vallier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 61.

32. Lacan, Seminar I, 174. He also asserts—misleadingly I think—“the earliest dissonance between the ego and being…to be the fundamental note that resounds in the whole harmonic scale across the phases of psychical history” (Lacan, Écrits, 152–53).

33. Lacan, Séminaire IV, 193.

34. Lacan, Écrits, 697.

35. In its baldest formulation: “a theory of human development in which a child’s relationship to a mirror is held to be more significant than its relationship to its parents is inherently implausible” (Webster, “The Cult of Lacan”). Borch-Jacobsen also accuses Lacan of eliminating the affective beneath the specular, which leads, in his view, to the “statue-fication” of the world: if only static, specular imagoes are at the root of ego development, the ego and its world can, in turn, only be static, rigidified entities (Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 59). Rogozinski similarly asserts that the neglect of the affective makes “the Lacanian body…always immobile, frozen, and petrified as if under a death sentence” (Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh, 57).

36. Lacan, Séminaire IV, 185.

39. Lacan, Seminar VII, 67.

40. Lacan, Écrits, 247.

41. Lacan, Seminar VII, 68.

42. In an early article, “Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual” (1938), Lacan himself sees both positive and negative sublimations of this bond. Jacques Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 35–36. As Borch-Jacobsen has noted, this article is remarkable, in general, for the way in which it very clearly describes an affective, bodily connection to the mother that both precedes and conditions specular identification (Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 66–71). Although I disagree with Borch-Jacobsen that Lacan eliminates the affective in his later work, I agree that Lacan would never theorize the affective in the same manner.

43. Lacan, Seminar II, 107–8.

44. Boothby, Death and Desire, 53–54.

45. Lacan, Seminar II, 107. About this, at least, he is correct: one shouldn’t give credit to Freud for imposing an alien theory upon his own.

46. See Paul Denis, “Emprise et théorie des pulsions,” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 56, no. 5 (1992): 1337.

47. What’s worse, he does so with a clean conscience: as he fathomed himself to be rescuing Freudian drive theory from a bad biologism, he felt free to impose. See Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 146.

48. Boothby, Death and Desire, 51. Weber connects Lacan’s mirror stage with the problem of mastery as it is discussed in the Fort-Da game of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but follows Lacan in seeing more aggressivity than mastery: “Active control, revenge, rivalry, and the desire to ‘make themselves master of the situation’ dominates Freud’s conjectures as to the impulses behind the playing of children” (Weber, The Legend of Freud, 95–96).

49. Lacan, Séminaire IV, 185, 169.

50. Lacan, Écrits, 574.

51. To review: Loewald follows Karen Horney in postulating a “dread of the vulva,” but we need not go there to affirm something like a “dread of union.” As the infant grows increasingly independent, and especially as fantasied mastery grows exponentially in comparison to actual mastery, the parent’s once helpful interventions come to be seen as impositions, arbitrary and threatening limitations on freedom and desire. This perceived impingement on autonomy is what I have in mind when I speak of “engulfment” here.

52. See Roger Dorey, “The Relationship of Mastery,” trans. Philip Slotkin, International Review of Psychoanalysis 13 (1986): 326 and 329.

53. In theorizing this “mechanism of defense,” wherein the infant “assimilates” or “identifies” itself with the “dreaded external object,” Freud explicitly invokes passages from Beyond the Pleasure Principle where her father describes the transformation of the passive reception of a threat into an active mastery over it. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, trans. Cecil Baines (London: Karnac, 1993), 110.

54. If this connection holds, then perhaps a better explanation of the overcoming of aggressivity can be tendered: if aggressivity has its energetic source in the urge to union, then the sublimation of the urge to union would entail a decrease in aggressivity. The “dream of absolute self-adequacy” would thus be abandoned for “an original being-at-a-loss” only when narcissistic aggressivity dries up at its instinctual source (Boothby, Death and Desire, 149). In other words, a drive for complete independence loses its motivating force without a drive for complete dependence.

55. In this view, it is not that all of the “statue-fied” features of Lacan’s world are products of identification with a fixed image, but rather that the infant comes to see the world in petrified form, and perhaps even comes to emphasize static visual representation over dynamic affective interaction in the first place, as a result of an aggressive overbuilding of psychic structure. In short, alienation follows from aggressivity and not vice versa.

56. With Greenberg and Mitchell’s claim that “drives, for Klein, are relationships” in mind, one might legitimately wonder if Klein belongs in this category. Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 146. This question deserves more space than I have here, but briefly: although Klein counters Freud in claiming that drives “contain objects as a constitutive part of their nature,” she does not explain why aggressivity seems invariably to be one of the two predominant “relational passions” (alongside love), and thus gives the impression that we simply are aggressive, even if that aggressivity is always elicited by and directed toward others. That being said, I imagine the Kleinian framework could easily incorporate the basic claim of this chapter: namely, that aggressivity is not an inborn response to objects but rather that there is something in the structure of the object-relation that necessarily gives rise to aggressivity.

57. See Jeremy Elkins, “Motility, Aggression, and the Bodily I: An Interpretation of Winnicott,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2015): 943–73.

58. As Eli Zaretsky represents his argument, Reich thought “sexual repression turned a neutral drive toward mastery into aggression.” Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage, 2004), 224.

59. See W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Tavistock, 1962), chapter 12.

60. “The intersubjective view maintains that the individual grows in and through the relationship to other subjects. Most important, this perspective observes that the other whom the self meets is also a self, a subject in his or her own right. It assumes that we are able and need to recognize that other subject as different and yet alike, as an other who is capable of sharing similar mental experience. Thus the idea of intersubjectivity reorients the conception of the psychic world from a subject’s relations to its object toward a subject meeting another subject.” Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 19–20.

63. Ibid., 32 (my emphasis).

64. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 114. According to Stephen Mitchell, “in Benjamin’s particular vision of intersubjectivity, minds tend toward an autonomous omnipotence in which other minds (and bodies) are treated as objects rather than as subjects in their own right.” Stephen A. Mitchell, “Juggling Paradoxes: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1, no. 3 (2000): 261.

65. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 88.

68. Benjamin discusses this kind of identification but does not attribute to it the same developmental importance: “The child may switch places with the mother, from active to passive. The omnipotence once attributed to the ‘good’ all-giving mother now resides instead in the child” (ibid., 38).

69. Mitchell, “Juggling Paradoxes,” 261; Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 55.

70. Ibid., 67. See also Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, 191. Responding to Stephen Mitchell’s criticism of her use of Freudian drive theory, Benjamin has since recognized that she “could have entirely dispensed with Freud in developing [the] thesis that the loss of intersubjective tension is like death”; see Mitchell, “Juggling Paradoxes,” 263 and Jessica Benjamin, “Response to Commentaries by Mitchell and by Butler,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1, no. 3 (2000): 295.

71. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 14:91.

72. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hokpins University Press, 1977), 148.

76. Girard presents the “double bind” of the human being as follows: “Man cannot respond to that universal human injunction, ‘Imitate me!’ without almost immediately encountering an inexplicable counterorder: ‘Don’t imitate me!’ (which really means, ‘Do not appropriate my object’)” (ibid., 147). According to the theory of aggressivity offered here, by contrast, imitation is the motor not only of the differentiation of I and other but also of the genesis of an external reality in which objects can be desired. If there is a “double bind” of imitation, it is that it is carried out in relation to an other that is both “other” and other as a result of projection.

