We have seen that there is a tendency in Marxist theory to fall into reified and abstract forms of structuralism. A valid emphasis on the system of alienated relations acting behind the backs of individuals comes to be replaced by a doctrine that structures exist and act independently of individuals. Not only is this view unintelligible but its political consequences are likely to be regressive. To hold that we do not deceive ourselves but that reality deceives us implies that we are absolved from struggling through the ambivalent vicissitudes and of our own lived experience. Since the structure of alienation is considered to be separate from us, a structure of real forces which we merely bear or represent in the world, it is these structures and not ourselves that become the object of theoretical praxis. We must discover the real character of this reified system and then oppose it. Is it idle fear that suggests that this perspective encourages the growth of an intellectual elite skilled in the comprehension and demystification of the real world, a cadre of theorists charged with the revelation of reality. But Marx spoke not only of structures “behind our backs”; he spoke also of underlying realities “in the depths” of our beings.
Structures do not act; only human beings act. That human activity under capitalism is incompletely human, that it is the semblance of purpose, freedom, and self-determination, dominated by the reality of needful compulsion, is the heart of Marx’s contention. “Semblance,” however, is a very dangerous term. What it means in the dialectical tradition to which Marx was committed is the adumbration of a more complete and perfect conclusion, not a thoroughly disfigured appearance ontologically divided from its essence. So, under capitalism we do in fact act with some intention, purpose, and power. But it is always less titan we propose and ultimately displaced. That is, our intentions do not reach the ends we have translucently prefigured.
If, however, we were to misconceive ourselves as wholly acted upon rather than acting, not only would we render ourselves unable to comprehend the activity of our imminent reflection, but we would sever ourselves from any grasp of our own agency sufficient to make a transition to a higher stage of our lives a viable and intelligible potentiality. To so misconceive ourselves is to reify our alienation by having absorbed the mere facticity to which we have reduced the world into the very conception of ourselves. Fortunately, even such an act of self-mutilation is an act, and thereby defeats the possibility of its own fetishism.
However abstract and esoteric the structures of socioeconomic reality, or how buried and archaic the peremptory forces of the id, they are human constructs. To maintain that these forces are not voluntarily chosen but imposed is only to note the problem. It is the point at which a meaningful analysis must begin. Of course these curtailments are not chosen out of knowledge and power. But a process of social estrangement is simply one side of the dialectic of individual sell-estrangement. To insist on the role we human beings play in the expanding reproduction of our own alienation is not to collapse into bourgeois voluntarism, however, if that is the fear behind the flight into structure. For we do not understand what bourgeois culture understands by the notion of the individual as agent, just as we do not accept what Freud contended was the nature of the repressed unconscious. We know that we who reproduce the estrangement of the world and our selves are individuals who have been birthed through the filaments of social domination. We cannot help but create ourselves with materials bequeathed us from the past. However, every appropriation of the world and of others is simultaneously the appropriation of ourselves. I he world can be massively pressed upon us, but to be impressed requires our participation, however unconscious and compelled. Duress and even necessity are real, but they do not bypass agency. To be necessitated means that the only course of action available in the world is wholly unsatisfactory to our human aspirations. Even this most pathological situation does not elirni
nate agency, but merely indicates the severe contraction of the inhuman condition in which it is required.
Production does not only produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the form of a commodity; in conformity with this situation it produces him as a mentally and physically dehumanized being. ... Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity . 1
In the phrase “ self-conscious and self-acting commodity,” the whole of the problem of alienation is compressed. How we can be both human and thinglike is precisely what we need to make intelligible, and the arguments I have made on behalf of the conceptions of the repressed and structural unconscious, understood as estranged human activities, are efforts in this direction. Marx was speaking of the formal structure of capitalism when he wrote:
If I am determined, forced, by my needs, it is only my own nature, this totality of needs and drives, which exerts a force upon me; it is nothing alien (or, my interest posited in a general, reflected form). But it is, after all, precisely in this way that / exercise compulsion over the other and drive him into the exchange system [emphasis addedj . 2
But it is simultaneously true that: “Man is no longer in a condition of external tension with the external substance of private property; he has himself become the tension-ridden being of private property" (emphasis added ). 3
Capitalist social structures are relationships among individuals, separated from their understanding and control. Compared with reified forms of structuralism which misconstrue this point, Freud’s contribution becomes all the more attractive. For in the Freudian perspective every social phenomenon originates in the unconscious dynamic of its individual members. This is Freud’s strength and weakness. On the one hand, he does not fall prey to attributing independent existence to compelling structural forces. For he regards such forces as the sum of individual drives and his powerful nominalism thus spares him the confusions of structural reification. But this is precisely Freud’s weakness; he lacks an understanding of social relations and therefore of the social nature of “individual” existence. Consequently, his efforts at the demystification of personal experience always reproduce some critical aspect of that demystification, for he never escapes taking the consequence of capitalist individualism for its cause. The framework through which he reveals the reality of the human condition is limited by the inhumanity of the capitalist condition which is then mistaken for the human condition itself. So, while Freud eschews any assertion of the significance of social structure, he reproduces this very structure in his uncritical acceptance of the deepest aspects of the capitalist world view.
