Abstract
Social movements like BLM and Rhodes Must Fall have recently re-emphasized the need for “working through” our collective past. I argue that we must be careful to distinguish two distinct and sometimes conflicting understandings of what it means to work through the past. An “idealist” understanding which sees “working through” as a process of self-enlightenment and moral learning through uncovering and acknowledging past moral failures and incorporating them into our collective self-image. The “materialist paradigm”, in contrast, understands “working through” as a process of uncovering the ways in which the structural causes of past moral catastrophe have endured into the present. It rejects idealist calls for reconciliation with the past and present and aims at the negative goal of preventing future moral catastrophe through changing tainted social structures. I argue, finally, that effective processes of working through the past have to engage in both idealist myth-building and materialist deconstruction.
Keywords
The year 2020 saw the largest protests for racial justice in US history as well as widespread calls for culling tainted statues and memorials. The newfound attention on racial inequality and its history gives us reason to revisit a claim pushed by Thomas McCarthy in an influential article (McCarthy 2002): the USA should “work through” its legacy of slavery and segregation, emulating the German process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, which saw Germany work through its Nazi (and GDR) past. What I want to do in the following, rather than defend his sensible and important call for “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in the USA (or elsewhere), is to add a note of caution. There is not one but a number of ways in which a process of working through the past may take place. The same is true of the ways in which we might think, as political and social philosophers and theorists, about such a process and its functions. This becomes visible when we look not just at the German experience with working through its own past but the political thought that appeared in its wake.
I argue that McCarthy, following Jürgen Habermas’s cue, conflates two distinct ways of imagining “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” and that we may come to a much clearer understanding of the process of working through if we disentangle them. Habermas (and following him McCarthy) problematically equivocates his understanding of “working through” and that of his mentor Theodor W. Adorno. I show them to be not only distinct but significantly so. Habermas pushes for what I call an “idealist” understanding: “working through” is a process of self-enlightenment and moral learning through uncovering and acknowledging past moral failures and incorporating them into our collective self-image through collective re-narration. Adorno’s “materialist paradigm”, in contrast, claims that “working through” is a process of uncovering the ways in which the structural causes of past moral catastrophe have endured into the present. It rejects idealist calls for reconciliation with the past and the present it has led to and aims at the negative goal of preventing future moral catastrophe through changing tainted social structures.
Importantly, the materialist paradigm can act as a corrective to real-world processes of working through the past. Where the idealist invites deliberation, the materialist calls for contestation; where the idealist seeks to reshape our collective identity by incorporating past moral failures into it, the materialist urges us to stay wary of collective narratives and myths; where the idealist believes that a reconciliation with our past through a celebration of past moral struggles is a necessary precondition to establishing citizen’s trust in liberal democratic institutions, the materialist rejects any calls to reconciliation with a social order predicated on structural injustice; where the idealist seeks to achieve such reconciliation by pointing to the history of real-world moral progress, the materialist points to the endurance of oppressive structures instead. Finally, the materialist pushes us to understand the process of working through as a self-reflexive one: any such process may end up serving certain political functions and interests and, its noble goal of collective moral self-growth notwithstanding, we must remain as vigilant and critical of it as of any other collective political endeavor.
1) “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” revisited
In “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA”, McCarthy argues that the process of working through that took place in Germany, particularly in the 1980’s, deserves more attention in the USA and ought to be emulated there. In particular, he points to the role that the “Historikerstreit” played in Germany: prominent German historians like Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer and Andreas Hillgruber, who had reinterpreted the Nazi crimes in ways that denied their singularity and belittled their magnitude and significance, where confronted by public intellectuals and historians like Hans Mommsen and Jürgen Habermas (McCarthy 2002). The latter’s interventions are of particular interest to McCarthy.