79. Girard does, of course, think the Oedipus complex lacks sufficient explanatory power: in his view, it is simply “not functional. One does not really know why it should go on generating substitute triangles.” René Girard, “Superman in the Underground: Strategies of Madness-Nietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevsky,” MLN 91, no. 6 (December 1976): 1168. Whether we believe that our earliest relationships are unconsciously internalized, as relationalists do, or that drives are both formed in and survive those relationships, as I believe drive theorists ought to, a simple response is easily furnished.

80. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 155, 157.

81. Ibid., 219 and 215.

83. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1990), 393–94.

84. This essentially theological point is made explicitly so by John Milbank, who, in his own account of the vicissitudes of despair (liberalism, positivism, sociology, postmodernism), offers us a simple choice: the peace of Christianity or the violence of everything else. Against Girard and Milbank, we should see the choice between violence and peace as itself part of the Christian mythos. The “either” here is determined by the “or.”

85. To be clear, Girard thinks something like the Oedipus complex does indeed play out in childhood, but only because the parents are the content to the model of desire’s form; as Mark Anspach explains, “Girard’s imitating Oedipus is liable to find himself caught in the same triangle as Freud’s desiring Oedipus.” Mark R. Anspach, “Editor’s Introduction: Imitating Oedipus,” in René Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, ed. Mark R. Anspach (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), xxxvi.

86. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 89.

87. Bailly, Lacan, 87.

88. Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 137.

89. The symbolic might be said to find more equanimous expression for contradiction in the real through what Adrian Johnston calls the “transubstantiation of das Ding into die Sache.” Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 193.

90. Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh, 236.

91. In his most fully formed articulation of his understanding of aggression, a dense little piece called “The Use of an Object,” Winnicott argues that destruction is necessary to the creation of external reality. It is not, he contends (in much the same manner as Loewald), that the infant enters an already existent reality and becomes aggressive in butting up against it, but that external reality emerges in tandem with a mature “object user.” However, whereas Loewald thinks of emergence from the primordial density in terms of a process of coping and mastery, Winnicott, like Lacan, emphasizes the need for destruction: “it is the destructive drive that creates the quality of externality.” D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969): 715.

92. Without, of course, recognizing the source of its negative projection.

93. Wilfred Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” in Melanie Klein Today: Developments in Theory and Practice, ed. Elizabeth Bott Spillius, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1988), 1:96–97.

94. Bion, Learning from Experience, chapter 12.

95. To my knowledge, the phrase comes from Žižek, though the title of Lacan’s nineteenth seminar is “…ou pire.” Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2013), 88.

96. Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 106. Both Bewältigung and Gewalt harken back to the Indo-German root val meaning “to be strong.”

1. Freud himself makes the connection between money and feces in “Character and Anal Erotism.” Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 9:173. See also Sándor Ferenczi’s “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” in First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1952) and Otto Fenichel, “The Drive to Amass Wealth,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 7 (1938): 69–95.

2. As Adam Phillips argues in “Adam Phillips on money,” YouTube video, 44:35, February 7, 2013, posted by “E.W.R. Many,” https://youtu.be/K8wGZt-4ASg.

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 143–44.

4. For a variety of reasons, though the most important being that his interpretation of Freudian metapsychology is nearly opposed to my own. See chapter 5, n7.

5. This chapter might be understood as a response to Jay Bernstein’s assertion that “Adorno needs a social psychology—a workable conception of identification, internalization, projection, etc., in relation to an account of socialization and ego formation—which his own writings fail to provide.” J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 130. As opposed to more recent critical theorists like Axel Honneth, who adopt an entirely new psychological frame, I am returning here to the psychology that Adorno and Horkheimer themselves employed. It is for this reason that I consider this chapter an immanent critique.

6. “The strength to stand out as an individual against one’s environment and, at the same time, to make contact with it through approved forms of intercourse and thereby to assert oneself in it—in criminals this strength was eroded. They represented a tendency deeply inherent in living things, the overcoming of which is the mark of all development: the tendency to lose oneself in one’s surroundings instead of actively engaging with them, the inclination to let oneself go, to lapse back into nature. Freud called this the death impulse [sic], Caillois le mimétisme.” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 188–89.

7. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, “Odysseus resists Circe’s magic. And he therefore receives actually what her magic promises only deceptively to those who fail to resist” (ibid., 56). This reading accords Odysseus too much agency, as he is only able to “renounce himself” on account of the “moly” he receives from Hermes, but since my aim here is to follow out the implications of their interpretation of The Odyssey and not to challenge it, I will play along.

8. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: On Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 38–39.

9. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 54.

12. Ibid., 48. In truth, Adorno and Horkheimer are by no means consistent here: Odysseus is presented both as a bourgeois fantasy, embodying risk, the ruthless pursuit of self-interest, etc., as well as a bourgeois reality, representing as he does an “absolute loneliness,” a “radical alienation,” etc. (ibid., 49).

13. As Adorno writes elsewhere: “In his limitless and implacable demands the petty-bourgeois sticks his chest out, identifying himself with a power that he does not have, outdoing it in his arrogance to the point of absolute spirit and absolute horror.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 88.

14. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 254.

15. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97. The editors of Adorno and the Need in Thinking call attention to this passage for “anticipating the ideology of niche marketing by several decades.” Donald Burke, Colin J. Campbell, Kathy Kiloh, Michael K. Palamarek, and Jonathan Short, eds., Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 10–11.

16. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97.

17. According to Simon Jarvis, “the culture industry thus generates a world of false specificity in which the advertised uniqueness of an individual product—the distinctive individual voice of a new poet, the inimitable style of a star conductor, or the sheer personality of a chat-show host—needs to be foregrounded by the relentless sameness of a whole range of the product’s other qualities, from diction to typeface.” Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 74. The elimination of difference lies not, however, primarily with the “relentless sameness” imprinted on the product itself but rather in the nature of its production.

18. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107.

19. Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 9.

20. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 180; Theodor Adornoø, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” trans. Deborah Cook, Telos 95 (Spring 1995): 28.

21. I will use the term late capitalism to mean the era of capitalism distinguished by “the appropriation of all culture in the service of commodity production.” Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working-Class Consciousness (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 15. The period demarcated by this definition roughly corresponds to that to which Ernest Mandel assigns the term (the 1940s to the present), one characterized by the “historic defeats of the working-class by fascism and war,” “the acceleration of technological innovation,” and “the international concentration and centralization of capital.” Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London: NLB, 1975), 9–10.

22. As Robert Hullot-Kentor has argued along different lines: “The Exact Sense in Which the Culture Industry No Longer Exists,” Cultural Critique 70 (Fall 2008): 137–57. See also Deborah Cook, “Adorno on Mass Societies,” Journal of Social Philosophy 32, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 35–52. For rejections of the contemporary relevance of the term culture industry, see Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 8; Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 145.

23. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 206.

24. “Without material to negate, there can be no enlightenment” (Bernstein, Adorno, 95).

25. Butler claims that “thinking the theory of power with a theory of the psyche [is] a task that has been eschewed by writers in both Foucauldian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies.” Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3. True as this may be, the pretense of blazing a new trail here seems a bit disingenuous with no mention of the Frankfurt school.

26. I would include as causes of this psychic shift four broad, interrelated transformations of the twentieth century: 1. the movement of all work activities outside the home, resulting in the further separation of “public” and “private” life; 2. the rise of Fordist and Taylorist manufacturing practices that lead to the routinization of work, the dissatisfactions with which compelled workers to seek the relief of pleasure in their “private” lives; 3. the rise of a variety of industries (media, leisure, fashion, etc.) devoted to providing those pleasures; and 4. the socialization of education. Thanks to these changes, the family has ceded its economic and socializing functions to the workplace and the school, respectively, and “public life has infiltrated and transformed even the most intimate of private refuges.” Antoine Prost, “Public and Private Spheres in France,” in A History of Private Life, ed. Antoine Prost and Gérard Vincent, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap, 1991), 5:132.

