Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Freudian revolution: the uses of psychoanalysis
Adorno: The Authoritarian Personality, anti-Semitism and the psychodynamics of modernity
Written in the stars: Adorno on astrology
Contents
Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Freudian revolution: the uses of psychoanalysis
Adorno: The Authoritarian Personality, anti-Semitism and the psychodynamics of modernity
Written in the stars: Adorno on astrology
Marxism, of all the classical sociological traditions, arguably provides the most scintillating storyline regarding the ongoing, frantic expansion of capitalism. ‘The bourgeoisie,’ wrote Marx, ‘has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.’ From San Francisco to Sydney, New York to New Delhi: anyone shopping in a downtown mall, surveying flashy designer goods and hi-tech products flown in from China, Taiwan or India, would most likely agree with Marx’s assessment. What happens to people under capitalism for Marx is an extravagant inflation of sensory life and human desire, creating a sort of permanent revolution across society in which pleasure depends upon the continual accumulation of more and more things. People, simply, want newer and newer experiences. One can argue about whether designer jeans, mobile phones or iPods really constitute an advance in societal well-being, but the essential point from a Marxist perspective is that such consumption has today become perversely self-constituting, self-breeding, self-referential.
Next to watching TV, shopping is now the most popular leisure pursuit the world over. Think about that for a moment. Today, more and more people define their lives in terms of what they buy and what they own, and arguably more so than in terms of what they think or what they do for a living. In the new consumer society of the twenty-first century, individuals consume not only material goods but various seductive products and services targeted to the insatiable wants of mass society. Shopping in today’s free-floating consumer landscape – in which shops, services and internet sites are open around the clock – individuals go about trying to quench their insatiable wants in societies where there just seem to be not enough hours in the day. From online shopping on Amazon.com to Rolex watches, from figure-hugging Calvin Klein jeans to the ultra-fashion sportswear of Nike, from age-reversing cosmetics and creams to the designer clothes of Armani or Versace: the near-universal pursuit of shopping in the West has established itself as fundamental to experiences of personal liberty and human freedom.
The ascendancy of universal consumerism is a remarkable phenomenon. It has, for one thing, transformed modern societies away from industrial production (that having been ‘outsourced’ to other developing countries) and towards the post-industrial consumption of products, services and brands. It has also helped fashion a new set of social attitudes in which shopping has become redefined as an end in itself. Unlike Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic description of society as a trade-off in which people sacrifice happiness for security, today’s consumer society is all about instant self-gratification and pleasure. The freedom to consume, or so runs the global laissez-faire doctrine, is essential to how contemporary women and men consume freedom.
Yet there are powerful reasons to question the supposed liberty which arises from our culture of consumerism. Do so-called lifestyle statements – Apple iPods, Gucci watches, Mont Blanc pens – really satisfy our deeper personal strivings, or are they just a further stimulus to a society that cannot stop desiring to desire? How many online shoppers find that they really have more quality time available in their lives – for family, friends or meaningful pursuits? How many parents avoid spending time with their children as a result of our culture of shopping? And do today’s consumer industries – from travel agencies selling pre-packaged holidays to IKEA-inspired firms selling pre-packaged living – promote new freedoms or new insecurities?
One influential contribution to thinking about the societal consequences of advanced capitalism, and especially tracking the contours of the cultural and consumer industries that people must now navigate, is that of the Frankfurt School. Central to the parameters of Frankfurt School social theory is Theodor Adorno’s vision of the ‘administered society’ and Herbert Marcuse’s thesis of the ‘one-dimensional society’ in which individuals suffer from ‘surplus-repression.’ The work of Adorno and Marcuse is incorrigibly interdisciplinary (involving certain traditions of classical social theory, and especially Freudian psychoanalysis), purveying a view of society that may well be unrecognizable to many contemporary men and women who inhabit the fast-paced, consumer-orientated societies of today. Yet, as two of the most important German intellectuals of the twentieth century, their writings – and indeed the work of the Frankfurt School as a whole – is of profound importance for engaging not only with recent world history, but with the impacts of large-scale societal processes upon individuals and their private worlds.
The Frankfurt School, as it came to be called, was formed in the decade prior to the Nazi reign of terror in Germany, and, not surprisingly, many of its leading theorists conducted numerous studies seeking to grasp the wave of political irrationalism and totalitarianism sweeping Western Europe. In a daring theoretical move, the School brought Freudian categories to bear upon the sociological analysis of everyday life, in order to fathom the myriad ways that political power imprints itself upon the internal world of human subjects and, more specifically, to critically examine the obscene, meaningless kind of evil that Hitler had actually unleashed. Of the School’s attempts to fathom the psychopathologies of fascism, the writings of Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm particularly stand out; each of these authors, in quite different ways, drew upon Freudian categories to figure out the core dynamics and pathologies of post-liberal rationality, culture and politics, and also to trace the sociological deadlocks of modernity itself. The result was a dramatic underscoring of both the political dimensions of psychoanalysis and also the psychodynamic elements of public political life.
Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment
While in exile in the United States, Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) – a brilliant work of social theory that sought to grasp the dark side of the modern age. Written with remarkable philosophical range and sociological insight, the task Adorno and Horkheimer set for themselves was spelt out thus: ‘The discovery of why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.’ The hell to which the authors referred was the political nightmare they had left behind in Germany – the fascism of the Third Reich. But such was the increasingly comprehensive sweep of instrumental reason throughout modern societies that Horkheimer and Adorno also found signs or symptoms of fascist domination in liberal democracies too, especially America. In fact, the American entertainment industry – from jazz to Hollywood – was a fundamental part of this process of commercialized brain-washing, and thus indicative of the rise and domination of fascist ideology. The idea that enlightenment and domination are intricately interwoven lies at the core of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and is fundamental to the comprehensive sociological diagnosis of modernity that Horkheimer and Adorno expounded.