Habermas argued, as he points out, that “German national identity was inseparable from historical consciousness” and that “past evils” are “central elements of who ‘we’ (Germans) are and who ‘we’ want to be” (McCarthy 2002, 627). To recognize “past evil as integral to German history” will have and should have a “powerful impact on our self-understanding” and lead to a “genuine effort to re-form national identity” (McCarthy 2002, 627). As I will demonstrate shortly, this call for a re-shaping of collective identity through uncovering past moral failures and incorporating them into our collective self-understanding stands at the center of the “idealist” approach to working through. Almost unnoticeably, however, there is a shift in the third part of McCarthy’s essay. Here, the focus of a process of working through is no longer predominantly about re-shaping collective identity. It is rather about pointing to the structural causes “of our racialized practices and attitudes” (McCarthy 2002, 636) and how economic inequalities like the “black/white wealth gap” are the “cumulative effect of the history of racial injustice” (McCarthy 2002, 641). The idea here, and this is central to the materialist paradigm, is one of uncovering the structural endurance of oppression.
McCarthy is not wrong to understand the process of working through as, ideally, consisting of both a re-shaping of collective identity and an uncovering of enduring structural oppression. Indeed, as I will argue in the conclusion of this paper, this is how we should imagine it. We will arrive at a much clearer understanding of how these two projects might come together, however, if we understand them as distinct and in many ways conflicting in the first place. The distinction becomes evident when we look at the different ways in which Jürgen Habermas and his mentor Theodor W. Adorno imagine the process of “Aufarbeitung” (working through the past). McCarthy mentions Adorno only in passing but implies that the latter shares Habermas’s understanding of working through. This is perhaps unsurprising, seeing how Habermas is guilty of the same equivocation. His most important essay on working through the past, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past – Today” (Was bedeuted Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit heute), not only makes explicit reference to Adorno’s much earlier “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” (Was bedeuted Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit). It also aims to use Adorno’s idea of “Aufarbeitung” as making the past conscious as a “yardstick” (Maßstab) for discussing the Nazi past in the newly re-unified Germany (Habermas 1995b). Adorno, however, would reject the notion of working through that Habermas ends up developing in this and related essays.
While the idealist approach favored by Habermas’s work and the materialist approach favored by Adorno have the same source in Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, they both emphasize distinct aspects of Freud’s idea of working through and they do so to great effect. The idealist places his emphasis on Freud’s idea of sublation and subsequently the moral development of the self-enlightened subject (in individual and collective terms). He also pleads for a broadly affirmative, reconciliatory relationship with the past: once the past has been “mastered” it may act as a motivation for moral struggle and a source of trust in liberal-egalitarian institutions. The materialist, oriented towards the object, places his emphasis on Freud’s naturalism and, subsequently, on the endurance of (oppressive) social structures and their interplay with the drives and desires of embodied human beings. He rejects calls for reconciliation with the past (and the present it has led to) as the product of a misplaced trust in the idea and reality of progress. Turning to the idea of working through the past in Freud acts as a starting point that will allow me to elucidate both what is shared in the idealist and materialist paradigm and how they depart.
2) The idea of “working through the past” and its roots in Freud
Adorno explicitly draws on Freud’s idea of “working through”, applying it to the political context of collective remembrance in postwar Germany (Adorno 1998). Freudian psychoanalysis consists of a process of working through the unconscious regions of the mind to uncover the natural desires of the patient which have been repressed. To “repress” is to cope with “anxiety” by locking away the desires that caused “anxiety” into what Freud calls the “unconscious” (Freud and Breuer 2009): that part of the mind that we cannot access without the help of psychoanalysis. The problem with “repressing” something, however, is that it continues to work in the unconscious, where it becomes the cause of various psychological pathologies. By uncovering these repressed desires (and memories) the patient can begin to reconfigure her ego in more balanced ways.
Freud points to a number of healthy ways in which the patient may learn to deal with her now uncovered unconscious wishes and desires after therapy. The most common one is “condemnation” (a conscious suppression and rejection of the newly uncovered desires) but Freud places a particular emphasis on “sublimation” (Aufhebung) (Freud 2001). Sublimation is a healthy variant of a less healthy coping mechanism called “displacement”. The latter sees an impulse towards a socially unacceptable gratification of desire redirected towards a powerless symbolic substitution target (where this redirection has little negative social consequences). An example of displacement would be the employee who lets out the aggression that has built up in relation to his domineering boss on his dog or his children. Sublimation is a constructive form of displacement, where socially unacceptable desires are redirected towards socially acceptable forms of behavior. Homoerotic desires (which in Freud’s time were of course socially unacceptable), to draw on an example Freud himself uses, might be redirected towards a drive to achieve scientific or artistic excellence. Indeed, Freud believes that this is what happened to Leonardo Da Vinci (Freud 1964).