27. In Adorno’s words, “the representatives of the new type are no longer individuals.” Theodor Adorno, “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie,” in Briefe und Briefwechsel, 8 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 4.2:453. “The psychology of the individual has lost what Hegel would have called substance.” Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 152.

28. Jessica Benjamin, “The End of Internalization: Adorno’s Social Psychology,” Telos 32 (Summer 1977): 44. One might think of the “end of internalization” narrative as the undoing of the “hothouse family” described by John Demos in “Oedipus and America: Historical Perspectives on the Reception of Psychoanalysis in America,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

29. Jessica Benjamin, “Authority and the Family Revisited: Or, a World Without Fathers?,” New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 48. This same critique later found a more deserving target in Christopher Lasch. Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, “Narcissism and the Family: A Critique of Lasch,” New Left Review 1, no. 135 (September-October 1982), 41.

30. Benjamin, “Authority and the Family Revisited,” 51.

31. Benjamin develops this critique further in The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 147–48 and 190–91.

32. Benjamin, “The End of Internalization,” 55.

33. Gillian Rose, “How Is Critical Theory Possible? Theodor W. Adorno and Concept Formation in Sociology,” Political Studies 24, no. 1 (March 1976): 74.

34. Ibid., 74. Rose’s argument preemptively defused the force of Michael Theunissen’s criticism that Adorno’s “absolute negativity,” in “surrendering to apocalypticism, cannot be realized in the medium of philosophical knowledge.” Michael Theunissen, “Negativität bei Adorno,” in Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 56; see also Jarvis, Adorno, 211–16.

35. The literal reception of Benjamin’s thesis has unfortunately been quite influential: Axel Honneth cites Benjamin to support his view that Adorno heralded an “end of mediation.” Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), chapter 5. Paul Piccone claims Benjamin’s article to be nothing less than “a systematic critique of the Frankfurt School’s reception of psychoanalysis.” Paul Piccone, “General Introduction,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 2005), xxi.

36. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 274.

37. Max Horkheimer, “Authoritarianism and the Family Today,” in The Family: Its Function and Destiny, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper, 1949), 365–66.

38. According to Horkheimer, “the only dictatorship in recent times, the Third Reich, which tried to dispense systematically with any mediation between the individual and the state and to push Jacobinism to the extreme, has failed” (ibid., 362). I take this to be a point more about the persistence of mediation than about the failure of the Third Reich.

39. Adorno, “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie,” 454.

40. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and Others (New York: Continuum, 1999), 57.

41. Horkheimer, “Authoritarianism and the Family Today,” 362–63.

42. David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xxix. “To think that the individual is being liquidated without trace is over-optimistic” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 135).

43. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 167.

44. Jarvis, Adorno, 27.

45. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 148.

46. Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. James Ingram and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 77–78.

47. Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction, trans. James Rolleston (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 48; Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 88.

48. A worry expressed in Iain Macdonald’s concern that “even if we dispense with the ideality of the past, it remains unclear how the ‘restitution’ made to the ‘damaged’ world could be anything but an attempted return to a prior engagement with nature.” Iain Macdonald, “Cold, Cold, Warm: Autonomy, Intimacy, and Maturity in Adorno,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 6 (2011): 671. Cf. Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 68.

49. Habermas characterizes mimesis as an irrational and quasi-mystical “mindfulness” of nature in which there is no place for the exercise of human reason and its supposed conceptual “violence.” Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 1:366–99. Honneth similarly describes mimesis as involving a “prereflective desire to be freed from conditions that fetter our potential for imitative reason” (Honneth, Pathologies of Reason, 69). Allen Dunn and Joel Whitebook offer similar criticisms: Dunn faults Adorno for confusing “the stimulating tremor that strengthens the ego even as it breaks its boundaries” (what I call “postoedipal mimesis” here) and “the suffering that remembers a unity of subject and object” (“preoedipal mimesis”), and Whitebook laments the identification of la promesse de bonheur with “the complete jouissance that would result from loss of ego, de-differentiation and merger.” Allen Dunn, “The Man Who Needs Hardness: Irony and Solidarity in the Aesthetics of Theodor Adorno,” in Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism, ed. Peter Freese (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1990), 483; Joel Whitebook, “From Schoenberg to Odysseus: Aesthetic, Psychic, and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer,” New German Critique 58 (Winter 1993): 49.

50. The “priority of the object” should not be confused with a “naïve realism”: in Adorno’s work, there is a reciprocity between subject and object, meaning that the object is determined in part by its conceptual determinations. Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004): 48–50. Thus, the “priority of the object” does not mean hypostasizing the object; this priority is rather “the corrective of the subjective reduction, not the denial of a subjective share.” Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 250. It should thus be kept in mind throughout that a critical realism is being defended here.

52. Ibid., 254. Just before this, Adorno relates this “knowledge” (Erkenntnis) to the subject’s “experience” (Erfahrung). Cf. “He who wishes to know [erfahren] the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15).

53. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 365; Adorno, Critical Models, 247.

54. Bernstein, Adorno, 456. I take Adorno’s assertion that childhood mistakes serve as “the model of experience” to mean that preoedipal mimesis serves as the model of postoedipal mimesis; this is how I understand Adorno’s claim that “nonidentity is the secret telos of identification” and Bernstein’s own claim that “reflective judgment is the heir of mimetic understanding” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 373; ibid., 149; Bernstein, Adorno, 312). It is important to emphasize, however, that those mistakes are not themselves real Erfahrungen, which are possible only “in the medium of conceptual reflection” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 13). According to Anke Thyen, the experience (Erfahrung) that is the fruit of negative dialectics is “a discursive, i.e. reflection-led and reflection-determined, experience obtained from a manner of appropriating possible objects of reflection in such a way that the indissolubility of the object is preserved as its freedom.” Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Erfahrung: Zur Rationalität des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 213.

55. See Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), chapter 1.

56. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 44–45; Jarvis, Adorno, 31.

57. Theodor Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology, Part 1,” New Left Review 1, no. 46 (November-December 1967): 80; Adorno, The Culture Industry, 121; Hans Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 47.

58. Bernstein, Adorno, 396. Adorno wrote often of a hardened coldness in the face of suffering, an idea one also finds in Wilhelm Reich. Theodor Adorno, “The Problem of the New Type of Human Being,” in Current of Music, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 466; Wilhelm Reich, “The Characterological Mastery of the Oedipus Complex,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 12 (1931): 454. This coldness is a function of having been “broken in on” by reality, a traumatic breach that leads to excessive protective structure building, or, in this new formulation, ego rigidity. Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 193; Adorno, “The Problem of the New Type of Human Being,” 463.

59. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 118; Adorno, Minima Moralia, 184. It is for this reason that I find the “tension” model of therapeutic success to suit Adorno’s project much better than the “integration” model, one that he relied upon at times and of which he was relentlessly critical at others. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 234; Theodor Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology, Part II,” New Left Review 1, no. 47 (January-February 1968): 83. One might see the tension model already at work in his opposition of a weak ego not to a strong ego but to a “firm ego,” one constituted by a strong “inner tension.” Theodor Adorno and Hellmut Becker, “Education for Autonomy,” Telos 56 (Summer 1983): 108.

60. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 95.

61. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 68.