Reason is, of course, essential to human existence. With Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical theory, however, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and instrumental reason are revealed as having capsized into a form of sickness. Reason at its extreme limit, transformed into a mirror-image of the very madness it seeks to repress, is explored by Horkheimer and Adorno with reference to various definitions of the term ‘enlightenment.’ One key definition is associated with the variety of political and intellectual currents which shaped social upheavals in Europe, from the great French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Russian Revolution in the early decades of the twentieth century. This is the revolutionary idea of enlightenment as rationalist, republican and universal in scope. Another key definition springs from modern science, especially the age of discoveries and transformations occurring in science as a result of technological innovations such as the telescope, microscope, compass and clocks. In examining these versions of enlightenment reason, Horkheimer and Adorno observe a general shift in people’s attitudes towards their own lives, towards the lives of others and in the external world. Whereas traditional societies turned to mythology in governing human affairs, modern societies greeted the force of human reason as decisive. Such an emancipatory notion of enlightenment was essential, for both liberals and conservatives, to the supposed erosion of mythology – facilitative of contemporary developments in science, technology and the economy.
This modern idea – that reason destroys myth – is however nothing but sheer illusion, according to Horkheimer and Adorno. On the contrary, enlightenment and myth are closely allied. This means, however, that there is a secret complicity between what founds enlightenment – reason – and that which it seeks to overcome – namely myth. On this view, the rational becomes more and more entangled in myth, as the social order comes to define itself as enlightened. ‘In the most general sense of progressive thought,’ write Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating man from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.’ From fascism in Europe to commercialized mass culture in the United States, the Enlightenment’s promise of freedom had produced disastrous social consequences on both sides of the Atlantic.
‘Enlightenment,’ write the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘is totalitarian.’ From the rise of National Socialism in Germany to the culture industry in America, from Hitler’s annihilation of European Jews to the unparalleled destruction of modern technological warfare: enlightenment reason has failed the West and indeed humanity as a whole. At the core of this sceptical, indeed bleak, assessment of the modern age is the concept of domination. Whilst Horkheimer and Adorno do not define domination with any degree of sociological precision, it seems clear that they seek to underscore the power of instrumental, technological and scientific reason in the establishment of domination over the self, over one’s inner nature and over external nature and society.
The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society’s domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them. The materially considerable and socially paltry rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is reflected in the hypocritical propagation of intellect. Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (2002 [1944]) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, page xvii.
By dominating nature, argue Horkheimer and Adorno, society and social relations are secured, while individual identity is transformed from blind instinct to reflective consciousness of the self. This is, in effect, a shift from nature to culture. But in a tragic irony, the violence which wrested society out of nature turns back upon itself, mutilating identities and robbing people of possibilities for happiness and freedom. That is to say, the aggression, rage and violence which were initially necessary to protect the social order from the ravages of nature do not magically disappear once culture and political life are constituted. On the contrary, violence is written into the very fabric of social order; aggression strikes at the heart of every attempt by social actors to change the world, no matter how noble or high-minded their intentions might be. This means that the unstoppable urge to ‘administer’ society through the application of rationalist blueprints is always dangerously in excess of necessity. There is something delusional about the desire for reason: it is delusional because reason conceals a mind-shattering repression which is, in fact, the exact opposite of autonomy. One symptom of this disease of enlightenment is fascism, especially anti-Semitism. Hatred of jews, contend Adorno and Horkheimer, is a projection of modern society’s ferocious inner compulsion onto a marginalized group. Yet anti-Semitism is not the only symptom of the frightful excess of enlightenment reason, which is why domination in our own era runs all the way from the destruction of nature to the colonization of developing nations.
Freudian revolution: the uses of psychoanalysis
One of the most distinctive features of the development of critical theory undertaken by the Frankfurt School was its use of Freudian psychoanalysis for the study of identity, politics, culture and ideology. Almost all of Freud’s central discoveries – the unconscious, sexual repression, the Oedipus complex, and the like – were deployed by key Frankfurt School theorists to reconsider the relation between selfhood and society, the family and socialization, ideology and political domination. In an essay ‘Sociology and Psychology,’ for example, Adorno defended the importance of Freud to social theory. He argued that psychoanalysis is valuable because it explored in detail the processes of identity formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to that extent could be marshaled in the service of critical theory for the development of a critique of identity. Paradoxically, however, psychoanalysis is at its most radical when its concepts are pushed to breaking point – as with some of the wilder ‘arm-chair’ conjectures of Freud. ‘In psychoanalysis,’ Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia, ‘nothing is true except the exaggerations.’ What Adorno meant by this remark, it seems, is that the more outrageous features of Freud’s work – the fictions of psychoanalysis, if you will – actually contain key insights into the contemporary social and political world. From this angle, Freud’s theory of, say, castration anxiety (a theory which, as a universal condition, has been rejected even within psychoanalytic circles) can be recast as an appropriate metaphor for the destructive and brutal nature of social relationships promoted in an age of advanced capitalism. As Martin Jay (1984: 90) observes, what ‘drew Adorno to the early Freud was the way in which his theory unflinchingly registered the traumas of contemporary existence. Telling the harsh truth was itself a kind of resistance to the acceptance of those traumas as inevitable.’
Marcuse’s use of Freud in critical theory to understand modern society parallels some of the perspectives advanced by Adorno, but his writings were far more influential. Like Adorno, Marcuse focuses on the early ‘biological’ Freud, or what is termed ‘drive theory.’ Whilst this reliance on the traditional Freudian vocabulary of repressed drives and sexual energies is unfashionable today, and ultimately accounts for certain limitations in Marcuse’s critical theory of society, it is also provides the conceptual context for many of his most important insights into how modern societies penetrate the internal landscape of identities in a profoundly repressive fashion. Both Marcuse and Adorno were, for example, deeply suspicious of American ego-psychology, a rewriting of Freudian theory away from its traditional focus on the split and fractured nature of the individual self and towards integration. Such a reading of Freud, argued Marcuse, robbed psychoanalysis of its revolutionary potential. Rather than graft society onto psychoanalysis, Marcuse sought to unfold psychoanalysis from the inside, in order to reveal its inherently critical edge. Unlike Adorno, however, Marcuse argues that the undoing of sexual repression opens the possibility for a radical transformation of identity, society and culture.
What has been of incomparable value, however, is the School’s analysis of why human subjects, apparently without resistance, submit to the dominant ideologies of late capitalism. The general explanatory model developed by the Frankfurt School to study the socio-psychological dimension of the relation between the individual and culture has received considerable attention in social theory.