While the exact nature of sublimation and the role it plays in Freud’s analytical system is famously complex and remains a matter of contestation (Gemes 2009), it is clear that sublimation elevates the repressed drives uncovered by psychoanalysis to a more socially productive level. Psychotherapy reveals a tension in the patient’s ego, between the id’s natural drives and desires and the internalized normative demands of the super-ego, where this tension produces various pathologies.
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To uncover these tensions and the desires that drive them allows the patient to redirect repressed libidinal energies in ways that allow for cultural excellence. Seeing how this may seem to many like an ideal outcome of a successful therapy, Freud was pressed by Harvard neurologist James J. Putnam to declare sublimation the explicit goal of psychotherapy.
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Freud, however, was reluctant. In his “Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis” he offers the following warning to those who would seek to redirect all libidinal energies towards the betterment of civilization: We must not omit to consider the third of the possible outcomes of the work of psycho-analysis. A certain portion of the repressed libidinal impulses has a claim to direct satisfaction and ought to find it in life. […] We ought not to exalt ourselves so high as completely to neglect what was originally animal in our nature. Nor should we forget that the satisfaction of the individual's happiness cannot be erased from among the aims of our civilization. The plasticity of the components of sexuality, shown by their capacity for sublimation, may indeed offer a great temptation to strive for still greater cultural achievements by still further sublimation. But, just as we do not count on our machines converting more than a certain fraction of the heat consumed into useful mechanical work, we ought not to seek to alienate the whole amount of the energy of the sexual instinct from its proper ends. We cannot succeed in doing so; and if the restriction upon sexuality were to be carried too far it would inevitably bring with it all the evils of soil-exhaustion (Freud 2001, 54).
The difference in emphasis on sublimation between Putnam and Freud is in essence the difference between the idealist and the materialist paradigm. Psychoanalysis is a process of working through the patient’s childhood past to uncover the truth about her repressed desires. This uncovering of the truth, and this may stand as a general definition of working through, allows for a reconciliation in the patient. Reconciliation, however, may come in different forms: it may come in the form of sublimation, that is, an elevation to a higher level of social productivity that overcomes the pathology inducing tension between the id and the super-ego in the ego, but it may also involve, as Freud stresses here, the satisfaction of repressed natural drives and desires.
While the idealist paradigm aims predominantly at the former (only here the idea is explicitly and somewhat more narrowly one of elevation to a higher level of moral excellence), the materialist paradigm stresses the latter. The idealist is interested, to put this another way, in the evolution of the subject through self-enlightenment. The materialist, on the other hand, is interested in the human being in its objective dimensions, that is, as an embodied being, whose natural drives interact with the demands and pressures of the social structure.
3) The idealist paradigm
3.1) Subject-centered
The idea of sublimation (or sublation) 3 is central to the idealist paradigm. For Freud (as for Hegel) confrontation leads to sublation, where sublation means, simultaneously, to preserve, to put an end to and to elevate. 4 In Freud, the confrontation that leads to sublation is that of the patient with her repressed desires. At the beginning of psychoanalytical therapy the id’s natural desires and the super-ego’s social-ethical demands collapse into each other in an unhealthy, pathological way. 5 The process of psychoanalysis sees the patient uncover repressed desires. Once uncovered, these desires have the function of confronting the ego’s self-image and the pathological coping mechanisms that have come to be constitutive of it. 6 The sexual deviant, say, can only overcome his pathologies if he fully acknowledges his repressed desire for sexual gratification. Once the ego’s self-image (which is the product of the strive to comply with the super-ego’s ethical demands) and the newly uncovered id’-driven desires stand in conscious opposition, psychoanalysis can work towards sublation: a healthy mediation between the id’s desires and the super-ego’s ethical or normative demands in the ego. Psychoanalysis, or so Freud claims, allows the patient’s psyche (his ego) to ascend to a higher stage. The confrontation of the patient’s self-image with his repressed desires constitutes a crucial moment in this process, one which is necessary for a successful reconciliation of id and super-ego. 7 In doing so, the ego is reshaped in new ways, even though the psychoanalytical process relied entirely on elements of the personality, conscious and unconscious, that were already there.