We noted in the first chapter of this work that Marx and Freud shared a profound mistrust of the common sense self-understanding of
everyday life. Both regarded conscious experience as the illusory representation of an underlying and distant reality. On the basis of our previous discussion we must also underscore the critical differences between their accounts ol the distinction between appearance and reality. The differences reduce to two: Freud’s individual vs. Marx’s social understanding of reality; and Freud’s anthropological vs. Marx’s revolutionary understanding of the transcendence of appearance. Of course, the two are linked.
Let us return to Marx’s phrase—“the phenomenal forms of essential relations.'' For Marx, these relations, properly understood, are the estranged powers of individual-social life. They are the logicalmotivational properties of the system of capitalism separated from their agents and standing over against them as powers beyond control or comprehension. Since human beings are the active concatenation of their social relations, and, consequently, of the logical structure of these relations, social structure and individual motivation are converse mirror images. Marx focused on structure and left the issue of motivation largely untouched, but this represents an absence in his work rather than a positive error. However if structure and motivation are truly dialectical concepts, it must be the case that in avoiding the issue of motivation Marx simultaneously avoided some aspect of social structure too. And we have already noted that his analysis lacks any real account of the embodiment of logical structures in the lives of individual men and women. Without a theory of motivation and its alienation we cannot grasp the active character of logical structures. Therefore treating human persons as the congeries of their relations will always appear to reduce them to those relations understood as an abstract pattern of merely conceptual determinations. In short, until the gap between real structure and phenomenal appearance, between essential relations and human motivation, between intention and consequence, is mediated, Marxism is left without a coherent theory of social alienation and its positive transcendence. Now, such efforts have of course been made, and every account which makes the institutions of daily life—family, media, schools, play, culture—intelligible in terms of the determinations of capital reproduction, and simultaneously, makes the movements of capital intelligible in terms of the transformations of everyday life, further completes the elaboration of a Marxist theory. Marxism is therefore an incomplete theory in practice, but not in theory.
Psychoanalytic theory is, however, fundamentally mistaken in its view of the relationship between appearance and reality; its project cannot be completed.
Before justifying this claim it is necessary to remove two sources of resistance. First, it seems difficult still for many to believe that Freud, who so often penetrated the surface of bourgeois pretension, could him
self fall prey to its deeper fetishism. I have already presented arguments that such was the case both in regard to Freud’s metapsychology and his clinical practice and I have nothing new to add to those considerations. I will shortly attempt to indicate how this semblance of demystification was achieved.
But there is a second source of resistance to the notion that Freud’s “uncovering” of reality was itself infected by a critical blindness. Freud s theory and practice are reflections of the alienation of capitalist life and, consequently, are consonant with its structure. Like every system of ideology, psychoanalytic doctrine both distorts and reflects the realitv it purports to disclose. Freud s misconceptions are the misconceptions that resonate through the structures of bourgeois culture. The mystification in which psychoanalytic theory participates is therefore more difficult to detect because its theory and practice are organized to treat a social pathology produced through capitalist exploitation with a cure that embodies the basic assumptions of the system ultimately responsible for the original disorder. There is consequently a certain correspondence between the alienation of capitalist society, which produces the human anguish that requires therapeutic “relief,” on the one hand, and the practice of psychoanalytic therapy— itself alienated in that its presuppositions do not transcend the social order that has produced the original pathology —which is the source of “cure,” on the other.
Psychoanalytic assumptions regarding human nature and its pathology are credible because they remain thoroughly isomorphic with the structures of the capitalist world. This is a powerful and disturbing fact which helps to explain why even those therapists and theorists who have substantial disagreements with Freudian conceptions tend to succumb to its perspective. For we have all been formed in the world to which Freud speaks and which speaks through him, and so this world, which is of us, speaks familarly to us through his theory and practice. In comparison with the weight of the world as it is, and as we have been deeply constituted by it as egoistic, privatized, consumatory, and vulnerable, the visionary outlines of Marx’s conceptions seem pallid and powerless, merely utopian conceptions which lack the force to dislodge us from the mass of the bourgeois gravitational field. So, while the vision of a new being resonates to something undeniable in our condition, it requires a willed defiance of the inertia of our formed being to remain loyal to its eschatology. It is only too easy to find Freud credible, however; his pessimism is the entropy of our alienation.