Fromm, who had been practicing as an analyst since 1926 and was a member of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, sought in his early studies to integrate Freud’s theory of the unconscious with Marxist sociology. Influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s book Character Analysis (1972 [1933]), which connected society to the functioning of the unconscious, Fromm became preoccupied with the themes of sexuality and repression, as well as the mediating influence of the family between the economy and the individual. According to Fromm, Freudian psychoanalysis must supplement Marxism in order to grasp how social structures influence, indeed shape, the inner dimensions of personal life. Fromm’s analysis of repression, however, differed substantially from that worked out by Reich. In Fromm’s view, Reich had been unable to develop an adequate theory of society because he had reduced Freud’s theory of sexuality to the level of individual psychology. Yet Freudian psychoanalysis, Fromm maintained, was fundamentally a ‘social psychology.’ For Fromm, the individual must be understood in his or her relation to others.
The social system, in Fromm’s reinterpretation of Freud, shapes people’s lives to fit the economic and cultural context of the historical age. Feudal society produced individuals adapted to the roles of serfs and lords; market capitalism produced individuals as capitalists and workers; and advanced monopoly capitalism churns out people as, first and foremost, consumers. Fromm describes this as the production of ‘socially necessary character types.’ Society goes to work, in effect, on individuals, ordering the psyche along pre-set social pathways, projecting social values and attitudes into the deepest recesses of the self. The result, says Fromm, is people ‘wanting to act as they have to act.’
For Fromm, as for Freud, the family plays a key role in the emergence of repression. The winning of parental love entails the repression or denial of inner selfhood, and the adaptation to socially prescribed patterns of behavior. As Fromm puts this: ‘The family is the medium through which the society or the social class stamps its specific structure on the child, and hence on the adult. The family is the psychological agency of society’ (Fromm 1985 [1932]: 483). The family is an institution that implants external, social contradictions at the heart of personal life, sustains economic conditions as ideology, and shapes perceptions of the self as submissive, self-effacing and powerless. The central thread of Fromm’s argument is that the destructive effects of late capitalism are not only centered on economic mechanisms and institutions, but involve the anchoring of domination within the inner life and psychodynamic struggles of each individual. If society, in Fromm’s eyes, is a matter of sexual repression, libidinal renunciation, and pathologies of self, then it is really not all that far from the general tenets of classical Freudianism. In arguing that social and political relations affect self-identity in different and changing ways, Fromm enriches Freud’s account of repression. Fromm’s later writings, however, change direction quite dramatically. Increasingly skeptical of Freud’s dualistic theory of the life and death drives (see subsequent discussion of Freud later in this chapter), he argued that classical Freudianism could not adequately grasp the importance of interpersonal relationships. In particular, Fromm rejected Freud’s notion of the death drive, arguing that it only served to legitimate the increasingly destructive and aggressive tendencies of modern societies.
Significantly, Fromm also became influenced by neo-Freudian analysts – such as Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Homey – who stressed larger social and cultural factors in the constitution of selfhood. This emphasis on cultural contributions to identity-formation was underscored in some of Fromm’s major books, notably Escape from Freedom (1941) and The Sane Society (1955). These books put the argument for an essential ‘nature of man’, a nature repressed and distorted by capitalist patterns of domination.
In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm examines modern society in terms of the pathologies it inflicts upon selfhood, considering the extent to which the pressures of social life deform intimate relationships. In particular, he argues that Freud underemphasized social and cultural relations, and also the general impact of culture upon human needs. Selfhood, says Fromm, is best understood in terms of interpersonal processes. From this angle, psychical life is composed of emotional configurations derived from relations between self and others. For Fromm, self-organization, though influenced by unconscious drives and passion, is reflexively organized through ‘awareness, reason and imagination.’ Fromm’s theory of selfhood can be stated in five theses:
The central feature of Fromm’s work then is that helplessness or isolation are key building blocks in relations between the self and other people. In this respect, intimate relationships can be either progressive or regressive. Progressive relations with other people involve emotional qualities of care, empathy and love. The pain of individual isolation must be confronted and accepted in order for healthy interpersonal relations to develop. By contrast, a regressive involvement with other people is caused by denying individual separateness. In this mode of functioning, inner pain and emptiness are sidestepped by a neurotic immersion in infantile illusions. An endless menu of regressive fantasies is offered by mass consumer culture in this connection, fantasies which produce narcissistic pathology and related disturbances. The key feature in this neurotic, regressive zoning of the self is that other people are used instrumentally in order to bolster self-identity, and thus to avoid inner emptiness and isolation. Here Fromm’s standpoint converges on a crucial object relational distinction between self-development and self-distortion – as in Fairbairn’s formulation of good and bad object relations, or Winnicott’s account of the true self and the false self. However, Fromm proposes a more open psychoanalytic theory of the self by directly linking interpersonal relations and social context. The core of his argument is that problems of self, which link with social relationship pathologies, have their roots in already-existing patterns of cultural domination. Because the spheres of economic, political and cultural life are shot through with the sadistic satisfactions of power and domination, regressive self-solutions are reproduced in the individual domain.
Given that contemporary social arrangements so violently deform and warp self-constitution, is there anything that can be done to reverse this pathological state of affairs? Can human beings create, and sustain, any kind of meaningful liberation? Fromm believes that they can. Surprisingly, given the pessimistic tone of the foregoing analysis, Fromm contends that it is still possible to face the painful realities of life in a mature and rational way. To do this, Fromm argues, it is vital for the self to disengage from the corrupting influences of the contemporary epoch. To live authentically means fashioning a creative and responsive selfhood, a self that can productively engage in intimacy and mutuality. Such a capacity, he contends, depends on coming to terms with individual separation and aloneness – realities that are usually experienced as isolation or emptiness in modern culture. A shorthand way of describing this is that Fromm is encouraging a more reflexive involvement with the self. But what then of social conflict? In this context, Fromm attempts to develop a moral dimension as an energizing vision for emancipation. The more that human subjects reclaim the possibility of authentic existence through introspection and self-reflection, the more a social order based on mutual respect and autonomous activity will develop.
Although Fromm’s early studies on the integration of individuals into capitalism was broadly accepted by other members of the Frankfurt School, his subsequent, more sociological diagnosis of an essential human nature twisted out of shape by capitalism was strongly rejected. Marcuse, for example, charged Fromm (and other neo-Freudian revisionists) with undoing the critical force of Freud’s most important ideas, such as the unconscious, repression and infantile sexuality. According to Marcuse, Fromm’s revisionism underwrites the smooth functioning of the ego only by displacing the dislocating nature of the unconscious. Marcuse (1956: 240–1) sums up the central point in the following way:
Whereas Freud, focusing on the vicissitudes of the primary drives, discovered society in the most concealed layer of the genus and individual man, the revisionists, aiming at the reified, ready-made form rather than at the origin of the societal institutions and relations, fail to comprehend what these institutions and relations have done to the personality that they are supposed to fulfil.