62. Bernard Stiegler, “The Time of Cinema: On the ‘New World’ and ‘Cultural Exception,’” Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology 4 (Spring 1998): 62.

63. Cf. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 140.

64. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 139, 142.

65. Adorno gets part of the way here when he writes that “people compensate for social powerlessness, which goes to the root of individual drives and conscious motives as well as guilt feelings because they are not what they should be and do not do what they should do according to their self-image. They compensate by turning themselves either in fact or imagination into members of something higher and more encompassing to which they attribute qualities which they themselves lack and from which they profit by vicarious participation” (Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” 32–33).

66. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 183. Sherry Turkle similarly speaks of the “flow state” allowed by computer-mediated interaction, wherein “you are able to act without self-consciousness.” Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 226.

67. Stiegler, “The Time of Cinema,” 62, 64.

68. Ibid., 64. Cf. Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Karnac, 2004), 241.

69. Skeptics of the problematic of “escapism”—that we go to the movies to “escape” real life—often prefer to see the products of the culture industry (especially as it has evolved, with its first-person role-playing games and social networking sites) as providing forums for self-expression and not self-forgetting; see, for instance, Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 27. According to the drive theory articulated in the previous chapters, the alternative is a false one: fantasied identifications no doubt make possible unexplored forms of self-relating as well as contribute to who we become inasmuch as they fail but leave behind a residue as internalizations, but they are also, as I argued in chapter 2, the primary means of escape from oneself. For Loewald, the desperate child turns to the fantasy of directly being the other half in the primordial bond—the Ur-fantasy, upon which all subsequent fantasies are modeled—as a confused way of reversing the process of individuation. While the specific content of fantasy obviously has a great deal to do with self-formation and expression, the very act of fantasying is secondary to the instinctual need that engenders it, and it is this need that I am associating here with “losing oneself.” Thus while film, in particular, bears the astonishing ability to transport audiences to strange realities, one that lends the culture industry the awesome power of managing public fantasies, the need for the fantasies it engenders stems from an overwhelming urge to overcome separation and thereby no longer be oneself. Fruitful as a “second life” might be as a form of self-expression, it is also “a way out for those who confront the severe limitations of corporate ideology, determining social structures, and the physical body itself,” which, again, is in itself neither a negative nor a positive phenomenon. Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 122.

70. Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture, 31. “The moviegoer…perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 99). According to Jack Zipes, “the inevitable outcome of most mass-mediated fairy tales is a happy reconfirmation of the system which produces them.” Jack Zipes, “The Instrumentalization of Fantasy: Fairy Tales and the Mass Media,” in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 101.

71. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 202.

72. Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Hullot-Kentor, Current of Music, 309. In Gunster’s words, there is an exchange of “unfulfilled longing for the pleasures of immediate satisfaction” (Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture, 33). The choice of psychopharmaceuticals over psychotherapy for the treatment of say, anxiety, is illustrative here: one is actually relieved of a particular psychic pain, but only at the cost of working through the source of that pain and thus the possibility of lasting (nonmedicated) relief from it.

73. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, 38.

74. Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture, 59; Adorno, The Culture Industry, 39.

75. Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture, 60–61.

76. As Douglas Kellner argues, the Frankfurt school meant by “false needs” those whose “satisfaction provide[s] momentary pleasure [and which] perpetuate a system whose continuation impedes the fulfillment of individual and social needs and potentials.” Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 244.

77. Theodor Adorno, Critical Models, 55. Adorno succinctly states the kind of happiness attained here “is to actual happiness what unemployment is to the abolition of work” (Adorno, “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie,” 459).

78. Adorno himself was highly sensitive to the fact that the “escape” provided by the culture industry was far from simple “ersatz satisfaction”: in his own words, “people are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them…. Without admitting it they sense their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all” (Adorno, The Culture Industry, 103).

79. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 136.

80. “The very fact that people suffer from universal manipulation is used for manipulation. People’s sincerest feelings are being perverted and gratified by swindle.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 20.1:284.

81. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xix; Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” 27.

82. Adorno, Critical Models, 55.

83. In response to the concern about the negative connotations of this phrase, I can only say that I hope to have done enough in the first three chapters to convince the reader that the drive toward the breaking down of self/other boundaries characteristic of the death drive has, in itself, no negative valence and is in fact a positive phenomenon inasmuch as it is part and parcel of an adequate “holding environment.” In this view, “losing oneself” is not an evasion of some authentic oneness with oneself; it is, on the contrary, the manifestation of a primary psychic need.

84. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 112, 107, 49. A good argument could be made that psychoanalysis itself proved to be another branch of the culture industry (psychoanalysis to “lose oneself” in the “archaic depths” of the psyche…), though I would not go so far as to dub psychoanalysis the spirit of late capitalism; see Eli Zaretsky, “Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Constellations 15, no. 3 (2008): 366–81.

85. Otto Fenichel, “Ego Strength and Ego Weakness,” in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel (New York: Norton, 1954).

86. It would be incorrect, for instance, to say that an overly militarized nation was “weak”; though one could certainly trace back that militarization to concerns about security that stemmed from an internal “weakness,” the nation itself is still strong, and, indeed, too strong.

87. Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture, 53.

88. “Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 40).

89. They “see the world as it is, but pay the price of no longer seeing how it could be” (Adorno, “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” 466).

90. Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 113. It is this conception of society as necessarily producing lies that Adorno claims “has a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 43).

91. The relation between this new anthropological type and what Lacan calls the “subject of science,” the subject that succeeds the “alienated” subject in the era of preventive normalization following a “decline of paternal imagoes,” is in need of further investigation. Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 485.

92. Adorno, “Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie,” 468. Thanks to Lisa Cerami for walking me through the intricacies of this phrase.

94. Adorno approvingly cites Simmel’s idea that ego immaturity stems from superego weakness in Adorno, Critical Models, 386; see also Ernst Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), 49.

95. No doubt Adorno would have been initially hostile to the move I am making here: following Freud, he saw in the superego nothing but “blindly, unconsciously internalized social coercion” and lamented the attempt to distinguish good and bad forms of the superego (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 272; see also Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology, Part II,” 82). What Adorno laments in this distinction is the attempt to separate good forms of social coercion from bad ones. What I am doing in this chapter and the next, by contrast, is separating that part of the superego that serves social coercion from that part that resists it. More generally, however, I find that the “integration” model of therapeutic success (wherein the ego purges itself of the superego) that Adorno relies upon to launch this critique of revisionist psychoanalysts fits his general project quite poorly (see n59). If we admit, as he does, that the ego’s “reality testing” is no socially neutral function, the call to “raze” the agency that criticizes the ego should look quite frightening.

96. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 207.

97. Corresponding roughly to what Adorno called “reflex-like” thinking and real reflexivity. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 209.

98. Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 45.

99. Jonathan Lear, “A Lost Conception of Irony,” berfrois, January 12, 2012, http://www.berfrois.com/2012/01/jonathan-lear-lost-conception-irony/.

100. Ibid. Lear emphasizes that this critical distance is not “disenchantment with given social pretenses” but rather a “committed questioning” (Lear, A Case for Irony, 38).

101. Lear himself is skeptical of the idea that the superego could be an agent of ironic reflection: “while the ego may be considered a faculty of pretense—governing how we put ourselves forward in the world—the idea that the superego in any of its guises might be a faculty for pretense-transcending aspiring would be met by Freud with skepticism bordering on derision. Far from being a faculty of pretense-transcendence, the superego is dedicated to keeping us in line” (ibid., 45). I have addressed this concern in the conclusion of chapter 2.