We can now turn to Freud’s analysis of the relationship between psychic reality and appearance and represent the Freudian conception by a diagram composed of vertical and horizontal lines intersecting at right angles (Figure 1). Above the horizontal is the realm of conscious ego, or appearance, and below, separated by the process of repressive
Repression
Appearance
Movement
of
successful
therapy
n
Conscious ego
Levels of conscious disguise
Censorship
Unconscious ego-defense mechanisms
Reality
Unconscious-id
Figure 1
censorship, is the reality of the unconscious-id. With the help of this simple aid it is possible to note both the contribution and simultaneous limitation of Freud’s theory.
Freud noted that as successful therapy proceeds, conscious experience becomes more transparent. The individual is progressively better able to draw the aspects of conscious experience and unconscious dynamics together. As awareness of unconscious forces deepens, symptoms gradually lessen their hold, the power of these forces diminishes and the self grows in and through its capacity to abandon defenses and reknit the sundered fabric of its life. If Dora’s consciousness was permeated with the effect of her denial of forbidden unconscious sexual longings, a successful recognition and real acceptance of these inclinations could be expected to transform not only her presenting symptoms but the pervasive character of her lived awareness. Every successful step in therapy would have brought Dora so much closer to her unconscious dynamics and would simultaneously have altered the manifestation of that dynamic in her consciousness experience. Still within the realm of individual experience, her awareness would have increased in lucidity.
A post-Freudian, Marxism must include this analytic insight and extend the Marxist definition of ideology. For there are two distinct levels of mystification, ideology and false consciousness: (1) the masking of underlying essential social structures through the phenomenal forms of individual life; and (2) the f urther distortion of that individual phenomenal realm through the mechanisms of defense. Marx used the terms “ideology” and “fetishism” in various contexts to refer to the first transformation. He was unaware of the second and, obviously, lacked any appropriate vocabulary.
For example, the fact that the deeply conflictural structures of capitalism manifest themselves in personal accusation and self-blame is an instance of ideological mystification—the masking of essential relations through individualized ideology. But, whereas Marx distinguished between “essential relations” and “phenomenal forms,” Freud established that individual conscious experience is itself the result of disguised defenses against these phenomenal forms. Marx s position is too simple. He knew that we do not understand the fundamental structures of outsocial world but he assumed that the phenomenal world was transparent in its own phenomenology. He did not realize what Freud so well knew—that individual conscious experience is the result of transformations of individual experience (“phenomenal experience”) beneath the level of consciousness. Freud discovered that there were degrees of mystification within the pysche of the individual. The fact that personal hatred, self-contempt, and guilt are themselves repressed and replaced by the conscious experience of love and self-sacrifice represents the work of false consciousness. Freud discovered this second process, which was a profound contribution to our understanding of mystification.
On the other hand, Freud believed that such a discovery exhausted the ground of mystification, and this was a profound error. The therapeutic movement which uncovers the unconscious dynamics behind false consciousness remains bound to the categories of the capitalist phenomenal world, because unconscious forces are themselves the transformation of reified social structures. This contention would, of course, have been vehemently rejected by Freud, who viewed his own contribution as the revelation of psychic reality in its essence. When Freud uncovered the repressed unconscious—the realm of instinct, primal memory, dissociated experience, and fantasy—he understood himself to have revealed the ultimate reality of individual life. I he truth of the claim lies in the fact that conscious experience disguises a deeper domain of unconscious forces. Marx had no sense of such a domain, which cannot be located in the Marxist dichotomy of structural social reality and conscious, phenomenal form. But even as a successful therapy proceeds to disclose the various levels of impulse and defense that rest upon each other down to the primary needs and vicissitudes of the individual,
it proceeds from the level of superficial bourgeois civility to the depth of irrational, individual bourgeois compulsion. That this “deeper” level is also constructed out of the contradictions of capitalist relations is beyond psychoanalytic understanding. But conversely, the traditional Marxist account never distinguished among levels of reality within the realm of phenomenal forms, for it mistakenly identified “phenomenal” with “conscious," a common misconception which it took Freud’s discovery to destroy.
When Freud reached the ultimate level of theoretical understanding or therapeutic disclosure, he believed he had traced reality to its root. In fact, he had passed from one stratum of individual psychic existence to another, albeit more profound, dimension. The structural logic of the social world, the system of compulsory and constrictive “domination” which defines the possibility and meaning of human action in capitalism, remained bevond his theoretical awareness. We have already noted in discussing the case of Dora that Freud often registered social facts whose meaning he could not integrate into this formal theory. In pursuing individual consciousness to its unconscious lair, Freud could not leave the terrain of the individual. As Marx lacked a theory of the individual unconscious, Freud lacked a theory of the social construction of the individual unconscious. So he was left with no alternative to the reification of bourgeois individualism whose consequences in the unconscious he mistakenly took for the original causes of social life.
The social distinction between appearance and reality is actually threefold, for it requires mediation. Between the social, structural unconscious and individual, phenomenal experience is the realm of the individual repressed unconscious. Marx moved mistakenly from structure to consciousness; his theory lacked critical mediations. Freud moved from individual consciousness to the individual unconscious; his theory lacked a critical foundation.