Fromm’s attempt to add sociological factors to psychoanalysis, says Marcuse, results in a false political optimism as well as a liquidation of what is truly revolutionary in Freud: the discovery of the repressed unconscious.
Fromm’s writings rank among the most important post-Freudian mappings of the relations between self and society. Indeed, his model has had a major influence upon the reception of psychoanalysis into social and cultural theory. There are, however, the important problems with humanistic psychoanalysis. It has been argued, for example, that his account of self-constitution and the social process leads to a form of sociological reductionism. What is meant by this charge is that Fromm reduces the complex, contradictory relations between self and society to a dull, mechanical reproduction of pre-existing social values. The subject is repressively constituted through certain agencies of socialization, which stamp the prescriptive values of society into the human soul and thereby deform the essential needs of the self. In this critique, Fromm presents an account of self-constitution that eliminates the profound role of unconscious imagination, and leaves unexamined the diverse human possibilities for agency, creativity, critical reflection and transformation. He reduces Freud’s notion of the unconscious to a deterministic conception of individual malleability. The limitations of such an approach are plain. The ambivalence that Freud locates between self and society – the tension between psychical and social reality – is obliterated. Although wanting to compensate for Freud’s focus on unconscious drives, Fromm’s cultural analysis proceeds too far in the other direction – sociologizing psychical reality out of existence. Ironically, then, it is the post-Freudian Erich Fromm that ultimately speaks up for a pre-Freudian conception of the ‘total personality.’
A related criticism is that Fromm evaluates society against some ‘human essence’ of a non-cultural kind. It is as if Fromm, having diagnosed modern selfhood as thoroughly ideological, has to safeguard some resistant kernel of the human condition in order to articulate an emancipatory claim at all. Rationality, individualism, transcendence: these ideals may be absent from modern society, but they underlie all human experience and will potentially transform the social world. But in arguing that there is a trans-historical, universal ‘human condition,’ Fromm seems blind to the fact that ideals such as rationality and self-mastery are often quite explicitly oppressive. Many contemporary world problems – global warming, the risk of massively destructive warfare, the exploitation and pollution of nature – are intimately bound up with the expansion of Western rationality and mastery. As one commentator puts it: ‘Fromm revives all the time-honored values of idealist ethics as if nobody had ever demonstrated their conformist and repressive features’ (Marcuse 1956: 258). Significantly, the ideals which Fromm stresses are also those of a male-dominated realm. Little is said about gender or the repression of female sexuality in Fromm’s work. His humanistic psychoanalysis, and its underwriting of the ‘essential needs of mankind’ thus reproduces at a theoretical level masculinist or omnipotent self-control. Seen in this light, the inadequacy of Fromm’s belief that authentic living is possible through social disengagement becomes evident: to turn inward in the hope of discovering authentic existence represents not a ‘radical endeavor’ but rather an illusory wish to overcome domination and suffering by escaping society.
Adorno: The Authoritarian Personality, anti-Semitism and the psychodynamics of modernity
Like Fromm, Adorno thought it important to study pathologies of culture – especially fascism – both sociologically and psychologically. For Adorno, investigating the role of irrational authoritarianism in the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism throughout Europe during the Second World War was of the utmost political importance. But so, too, was studying whether such evil could ever firmly take root in the United States. To that end, Adorno joined with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levison and R. Nevitt Sanford in the late 1940s to conduct a large-scale analysis of the ‘potentially fascistic individual.’ The result was one of Adorno’s best known books, The Authoritarian Personality (1950).
In contributing to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno was arguably seeking to find empirical confirmation for the social theory of domination he developed with Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Again, Freudian psychoanalysis loomed large. Adorno found in fascist leaders, fascist regimes and fascist propaganda the psychodynamic logic of the ‘sado-masochistic character’ – of identities split between the bloodthirsty desire to denigrate and destroy out groups on the one hand, and a submissive orientation to social authority on the other. Yet this was far from any simple-minded Freudianism. Like Fromm and Marcuse, Adorno sought to discern how the repressed unconscious shaped, and yet was itself shaped by, social and political conditions. ‘The political, economic and social convictions of an individual,’ wrote the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, ‘often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit,’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.’
For our purposes, there are three key elements in Adorno’s thesis of irrational authoritarianism spreading throughout modern societies. Succinctly put, these are (1) the thesis of the ‘end of the individual’; (2) the triumph of the unconscious over consciousness of self; and, (3) the murderous rage associated with fascist tendencies or authoritarian identities. Let us briefly consider each of these points in turn.
Adorno’s account of the rise of irrational authoritarianism proceeds from the insight that there has been a major shift in how society constitutes the individual. He contends that today, throughout the West, we witness the ‘end of the individual.’ Contemporary society overpowers the individual through a standardized, monotonous mass culture, leaving little room for authentic individualism. Instead, society produces authoritarian social character types. These claims are advanced by Adorno through an interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis as revealing large-scale historical shifts in identity-formation. From this angle, Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex – the psychosexual drama involving the small infant’s emotional dealings with its mother’s love and father’s authority – maps the realization of mature identities in the age of bourgeois capitalism. Throughout the liberal phase of capitalism, according to Adorno, the child’s emerging sense of identity was dramatized through resistance to, and internalization of, the authority of the Oedipal father. The new world of administered capitalism, however, changes all that. In late modern society, massive changes in the economy directly serve to undermine the father’s authority within the nuclear family. As businesses become corporate, and as jobs shrink or disappear at an unprecedented pace, men as fathers suffer a loss in economic and social standing. A father who becomes unemployed suffers new kinds of insecurity – not just economic, but emotional and social. One significant consequence of these changes from liberal capitalism to the administered society is that the child aspires less and less to be like its father, according to Adorno. In post-liberal societies, therefore, changes in family life mean that the father no longer functions as an agency of social repression. Instead, individuals are increasingly brought under the sway of the logic of techno-rationality itself, as registered in and through the rise of the culture industries. As Adorno summarized these historical developments in identity-constitution: ‘The pre-bourgeois world does not yet know psychology, the oversocialised knows it no longer’. Repressive desublimation functions in Frankfurt School sociology as that psychic process which links what Adorno called the ‘post-psychological individual’ to the historical emergence of fascism and totalitarian societies.