103. Lear, “A Lost Conception of Irony” and A Case for Irony, 32.

104. In one of their pithier quotables, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that “the culture industry does not sublimate; it suppresses” (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 111). While this is not exactly inaccurate, it might be more precise to say: “the culture industry does not sublimate; it manages gratification as a means of curbing sublimation.”

105. Marx, Capital Volume One, 792–93.

106. One of the primary objections to the “end of internalization” thesis is that it cannot explain breaks from increasing homogeneity: in other words, it does quite well with the drab conformism of the forties and fifties, but cannot explain the emergence of sixties counterculture. According to Douglas Kellner, Adorno’s “theoretical optic cannot adequately account for the genesis and popularity of many forms of popular music such as the blues, jazz, rock and roll, punk, and other forms of music connected with oppositional subcultures.” Douglas Kellner, “Theodor W. Adorno and the Dialectics of Mass Culture,” in Gibson and Rubin, Adorno: A Critical Reader, 101. I believe that this new problematic of “losing oneself” and “living straight ahead” helps here: the failure of the culture industry that the critical theorists knew and despised (the industry of the forties) was that it did not provide enough incentive for “living straight ahead,” that its “immediate satisfactions” were insufficient to compensate for the conformity demanded. The sixties might then be seen coming to its aid: in forging more powerful modes of “losing oneself,” whether through political “joining” or LSD, “counterculture” proved itself only a temporary trial run; its “explosiveness” would soon be appropriated to serve commodity production. I would hope that the history of the “oppositional subcultures” mentioned by Kellner serves as evidence of this point and, more generally, to tame the uncritical assumption that we ought always to attend to a “work’s contradictions, critical or oppositional moments, or potential to provide insight into social conditions or to elicit a critical response” (ibid., 101).

107. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 116 (my emphasis). They continue: “Once, film spectators saw their own wedding in that of others. Now the happy couple on the screen are specimens of the same species as everyone in the audience” (ibid., 116).

108. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, part 3.

109. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 49; Helga Nowotny, “From the Future to the Extended Present,” in The Formulation of Time Preferences in a Multidisciplinary Perspective, ed. Guy Kirsch, Peter Nijkamp, and Klaus Zimmermann (Aldershot: Avebury, 1988), 27.

110. It is thus unnecessary for the culture industry to propagate “an anti-utopian, intrinsically conservative image of human nature” in order to convince us that strong social forces are needed to curb “submerged destructive forces lying just beneath consciousness” (Aronowitz, False Promises, 113). The culture industry works just as well with a utopian image (see, for instance, The Matrix series). Its force lies not in its content, overt or covert, but in the kind of identification it makes possible, which can take place within a wide variety of narratives.

111. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow, Telos 31 (March 1977): 129.

112. Jay, Marxism and Totality, 209.

113. Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, 112–13. Compare with the twenty-year-old Horkheimer’s longing for a different existence: “By my craving for truth will I live, and search into what I desire to know; the afflicted will I aid, satisfy my hatred against injustice, and vanquish the Pharisees, but above all search for love, love and understanding” (quoted in Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 9).

114. See Martin Shuster, Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 134.

115. I do not believe there is any reason to believe, as Fabian Freyenhagen does, that “while Adorno seemed to think of the critical individuals on roughly the model of his own life, there is clearly room for extending the ambit beyond white males from a privileged background and educated in modernist high culture” (Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy, 179). Rather than open luck to other demographics, I am attempting here to do away with the luck altogether.

116. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 41.

117. Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 106. I thus take the following to be one way of addressing the problem of the “normative foundations” of critical theory.

118. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 4. “Conceited…is the illusion that anyone—and by this one means oneself—might be exempt from the tendency to socialized pseudo-culture” (Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” 37).

119. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 99.

120. Despite the fact that it was his intention to work collaboratively on an “open-ended” version of the dialectic with Adorno (which the latter eventually wrote on his own), it is clear that Horkheimer never fully understood or accepted Adorno’s emphasis on negation (See Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 68). Concepts like reason, truth, and the whole were generally less problematic for Horkheimer, ethical anchors in a fragmented world: “Harmony and significant existence, which metaphysics wrongly designates as true reality against the contradictions of the phenomenal world, are not meaningless” (Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 178). It is thus very difficult to see Horkheimer, who much preferred the straightforward march of ideology critique, following Adorno down the rabbit hole. Simon Jarvis recounts an occasion when Horkheimer, in conversation with Adorno about the possibility of a materialist dialectic, was “driven to an exasperated outburst: ‘So all we can do is just say ‘no’ to everything!’” (Jarvis, Adorno, 211). One might take the following passage from Minima Moralia, obviously written with Hegel in mind, to apply equally to Horkheimer:

Even when sophistication is understood in the theoretically acceptable sense of that which widens horizons, passes beyond the isolated phenomenon, considers the whole, there is still a cloud in the sky. It is just this passing-on and being able to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a through-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death for the sake of a reconciliation occurring merely in reflection—in the last analysis, the bourgeois coldness that is only too willing to underwrite the inevitable.

Adorno’s worry, in essence, is that anyone in rabid pursuit of wholeness, as Horkheimer imagined himself to be, will find himself irritated with the particulars along the way. Adorno thus does not, like Horkheimer, want to pit the particular (the resistant individual) against a false universal for the sake of a true universal but rather aims to turn the particular against itself for the sake of reconciliation with other particulars.

121. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 140.

122. Jarvis, Adorno, 202. What’s more, anyone who promises to get us “to the things themselves” in this way can only, in the present world, be hawking ideology. In essence, we have here Adorno’s critique of Heidegger (in his mind, the quintessential sick subject): while his impulse to break out of Kantian subjectivity is also Adorno’s, by denying mediation and desperately grasping for the things themselves, Heidegger ends up enthroning “the being-thus-and-not-otherwise of whatever may, as culture, claim to make sense” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 86). In aiming for a regression past subjectivity, Heidegger, with his desire to answer the “ontological need,” with his affirmation of the “purity” of being, with his immediate, visual categories, with his doctrine of “the ens realissimum under the name of Being,” and with his glance cast longingly back at Greece, provides little more than a new form of domesticated risk, and thus his philosophy is already primed for success on the market (ibid., 79).

123. I thus disagree, in both spirit and substance, with Robert Pippin’s assessment of negative dialectics: that it “seems little more than applying concepts in such a way that an asterisk is always somehow present or implied, as if to add to the invoking of a term such as ‘factory’ or ‘welfare’ or ‘husband’ or ‘statue’: Caution: Concepts just used not adequate to the sensuous particulars that might fall under them.” Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005), 105. I imagine something similar could be said of psychoanalysis: that its aim is little more than to bring about the realization “My understanding of my relationship to my mother is not adequate to the sensuous particulars that fall under it.” In both psychoanalysis and negative dialectics (which I am admittedly attempting to interpret as a historically specific mode of psychoanalysis), the aim is to bring about a real change in the way the subject relates to the world, though I suppose that neither will ever be immune from the charge that they are fanciful ways of leaving everything as it is (but with asterisks!).

124. Hullot-Kentor, “Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being,” 194.

125. Robert Hullot-Kentor, “A New Type of Human Being and Who We Really Are,” Brooklyn Rail, November 10, 2008, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/11/art/a-new-type-of-human-being-and-who-we-really-are.

126. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 197.

127. Adorno, “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” 468.

128. Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schröder, trans. Rodney Livingston (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 169. This reading would make sense of Adorno’s “wish that, as its ultimate act, the dialectic would cancel itself out altogether”: if “unswerving negation” could not recreate the kind of psychic tension that allows a non-projective, mimetic relationship to the world, then there would be no “ultimate act” of negative dialectics (Jameson, Late Marxism, 120; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 159).

129. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” 130. It is only the achievement of this postoedipal mimesis that would allow noncoercive communication. If Adorno was “hostile” to the “dialogic, communicative function of language,” it was because he understood, in good psychoanalytic fashion, that destruction precedes communication (and, indeed, the kind of destruction that may require the renunciation of communication as an aim) (Jay, Marxism and Totality, 272; Whitebook, “From Schoenberg to Odysseus,” 59; Bernstein, Adorno, 283). The problem with the communicative intersubjectivity that second-generation critical theorists suggest ought to replace Adorno’s utopian thinking, in short, is that it eliminates from the sphere of “social action” the act of self-effacement. We see in Habermas’s subsumption of the emancipatory interest he associates with psychoanalytic illumination in Knowledge and Human Interests to practical interest in his “mature” work the characteristic gesture of the communicative turn. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971), chapter 9. It is also noteworthy that power becomes “derivative from the more anthropologically basic communicative interaction” in this same move. Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 176.

130. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), 33.

131. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 39 (the original phrase deals literally with the relation to one’s home, but it works metaphorically as well). Andrew Douglas makes this same point—that Adorno’s dialectical approach is “germane to a particular historical moment, an approach that recommends itself in light of the contradictions that we now experience”—but is quite vague about the present conditions that demand this approach. Andrew J. Douglas, In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 81. The “redemptive energy” of dialectical thinking “in the face of despair” is not enough, to my mind, to justify its historical specificity (ibid., 65). In this section I am arguing that negative dialectics is not simply germane to but rather made possible by the conditions of late capitalism.

132. In addition to defending Adorno and Horkheimer against the charge that they, like Lasch, mounted a “reactionary defence of the bourgeois, patriarchal, Christian form of the family,” my reworking of their crisis of internalization narrative has addressed Benjamin’s criticisms of it in reconceiving of the superego as that which allows successful navigation of the conflict between tendencies traditionally associated with mother (union) and father (differentiation) and demonstrating that the weakening of the superego presents a unique opportunity for the achievement of autonomy (Barrett and McIntosh, “Narcissism and the Family,” 43).

133. I thus disagree with Stéphane Haber that Adorno “yielded to the temptation to exonerate retrospectively and strategically the bourgeois superego” (and also, relatedly, his literal interpretation of the end of internalization thesis). Stéphane Haber, Freud et la théorie sociale (Paris: La Dispute, 2012), 186, 231.

134. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 170.

135. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 66. Stiegler proposes a similar idea when he argues for the need “to produce a superego through the critique of the superego inherited from previous modes of life.” Bernard Stiegler, Réenchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 70.

136. Adorno admittedly spurns the idea that he is proposing something like “psychoanalysis on a mass scale,” which he deems “not feasible,” but at the same time claims that the attempt “to foster self-reflection in those whom we want to emancipate from the grip of all-powerful conditioning” necessarily involves “a substantial piercing of…powerful defense mechanisms” (Adorno, “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” 277, 272). While it is true that “abstract insight into one’s own irrationalities, without going into their motivation, would not necessarily function in a cathartic way,” since, as Adorno and Horkheimer themselves point out, the irrationality of mass culture intimately shapes our personal lives from an early age, I believe Adorno is wrong to downplay the psychological change involved in his approach (ibid., 279). In late capitalist society the critique of mass culture is a necessary part of “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.”

137. Aronowitz, False Promises, 119.

138. “There is no telling yet whether it will be a disaster or a liberation” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 346).

139. As I said in the first section, I am acutely aware that this narrative needs to be updated, and my aim here was to have laid a foundation for those additions. While I am hesitant even to hint at what they might look like, I can offer a brief note about how they ought to be formulated. The strength of the critical theorists’ appropriation of psychoanalysis was to have revealed a dynamic internal to psychoanalytic theory rather than to have simply “revised” Freud and criticized him either for what he supposedly got wrong or for being outdated. It is easy to gather a list of adjectives that the New York Times uses to describe “youth” (distracted, aimless, plugged in), compare this list to the psychological theories of Freud or the Frankfurt school, and conclude that the latter leave something to be desired. The more difficult task, and the one upon which the legacy of the first-generation critical theorists hangs, is to work within their theories toward the present.

140. I take the possibility of this transformation to be what Adorno has in mind when he invokes “the mass potential of autonomy and spontaneity which is very much alive” (Adorno, “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” 272). At this point, I hope it is clear that Shane Gunster is wrong to claim that Adorno’s “criticism of commodification leaves one convinced of its dangers but largely fails to explore any immanent dynamic within this social process that might play a part in its dialectical suspension” (Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture, 71). If the reification Adorno describes is understood as incomplete, as I believe it must (following Rose), then we can see dialectical possibility where Gunster sees none.

141. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, 203. This is also how I understand the claim that “the man who enjoys [happiness] is acceding to the terms of the empirical world—terms that he wants to transcend, though they alone give him the chance of transcending” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 374).

142. By which Adorno meant not self-sufficiency but proper object relation (what I am calling a capacity for postoedipal mimesis): “Detached from the object, autonomy is fictitious” (ibid., 223).

143. See Russell Berman, “Adorno’s Politics,” in Gibson and Rubin, Adorno: A Critical Reader.

144. According to Volker Heins, Adorno rejected both “decisionistic and moralistic conceptions of politics” in favor of a “democratic pedagogy” that “focuses less on the restoration of democratic institutions than on the transformation of the ideas and habits of citizens.” Volker Heins, “Saying Things That Hurt: Adorno as Educator,” Thesis Eleven 110, no. 1 (2012): 70, 72.

145. While I appreciate the desire to counter the picture of Adorno as pessimistic elitist, I believe recent efforts to recover a “democratic” Adorno—such as those of Andrew Douglas, Volker Heins, and Shannon Mariotti—overstate the case. Douglas, for instance, claims that “ordinary citizens must work on a mode of critical reflection that can expose and blast open the continuum of democratic apathy,” a statement that Adorno would find extremely suspect (Douglas, In the Spirit of Critique, 89). See also Heins, “Saying Things That Hurt” and Shannon Mariotti, “Critique from the Margins: Adorno and the Politics of Withdrawal,” Political Theory 36, no. 3 (June 2008): 456–65.

146. Freud, Standard Edition, 21:49.

147. Macdonald, “Cold, Cold, Warm,” 684. Adorno offers a very concrete proposal in Adorno and Becker, “Education for Autonomy,” 109.

148. Macdonald, “Cold, Cold, Warm,” 684. It is for this reason that I find it premature, though not wrong exactly, to portray reason’s “turning upon itself” as a “self-critique through which actuality can be reendowed with ethical substantiality” (Bernstein, Adorno, 233).

149. See chapter 3, n96.

1. “Mechanization…impinged upon the very center of the human psyche.” Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1969), 42. “Technology [is] deeply modified at every stage of its development by dreams, wishes, impulses, religious motives that spring directly…from the recesses of man’s unconscious.” Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 415. “Ecologists…tend to polarize their efforts on limited objectives without taking into account all the consequences of technology on the human psyche. Jacques Ellul and Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology, and Christianity: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 119.

2. As I suspect is also true of many of the readers of this chapter, I have been part of too many conversations where a seemingly thoughtful interlocutor transforms, in front of my eyes, into a human billboard: “Have you seen the new x? Have you heard that scientists did y?”

3. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 492.

4. Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 21:87–88.