These psychological and historical shifts in identity-formation lead to the second aspect of Adorno’s account of authoritarian irrationalism, namely the individual’s susceptibility to fascist ideologies. In ‘Freudian theory and the pattern of Fascist propaganda,’ written in 1951, Adorno argues that Freud’s work on group psychology foresaw the rise of fascist movements, and that psychoanalysis provides a powerful explanation of the relation between leaders and followers. The psychological mechanisms uncovered by Freud’s analyses of group processes are vitally significant to critical theory, Adorno argues, since they draw attention to the ways in which individuals yield to political manipulation by external, social agencies. For Adorno, as for Freud, the individual, when in a large group, is likely to identify less with its own ‘ego-ideals’ and more with impersonal ‘group ideals.’ This identification with the group involves the undoing of various repressions at the level of the individual, and Adorno argues that fascist propaganda transposes aggression into hatred of the outgroup – in short, racism. With reference to the theme of the ‘end of the individual,’ Adorno contends that fascist leaders become the guarantor of the social bond to the extent that fathers no longer represent a superior social authority. This is a complex psychoanalytic point, but broadly speaking Adorno underscores that fascist leaders rarely present themselves as traditional figures of authority. The fascist leader is more likely to model himself in the style of an elder brother, as one who challenges traditional forms of patriarchal authority. Hitler as Fuhrer was just such a fascist leader, says Adorno: less a patriarchal president than an elder brother, the ‘great little man.’ ‘Hitler,’ wrote Adorno, ‘posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber.’ This complex combination of power and personalism spoke to the Nazi movement’s followers in a profound way, and ultimately resulted in masses hell-bent on violence. Adorno interprets such mobilizations of fascist, and especially anti-Semitic, aggression as suggestive of key changes in structures of personal subjectivity in modern societies as a whole. Indeed, he (1951: 136) writes of individuals today as ‘postpsycho-logical de-individualized social atoms.’
The individual owes his crystallization to the form of political economy, particularly to those of the urban market. Even as the opponent of the pressure of socialization he remains the latter’s most particular product and likeness… Socially, the absolute status granted to the individual marks the transition from the universal mediation of social relation – a mediation which, as exchange, always also requires curtailment of the particular interests realized through it – to direct domination, where power is seized by the strongest. Through this dissolution of all the mediating elements within the individual himself, by virtue of which he was, in spite of everything, also part of a social subject, he regresses, impoverished and coarsened, to the state of a mere social object… If today the trace of humanity seems to persist only in the individual in his decline, it admonishes us to make an end of the fatality which individualizes men, only to break them completely in their isolation.
Theodor Adorno (1974 [1951]) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: NLB, pages 148–50.
It is obvious from all this that the individual subject, dominated by archaic unconscious impulses, languishes in the grip of an insanely powerful social order. What this period of Adorno’s work represents, in fact, is psychoanalytic criticism transfigured by social theory. This is social theory as a more individually focused and less dispassionate enterprise, and which is thus able to harness the unconscious aspects of human activity to social research. Adorno’s version of critical theory consists in generalizing beyond an image of the bureaucratized, administered world of advanced capitalism to consider how such alienated forms of consciousness become deeply implanted at the level of personal identity itself This takes us to his final point concerning irrational authoritarianism – namely, that fascist ideology is a core mechanism for the seamless monolith of contemporary social processes. In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his co-authors sought to identify how an all-pervasive social authority is internalized by women and men in what they called the F scale – designed as a measurement of fascist potential. Through over two hundred questionnaires and detailed psychoanalytic profiles, Adorno and his colleagues explored such topics as their respondents’ early childhoods, family relationships and wider political ‘world-views.’ The F scale sought to measure implicit ‘prefascist tendencies’ towards anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism and political and economic conservatism. To clarify the personal dimensions of fascist ideology, The Authoritarian Personality identified nine emotional traits of interviewees who were judged to be high as regards possible authoritarian tendencies:
Whilst Adorno and his colleagues did not discuss in any detail how widespread the authoritarian personality might be in conditions of advanced capitalism, the study did suggest that this syndrome is especially characteristic of the lower middle-classes in Europe. The conclusion of the book is that the authoritarian suffers from ego weakness, idealizes social authority, submits in the face of powerful social forces, and demonstrates propensities for racial prejudice and ethnic hatred.
The Authoritarian Personality has been criticized as an attempt to reduce the complex social phenomenon of authoritarianism to the level of individual psychology. If, indeed, Adorno and his colleagues had meant to show that every social formation with authoritarian or fascist potential could be explained away through reference to childhood experiences or stereotypical character traits, then the criticism of ‘psycho-babble’ could reasonably apply. However, such criticism is surely wide of the mark. For Adorno in particular, transformations in identity-formation – and especially pathologies of the self – are inscribed in the very structures of social life, while the analysis of personality traits in relation to authority, and particularly anti-Semitism, can only be adequately undertaken with sociological reference to major changes in the family, culture and the economy. What is pathological about authoritarianism for Adorno is traced not only to disturbances of the psyche, but to general developments in the nature of rationality. Whether Adorno’s social theory will do as an explanation of social pathologies is, however, perhaps more questionable. His general theoretical and political conclusions, for one thing, would appear to render individuals mere ciphers of the wider society. This is problematic because, if an unconscious authoritarian submission exerts its hold everywhere, then this must presumably extend to the realm of critical social theory itself; what is striking about the more pessimistic elements of Adorno’s cultural diagnosis, in other words, is that logically it would appear impossible for the Frankfurt School to have unearthed the thesis of the ‘end of the individual’ in the first place. Adorno does indeed speak of personal autonomy as essential to the flowering of democracy, but the global tone of his pessimistic, social theory overrides such occasional contrasts to the dominance of authoritarian identities. And even within the sociological terms of the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment,’ it seems likely that Adorno overestimated the degree of cultural cohesion operating within modern societies. To that extent, as Terry Eagleton (1990: 47) comments, Adorno judged the contemporary social order ‘as it would wish to appear.’
Written in the stars: Adorno on astrology
What’s in a star forecast? For many people, reading a magazine astrology column is merely a source of amusement. But not so, says Theodor Adorno, who sees in such commodified mass culture something far more sinister and disabling. For Adorno, the newspaper or magazine astrology column follows the social logics of the American entertainment industry – from TV soaps to Hollywood movies. Instead of the differentiated elements of selfhood on the one hand and culture on the other, astrology collapses the former into the latter, promoting conventional and contended attitudes in the process. Unable to accommodate social contradictions without commodifying them, newspaper and magazine astrology columns offer stereotypical scenes to remind us of the dependency of our social existence in the administered world of late capitalism.
In the early 1950s, during a return visit to the United States from Germany, Adorno undertook a study of an astrology column in the Los Angeles Times. The result was ‘The Stars Down to Earth.’ According to Adorno, Caroll Righter’s ‘Astrological Forecasts’ column in the Los Angeles Times promoted attitudes of fatalism. This is the attitude that, whilst we live in a threatening world where things are out of control, it is nonetheless a world where things are likely to turn out for the best in the long run. As Adorno (1994: 56–57) develops this point:
The semi-rationality of ‘everything will be fine’ is based on the fact that modern American society in spite of all its conflicts and difficulties succeeds in reproducing the life of those whom it embraces. There is some dim awareness that the concept of the forgotten man is outdated. The column feeds on this awareness by teaching the readers not to be afraid of being weak. They are reassured that all their problems will solve themselves even if they feel that they themselves are unable to solve them. They are made to understand – and in a way rightly – that the very same powers by which they are threatened, the anonymous totality of the social process, are also those which will somehow take care of them.
What, in your view, does the regular newspaper or magazine astrology column tell us about the nature of modern societies? Is Adorno’s thesis of psychological dependency and social conformism still relevant to today’s global realities?
Marcuse: Eros, or one-dimensional futures?
For Marxist social theorist Herbert Marcuse, one-time member of the Frankfurt School and close colleague of Horkheimer and Adorno, this deranged logic of capitalism is, among other things, imposed through the culture industries of advertising, marketing and entertainment. Capitalism for Marcuse operates on a deeply unconscious level, a realm of chimerical fantasy in which sexuality is paradoxically stripped of erotic aura and transferred to the selling of things – both products and people. Marcuse calls this insidious process ‘repressive desublimation.’ The power of capitalism is that we are all embroiled in a social landscape of commodities and wages, prices and profits. Gradually but unstoppably, people in such a world come to feel personally content only when their appetites and desires are dictated by the emotional system in advance, by socially controlled desublimation.
Marcuse was in broad agreement with Horkheimer and Adorno as regards the thesis of a ‘decline of the individual.’ Having departed Germany when Hitler came to power, Marcuse joined with his Frankfurt School colleagues in the United States and, throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, worked on a series of research projects investigating transformations of state and monopoly capitalism, the dynamics of mass communication and popular culture, social dislocation, racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of authoritarianism. According to Marcuse, modern culture is repressive, often tyrannically so. However, the transformation of society remains the key to utopian thinking, critical theory and progressive politics. In an early book, Reason and Revolution (1941), Marcuse speaks up for the progressive side of utopian thinking. Yet he takes to task those Marxists who argued either that socialism was an inevitable outcome of history, or that workers were the revolutionary agent of social change. Such standpoints for Marcuse were far too simple. The collapse of the Russian revolution into Soviet Marxism, the failure of various working-class movements and the decline of political dissidence as a result of the rise of mass communications and popular culture were all for Marcuse signs that there could be no privileged agents in the transformation of social life. That this is the case is not necessarily bad news for progressive politics, however. Just because political developments had not unfolded in the manner predicted by orthodox Marxism did not mean that social change was either unjustified or unlikely. A non-repressive society for Marcuse always remained a theoretical and political possibility, and in attempting to address these problems he opened new perspectives in critical social theory by turning to Freud and psychoanalysis.
It is against this political and intellectual backdrop that Marcuse’s seminal Eros and Civilization (1956) should be contextualized, as a work that was at once resolutely critical of existing capitalist societies and profoundly utopian in its defense of the possibilities for radical social change. Repression is Marcuse’s theme from beginning to end in Eros and Civilization, and in particular the Freudian insight that the renunciation of emotional energy and sensuality is always filtered through both historical and trans-historical forces. People suffer from too much repression in contemporary society, says Marcuse. The contradictions of capitalism, he argues, pass all the way down into the deepest textures of lived experience and personal subjectivity. Capitalist processes of technological mechanization and standardization have become inscribed within the inner fabric of identity, particularly as a result of the oppressive, dull labor to which people are subjected. Here Marcuse’s ideological target was the cultural conformity of middle America, of faceless bureaucrats coping with the crushing repetitions demanded by the workplace and of middle-class housewives bored with their lives at home in the suburbs. Something was deeply amiss. America in the 1950s was easily the wealthiest and most industrially advanced society on earth, and yet such economic prosperity seemed to run directly counter to the constrained and constraining lives that people experienced, most especially in terms of emotional literacy and interpersonal relationships. Repression, for Marcuse as for Freud, was vital in converting nature into culture, and he interpreted the classical psychoanalytic account of the Oedipus complex as a kind of social parable regarding sexual and social reproduction. According to Marcuse, however, the torments and repressions of contemporary women and men are not quite the same as those of Freud’s era. In his view, repression has become heightened, with particularly excessive restrictions placed on sensuality and eroticism, in a world organized around prices and profits, money and monopolistic corporations.