5. See, for instance, his underdeveloped claims that “the mother is the goal of Eros and of the death instinct” and that “there are two kinds of mastery: a repressive and a liberating one.” Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 25; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 240.

6. Joel Whitebook, “The Marriage of Marx and Freud: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 89.

7. In this chapter I will thus not be directly confronting Marcuse’s own reinterpretation of Freudian drive theory, but I can briefly indicate the major differences between his presentation and my own. Whereas Marcuse interprets the death drive as a “result of the trauma of primary frustration,” I see it as that which is primarily frustrated, and thus as preceding the trauma that Marcuse contends is its source. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 139. Furthermore, whereas Marcuse, in articulating the historically specific possibility of freeing Eros from surplus repression, believes that a “strengthened Eros” could “absorb the objective of the death instinct,” I argue that Eros, being a sublimation of the death drive, always already has absorbed its force but with a changed objective (ibid., 235). Finally, whereas Marcuse expresses hope in the free thrust of the “libidinal energy generated by the id,” my own limited hopes lie in the liberating possibilities that attend instinctual frustration; which is to say, not in “exploding the reality ego” but in derigidifying it (ibid., 48).

8. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 13.

9. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Penguin, 1968), 198.

11. Freud, Standard Edition, 21:121. Erich Fromm rejects this line of thought:

[According to Freud,] the aim of the instinct is not weakened, but it is directed toward other socially valuable aims, in this case the “domination over nature.” This sounds, indeed, like a perfect solution. Man is freed from the tragic choice between destroying either others or himself, because the energy of the destructive instinct is used for the control over nature. But, we must ask, can this really be so? Can it be true that destructiveness becomes transformed into constructiveness? What can “control over nature” mean? Taming and breeding animals, gathering and cultivating plants, weaving cloth, building huts, manufacturing pottery, and many more activities including the construction of machines, railroads, airplanes, skyscrapers. All these are acts of constructing, building, unifying, synthesizing, and indeed, if one wanted to attribute them to one of the two basic instincts, they might be considered as being motivated by Eros rather than by the death instinct.

12. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1957), 3:493–94.

13. Freud, Standard Edition, 14:94.

15. And I do not mean simply that coitus leads to reproduction: in late capitalism, sexuality is deployed in myriad ways to promote commodity consumption.

16. F. J. Hacker, “Sublimation Revisited,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 53 (1972): 219.

17. Ernest Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1913), 426.

18. Hacker, “Sublimation Revisited,” 220.

19. Morton Schoolman chalks this fact up to Marcuse’s generally confused understanding of sublimation. Morton Schoolman, The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse (New York: Free Press, 1980), 107.

20. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 85–86.

21. Marcuse, Negations, 198.

22. “Assuming that the Destruction Instinct (in the last analysis: the Death Instinct) is a large component of the energy which feeds the technical conquest of man and nature, it seems that society’s growing capacity to manipulate technical progress also increases its capacity to manipulate and control this instinct, i.e. to satisfy it ‘productively’” (Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 82).

23. Freud, Standard Edition, 21:91–92.

24. Marcuse himself denies the existence of a force like aggressivity: “One can dispense with the notion of an innate ‘power-drive’ in human nature. This is a highly dubious psychological concept and grossly inadequate for the analysis of social developments” (Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 48).

25. According to Cornelius Castoriadis, “the idea of total mastery remains the hidden motor of modern technological development.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 192–93 (my emphasis).

26. Advertisements readily exploit this feeling: “convenience at your fingertips,” “fit for a king,” and, perhaps the most telling phrase, “with the touch of a button.”

27. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 159.

28. Marcuse, Negations, 153; Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 332.

29. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 238; see n57.

30. As Marcuse explains,

32. Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, 330.

33. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 56.

34. Ibid., 68. Following Gilbert Simondon, Marcuse thus thinks of liberation as a kind of completion of technics: “in constituting themselves methodically as political enterprise, science and technology would pass beyond the stage at which they were, because of their neutrality, subjected to politics and against their intent functioning as political instrumentalities” (Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 238).

35. “Now there is, in advanced technological societies of the West, indeed a large desublimation (compared with the preceding stages) in sexual mores and behavior…. But does this mode of desublimation signify the ascendancy of the life-preserving and life-enhancing Eros over its fatal adversary” (Marcuse, Five Lectures, 57)? In short, no: Eros is supposed to represent the individual’s autonomy from society, but “in the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. The conflict between pleasure and the reality principle is managed by a controlled liberalization which increases satisfaction with the offerings of society…. With the integration of [pleasure] into the realm of business and entertainment, the repression is itself repressed: society has enlarged, not individual freedom, but its control over the individual” (ibid., 57). Thus, in Marcuse’s view, both freedom and bondage today can be conceived in terms of desublimation; whereas one returns the subject’s drives, the other seeks further control over them.

36. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 162.

37. “The very judgment that the automobile is the most effective means of traveling from point A to point B structures in advance the visible and the invisible, what can be seen and what cannot. The most effective means of achieving a desired end, in this case reaching a destination, itself is a moment of world disclosure.” Samir Gandesha, “Marcuse, Habermas, and the Critique of Technology,” in Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, ed. John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (London: Routledge, 2004), 203.

38. In order to distinguish these two elements, Feenberg introduces a distinction “between the aspect of technology stemming from the functional relation to reality, which [he calls] the ‘primary instrumentalization,’ and the aspect stemming from its social involvements and implementation, which [he calls] the ‘secondary instrumentalization.’” Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 72. This distinction allows him to hold off both the constructivist reduction of the technical to the social as well as the naïve elimination of the social from the technical.

39. Andrew Feenberg, “The Bias of Technology,” in Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, ed. Robert Pippin et al. (London: Macmillan, 1988), 230, 238. Habermas understands Marcuse’s assertion that technology is ideology as meaning that “technocratic consciousness makes this practical interest [in “the maintenance of intersubjectivity of mutual understanding as well as…the creation of communication without domination”] disappear behind the interest in the expansion of our power of technical control.” Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 113. Habermas thus reduces the whole problem of “technological rationality” to a confusion of “technical and practical problems,” thereby conceding that “experts can resolve all technical questions properly and appropriately so long as they do not overstep the bounds of their authority and ‘colonize the lifeworld’” (ibid., 120; Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, 167). To ask more of technology—for instance, that it be “aestheticized”—would, for Habermas, be to seek the “resurrection of fallen nature” (Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” 86). As Feenberg and Kellner both argue, this move leaves “no room at all for the social dimension of science and technology” and is ultimately conservative in casting the idea of repurposing technological progress to the end of meeting human needs as “utopian speculation” (Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, 138; Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, 331). Kellner abruptly concludes that “Habermas and others who defame the notion of a ‘new technology’ are in effect capitulating to current forms of technology and labour as inevitable and inalterable” (ibid., 332). For a longer critique of Habermas on this point, see Ben Agger, “Marcuse and Habermas on New Science,” Polity 9, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 158–81.

40. Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, 29, 151, 153.

41. Bernard Stiegler, Réenchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 128.

42. In Feenberg’s terms, this means that primary instrumentalization cannot be separated from secondary instrumentalization even analytically.

43. Feenberg claims that “only in our fantasies do we transcend the strange loops of reason and experience. In the real world, there is no escape from the logic of finitude” (Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, xxiii). My claim here is that this fantasy is not therefore without consequence and that excluding this fantasy from our understanding of technology reinforces the very “neutrality” of technology that Feenberg rejects (ibid., 6).

44. For other articulations of this basic idea, see Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, 192–95; Anthony Elliott, Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 79.

45. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 39.

46. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 68–69. Thanks to Isaac Balbus for pointing me to this passage.

48. Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 60.

49. A separation repeated by Feenberg: “No doubt human nature remains the same as always, but the means at our disposal are now much more powerful than in the past.” Andrew Feenberg, “Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of Technology,” in Abromeit and Cobb, Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, 67.

50. Marcuse, Collected Papers, 1:47.

51. Marx, Capital Volume One, 165.

52. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 95.

54. See Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 266–67.

55. Indeed, he goes out of his way to interpret the structural model in dualistic terms: “Throughout the various stages of Freud’s theory, the mental apparatus appears as a dynamic union of opposites of the unconscious and the conscious structures; of primary and secondary processes; of inherited, ‘constitutionally fixed’ and acquired forces; of soma-psyche and the external reality. This dualistic construction continues to prevail even in the later tripartite topology of id, ego, and superego; the intermediary and ‘overlapping’ elements tend toward the two poles” (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 21–22). An adherence to rather than an ultimate rejection of the structural model would have led Marcuse to interpret advanced capitalist society not as one-dimensional but two-dimensional, fixed between the poles of a rigid instrumentalism at work (ego) and fleeting pleasure in one’s leisure (id) without the critical dimension needed to transcend this bipolar existence (superego) (see Marcuse, Collected Papers, 5:111).

56. Bernard Stiegler, “Spirit, Capitalism and Superego,” ars industrialis, May 2006, http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2928.

57. Exaggerating this claim even further, Jeremy Shapiro argues that the individual today is “no more than a unit or locus in a field of total design whose laws determine his or its meaning and our reaction.” Jeremy J. Shapiro, “One-Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience,” in Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse, ed. Paul Breines (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 166. As I argued in the previous chapter, I do not believe it productive to ape the Frankfurt school’s rhetoric about a total elimination of individuality when their own theories demand the assumption of the continued existence of (damaged) individuality.

58. Or, more precisely, that the problem of technological rationality is one of linguistic deficit.

59. Erik Erikson helpfully describes the difference between the different wholes sought by Eros and Thanatos in distinguishing between “wholeness” and “totality”:

60. To use Sherry Turkle’s words, the language of Thanatos “promise[s] relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all” (Turkle, Alone Together, 17).

61. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 172.

62. Ibid., 98. Jeremy Shapiro calls this the “universal semiotic of technological experience” (Shapiro, “One-Dimensionality,” 152).

63. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 97. In the era of text message abbreviation, this trend has reached somewhat absurd heights.

64. Christoph Türcke, Philosophy of Dreams, trans. Susan Gillespie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 239. Karl Korn analyzes this phenomenon in the phrase auf Draht, or “on the ball,” “up to speed”: today, “being well-informed, having one’s ears and connections everywhere, is crucial.” Karl Korn, Sprache in der verwalteten Welt (Olten: Walter, 1959), 86. One cannot be successful without being up to date, the concern for which is fueled by an anxiety over being left behind: “the phrase ‘on the ball’ will be around as long as there is a general prosperity that creates the illusion that an individual could escape the fate of the masses through information” (ibid., 87).

65. Cf. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), part 3.

66. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 92.

68. A phenomenon that Jaeggi calls “rigidification.” Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith, ed. Frederick Neuhouser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 59.

69. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 96. Cf. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 137–38.

70. Analytic philosophy, as exemplified in Austin and Wittgenstein, is a primary target of Marcuse’s, which, he believes, colludes with this closure: in Wittgenstein’s assurance that philosophy “leaves everything as it is,” one finds the essentially conservative nature of a “self-styled poverty of philosophy” that masochistically reduces speech to the “humble and common” (Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 182). This conservativism is exacerbated by the “therapeutic character” with which these philosophers conceive their project: “to cure from illusions, deceptions, obscurities, unsolvable riddles, unanswerable questions, from ghosts and spectres” (ibid., 187–88). Against this contemporary effort to reduce the scope of philosophy (and to thereby “cure” it), Marcuse upholds the difference between everyday and philosophical thinking (ibid., 183). The latter is preoccupied with the “question of universals,” with abstract nouns like “justice,” “beauty,” and “freedom,” all of which are not just components of everyday language games but rather “ideas which transcend their particular realizations as something that is to be surpassed, overcome” (ibid., 218). The persistence of these “untranslatable universals” in the face of linguistic instrumentalization attests to the continuing “unhappy consciousness of a divided world in which ‘that which is’ falls short of, and even denies, ‘that which can be’” (ibid., 214).

71. Theodor Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” Telos 95 (Spring 1995): 33.

72. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 1:287.

73. Albrecht Wellmer, “Truth, Semblance and Reconciliation: Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity,” in The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 20.

74. Joel Whitebook, “From Schoenberg to Odysseus: Aesthetic, Psychic, and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer,” New German Critique 58 (Winter 1993): 56.

75. See chapter 4, n129 and chapter 5, n70.

76. See Freud, Standard Edition, 21:145.

77. Nicole M. Aschoff, “The Smartphone Society,” Jacobin 17 (Spring 2015): 35.

78. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10. According to Balbus, “computer-mediated communication dramatically accelerates the compression of time and space endemic to modernity…and promotes the proliferation and intensification of fantasies of infantile omnipotence off which modernity feeds and to which it contributes.” Isaac Balbus, Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society (New York: Other, 2005), 117. Although I agree with Balbus’s basic argument, I believe it is important to distinguish, as he does not, between omnipotence and self-loss, and to see these features as equally prevalent in what he calls the “infancy of modernity.”

79. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 307–42.

1. The adoption of the term triangulation in recent psychoanalytic discourse reflects a desire to rescue the fundamentals of what Freud theorized under the concept “Oedipus complex” while discarding the reification of heterosexual complementarity; see Jay Greenberg, Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 180; Lewis Aron, “The Internalized Primal Scene,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 5 (1995): 195–237; Jessica Benjamin, “Response to Commentaries by Mitchell and by Butler,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1, no. 3 (2000): 306. My own way of doing so has been to translate mother and father into “other” and other, respectively, and thus to see the conflict that Freud assigns to two separate people as generated by the schizoid relation to one and the same other.

2. Le Gai Savoir, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1969; Neuilly-sur-Seine: Gaumont, 2012).

3. The figure above should thus be imagined as generally atrophied in the upper half, but more swollen in the upper-right quadrant.

4. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 21:166.

5. For sexuality as bodily pleasure, see the third section of the second essay of the Three Essays, “Infantile Sexuality” (Freud, Standard Edition, 7:183–85); for the importance of limitations, see the first section of the same essay, where Freud speaks of the “mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow—disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals” (ibid., 7:177).

6. See introduction, n43.

7. Leo Bersani, “Why Sex?” presentation, First Annual Conference of the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry, University of Chicago, May 17–19, 2013.

8. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 255 (my emphasis).

9. Claus Offe, “Technology and One-Dimensionality,” in Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, ed. Robert Pippin et al. (London: Macmillan, 1988), 218.

10. Herbert Marcuse, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2014), 5:223.

11. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 250.

12. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 135–36.

13. I would hope, nonetheless, that the possibility I have outlined in chapter 4 indicates that we have more to do than simply “drag” ourselves along “under the burden of what is.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 345.

14. I find this passage from Douglas Kellner to be remarkable in this regard:

15. It is for this reason that I am skeptical of Axel Honneth’s assertion that critical theory “cannot be maintained today in the theoretical form in which the members of the Frankfurt School originally developed it.” Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. James Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 42. Although I agree that their project needs to be updated, it strikes me as obfuscating to emphasize their essential outdatedness.