How to explain this? Marcuse presented much of his historical analysis in the language of Freud, but throughout Eros and Civilization he sought to contextualize psychoanalytic insights within the broader Marxist tradition of critical theory. In contemporary societies, the unconscious is denied true expression as a result of the reproduction of capitalist profit and exploitation. In Marcuse’s view, however, Freud’s interpretation of the conflict between repressed desire and social order was ahistorical, which in turn renders a picture of social repression the same in all possible worlds. To recapture this potential historical dimension of psychoanalysis, Marcuse distinguished between two kinds of repression: ‘basic repression’ and ‘surplus repression.’ Basic repression refers to the minimum level of sexual renunciation for facing social life and the tasks of culture. Marcuse contends that a certain amount of repression is always necessary for effective socialization and social order. Surplus repression, by contrast, refers to the intensification of self-restraint generated by capitalist exploitation and asymmetrical relations of power. Marcuse gives as an example of this repressive surplus the conjugal family, in which the conventional sexual norms of patriarchy are strictly enforced in the interests of maintaining existing values and society. The repression this surplus generates is not necessarily understood very well by individuals in terms of its emotional damage. According to Marcuse, repression becomes surplus to requirements as a result of the ‘performance principle,’ a culturally specific form of sexual and social demands instituted by the economic order of capitalism. According to Marcuse, the capitalist performance principle recasts repression as surplus in several key ways. The performance principle causes human beings to face one another as ‘things’ or ‘objects,’ replaces general eroticism with genital sexuality, and fashions a disciplining of the human body (what Marcuse calls ‘repressive desublimation’) so as to prevent repressed desire from interfering with capitalist exchange values.
In a subsequent book, One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse takes the analysis of the forces of domination to extreme lengths. In the course of the twentieth century, says Marcuse, our personal and social lives are constantly being pulled in two directions at the same time. Arguably, with the advent of advanced industrial society, people’s encounter with culture becomes more individuated, complex and subtle. Yet on another level, this potential cultural and aesthetic liberation within advanced capitalism has been thoroughly stunted. Advanced capitalism has brought little more than domestic appliances, Hollywood movies and packaged holidays into the reach of many people in the West. In this age of mass consumerism and popular culture, according to Marcuse, a new social order has emerged that sharply curtails individuality, dissent and opposition. Advanced capitalism generates a one-dimensional society based on ‘false’ consumer needs, and increasingly integrates individuals into the smooth running of a mass system of domination and social inequality. In Marcuse’s view, the most striking feature of the modern world is conformity. Contemporary forms of repression and domination are suffocating, and it is against this backdrop that Marcuse raises the issue of how society might confront the systematic erosion of critical thinking, dissent and opposition to capitalism and industrial management. ‘How,’ writes Marcuse, ‘can the administered individuals – who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions … liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinking that the vicious circle be broken?’
The desublimation rampant in advanced industrial society reveals its truly conformist function. This liberation of sexuality (and of aggressiveness) frees the instinctual drives from much of the unhappiness and discontent that elucidate the repressive power of the established universe of satisfaction. To be sure, there is pervasive unhappiness, and the happy consciousness is shaky enough – a thin surface over fear, frustration and disgust. This unhappiness lends itself easily to political mobilization; without room for conscious development, it may become the instinctual reservoir for a new fascist way of life and death. But there are many ways in which the unhappiness beneath the happy consciousness may be turned into a source of strength and cohesion for the social order. The conflicts of the unhappy now seem far more amenable to cure than those which made for Freud’s ‘discontent in civilization,’ and they seem more adequately defined in terms of the ‘neurotic personality of our time’ than in terms of the eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos.
Herbert Marcuse (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, pages 76–7.
What, then, of the possibilities for change? Marcuse differs sharply from Freud as regards the nature of emancipation. Marcuse contends that the performance principle, ironically, generates the cultural conditions necessary for a radical transformation of society. What promises an end to surplus repression are the industrial-technological advancements of late capitalism itself. For Marcuse, the material affluence generated by Western capitalist industrialization and techno-science opens the way for an unraveling of sexual repression. The overcoming of cultural domination will release repressed unconscious forces, permitting the reconnection of sexual drives and fantasy to the social network. Such a reconciliation between culture and the unconscious will usher in a new, sensuous reality – a reality Marcuse calls libidinal rationality.’ Libidinal rationality, though abstract as a concept, involves a radical reversal of surplus repression. Liberation from this surplus will facilitate a general eroticism, not only of the body, but of nature and cultural organization. Yet Marcuse’s grounding of social theory in psychoanalysis stresses that emancipation requires more than just sexual freedom. It demands an integration of sexuality and love into transformed social, institutional life.
How are we to understand this notion of libidinal rationality? Is it just some emancipatory dream of the Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse, or does it unearth certain psychical tendencies that point towards an alternative social condition? As a resexualizing of social life, libidinal rationality can be interpreted as an encouragement of emotional communication and intimacy. Fantasy occupies a special place in this context, Marcuse says, since desire contains a repressed truth value. As he puts this:
Imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason. While this harmony has been removed into utopia by the established reality principle, fantasy insists that it must and can become real, that behind the illusion lies knowledge.
(1956)
Fantasy is itself a longing for reconciliation – between pleasure and rationality, desire and reality. For Marcuse, this recovery of unconscious desire will facilitate the resexualization of the human body, thus creating harmonious social relations. Against the repressive structuring of ‘sex’ under the performance principle, the release of fantasy will eroticize all aspects of society, allowing for a spontaneous and playful relation to life.
There remain many unresolved difficulties in Marcuse’s work. Among these it is important to mention deficiencies in his approach to human agency, particularly his long-standing emphasis upon the concept of the repressed unconscious as the key to social transformation; the limitations of his analysis of contemporary societies, especially as regards the critique of domination and exploitation; and a series of problems to do with human needs, meanings, ethics and justice. Let me briefly address these three criticisms in turn.
Firstly, in an age of media sound-bites, spin and seduction, Marcuse’s ironic concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ serves as a powerful tool with which to grasp how apparent forms of sexual liberalization actually serve to promote heightened repression. Marcuse’s argument is that the glossy commercialization of sexuality we see everywhere in the West today confines human desire, eroticism and intimacy to only a partial and restrictive understanding of sexuality. In this view, the sex industry in all its guises, from porno movies to lap-dancing clubs, serves to dull human sexuality and instead promotes conventional behavior and values. Yet if such a viewpoint offers a powerful critique of the repressive contradictions of capitalism and mass culture, it nonetheless remains certainly vulnerable to charges of oversimplifying both the psychoanalytic understanding of emotional life as well as the complex, contradictory relations between self and society. Many would now agree, for example, that Marcuse’s conceptualization of surplus repression is wanting. His recasting of repression as surplus in order to capture aspects of the dismantling of emotional contradictions fostered by one-dimensional mass culture, whilst provocative, ultimately gives rise to a top-heavy version of cultural domination, where society stands over and above the individual agent. The problem with this is that it overlooks the fact that the psyche is shot through with unconscious conflict, which in Freudian terms is one important reason why selfhood can never be serenely inserted into social relations without tensions and contradictions. A related difficulty stemming from Marcuse’s wall-to-wall image of surplus repression is that he is subsequently forced to round the individual subject back upon itself in order to find an escape route from the contemporary performance principle. The way forward is through the unconscious – which, somehow, is beyond the scope of social domination, and thus prefigurative of an alternative society. Despite this stress on alternative political visions, however, Marcuse has remarkably little to say about new forms of intimacy, interpersonal relationships or cultural association. His utopianism rather focuses on the overcoming of sexual repression. Yet such a vision of liberation is highly questionable. A mechanistic conception of the repressed unconscious, and not people, is key to Marcuse’s view of social transformation. Human agency is reduced to domination, while the repressed unconscious is linked to emancipation. But this gives rise to a thorny political issue: if the individual subject is obsolescent and repression complete, who would be in a position to transform, or even to know, the truth of the unconscious? Who, exactly, would be capable of sustaining a liberation known as ‘libidinal rationality’? Marcuse’s focus upon unconscious potentialities, although valuable in some respects, actually mirrors an individualist culture which forecloses issues about social bonds and cultural association. Significantly, Marcuse’s argument in favor of the liberation of repressed drives also smacks of essentialism. This argument recalls a pre-Freudian view of human passion as somehow natural and timeless, outside and beyond the reach of the social structure. The view that the repressed unconscious, or fantasy itself, will only gain expression in the non-repressive society falls to see that fantasy structures are already bound up with institutional life. Such a view fails to recognize that the ‘truth of the unconscious’ is already interconnected with embattled human relationships, violent gender tensions and ideological conflict.
Secondly, there have been a number of sharp criticisms made of Marcuse’s analysis of the nature of modern societies, particularly his account of advanced capitalism. It is important to be quite specific about the limitations of Marcuse’s social theory in this respect, as there are contradictory elements in his analysis of modern societies and it is my view that he did not manage to reconcile these elements successfully. Now the bleak critique of advanced capitalism that Marcuse outlined in One-Dimensional Man stands in blunt opposition to his optimistic analysis of the potentialities for radical social transformation in Eros and Civilization. Some critics have put this discrepancy down to Marcuse’s heavy concentration upon the American postwar boom in the former book, while other critics have noted his implicit indebtedness to German Romanticism in the latter book. Whatever the exact division between these optimistic and pessimistic threads in his thinking, however, it is clear that the idea of an emergent stabilization of capitalism played an important role throughout the bulk of his writings. But there are good reasons to object to Marcuse’s outline of such trends of social development. For one thing, in focusing too exclusively on the containment of the contradictions and crisis-tendencies of advanced capitalism, Marcuse seemed to assume that cultural conformity plays a central role in the reproduction of modern societies. But such consequences are not borne out by recent sociological research, which rather indicates that social reproduction can be an unintended consequence of the rejection of the values and norms promoted by popular culture and the mass media. For another, in overemphasizing the intensification of technological rationality in our own time and its capacity to integrate culture, society and personhood into a closed, harmonious system, Marcuse’s social theory remains unable to account for what promptedthe widespread social revolt of the 1960s – notwithstanding his close association with various aspects of these revolts. And his social theory is equally lacking in critical edge if forced to confront, say, the recent war on terrorism or the global economic crisis of the early twenty-first century. Nowhere did Marcuse adequately confront the potential explosive disequilibrium of global capitalist markets, nor the massive development of militarization on the part of the world’s superpowers.
Finally, some critics have lampooned Marcuse’s radical politics and vision of utopia. Marcuse’s social theory addresses what the transformation of libido would mean at the level of the whole society, as the notion of ‘libidinal rationality’ tries to clarify what counts as creative, sensuous reason between individuals, groups and nations. For some of its critics, however, the very idea of an eroticized reason is a contradiction in terms, since rationality and the passions remain stubbornly particular and are separate domains. Reason is universal, emotion is particular. This contradiction, however, is only apparent – and for reasons which Marcuse’s writings actually make clear. When social rationalization is pressed beyond all reason, it flips over into surplus repression; and one name for such pathology is ‘repressive desublimation.’ The problem is not that reason and emotion are separated, but that a deformed, perverse version of the latter has come to exert the upper hand over the former. Historically speaking, however, social conditions now offer the slim possibility of eliminating surplus repression. What social theory needs to engage, in Marcuse’s own terms, is a ‘new rationality of gratification.’ This position, however, still gives rise to the dilemma of how people could ever determine that a form of rationality was sufficiently aesthetic, concerned with creativity, fulfillment, pleasure. As David Held writes of this problem, ‘one cannot simply appeal, as Marcuse does, to instincts to settle questions about real wants; for wants cannot be articulated independently of the circumstances of their development and of the way in which they are conceived.’ Marcuse may indeed be correct, following Freud, in locating reason or rationality in unconscious desire. But even if this reason is an outcrop of desire, social theory still demands a language for grappling with how individual needs and potentials are constituted, conceived and recognized between social actors. This is not to take issue with Marcuse’s vision of freedom in terms of the ‘rationality of gratification,’ but it is to raise questions about how concrete history bears on the deliberation of the actual needs and desires of individual human beings. Such questions necessarily involve a shift away from the rather solitary Freudian language of individual drives, desires and repressions and toward a more interpersonal language of communication, discourse and symbolic exchange.
1 Contemporary western cultures are obsessed with consumption. Do you agree?
2 The bureaucratic administration of society turns reason into its opposite. Evaluate this claim.
3 Why is the Freudian psyche important for social critique?
4 In our age of global terrorism, do people fear freedom?
5 The Frankfurt School sees repression as central to political domination. In our supposed age of liberal, anything goes society, how does an analysis of repression contribute to cultural critique?
Frankfurt School
(edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt) Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982)
Theodor Adorno
(with Max Horkheimer) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmunt Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)
(with co authors) The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950)
Minima Moralia (London: NLB, 1974)
Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973)
The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 2001)
Erich Fromm
Escape From Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941)
The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart, 1955)
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Holt Paperbacks, 1992)
The Art of Loving (Allen & Unwin, 1957)
Herbert Marcuse
Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)
One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964)
The Aesthetic Dimensions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978)