Jürgen Habermas, who will act as the main protagonist for the idealist camp, combines the Freudian idea of working through the repressed past with the idea of a self-reflexive and morally responsible process of identity creation through “self-understanding” (Selbstverständigung). In a “postmetaphysical” context which harbors “a plurality of lifeforms”, we can no longer orient ourselves along fixed and universally binding conceptions of life and self-understanding (Habermas 1995a, 48, 1995b, 22). Every individual must decide for themselves who they are and who they want to be. Importantly, this narrative creation of our identity has to involve a self-reflexive, self-critical and morally responsible appropriation (Aneigung) of our own life history (Habermas 1995b, 23). This means that we have to be honest about our moral failures in the narrative creation of our own identity. As self-respecting, responsible human beings, we must be willing to learn from our past mistakes. This is true for individuals and collectives, as Habermas stresses. When “we” (understood as an intergenerational collective) have committed barbarous acts in the past, “we” ought not to cover them up, but rather push them out into the open arena of the public sphere, where they become a matter of public debate and political struggle (Habermas 1995b, 23). The ultimate goal of this exercise of working through the past is the incorporation of the darker parts of our own history into our collective identity.
Here we have, I believe, an understanding of working through the past as a process that leads to reconciliation as sublimation, analogous to that offered by Freud. The Habermasian process of collectively and publicly working through the past is one in which the uncovering of repressed memories of past crimes (which are just as anxiety inducing as Freud’s socially unacceptable desires) leads to a confrontation of these memories with the image we, as a collective, have established of ourselves. This leads, ultimately, to the reconciliation of these uncovered memories with our existing self-image in ways that create an entirely new self-image: a new collective narrative that incorporates the darker parts of our collective history but without jettisoning elements of a shared history and shared “traditions”, which were central to the original, pre-working through ego (Habermas 1995b, 23). This allows us to develop a shared narrative which provides us with a collective identity that we can use to orient ourselves in the future.
In analogy to Freud’s psychotherapy, that is, the historically narrated image that a collective, a nation, has of itself is confronted with repressed memories that are uncovered. This creates a paradoxical tension (the past crimes stand in stark contrast to the collective’s self-image), which is resolved in the sublation towards a higher, more accurate and morally acceptable self-image. The self-image that is created in the process is entirely novel but nevertheless constructed out of elements that were already inherent in the original self-image.
What I mean by inherent here is not “explicit” – the repressed memories of past crimes are after all omitted in the original, pre-working through self-image. They are inherent unconsciously, as it were, precisely by virtue of their omission. Just as the repressed desires for the Freudian form a crucial part of the pathological pre-psychoanalysis ego, the past (agonizing and wrongful) events and practices that we leave out of our collectively narrated self-image shape this self-image in pathological ways. The most brutal and oppressive colonial empires often operate with the most self-aggrandizing collective narrations. France, the self-acclaimed “Grande Nation”, still omits from its collective self-narrative the fact that the wealth required to build its great culture was in significant parts the product of colonial exploitation and oppression.
By making these omissions explicit, by acknowledging the role that colonial exploitation and oppression played in its collective past, France’s morally grandiose republican self-image would be brought into tension with the nation’s past colonial crimes. This tension could only be resolved through sublation, through the creation of a more accurate and morally acceptable collective self-image. The French might try to see themselves as a great republic, one born out of a rightly celebrated democratic revolution against aristocratic repression, while simultaneously acknowledging that its great wealth and cultural heritage is the product of horrible wrongs against its colonial subjects. This would mean acknowledging that the (post)colonial subject, both in the colonies and in the French “motherland”, became itself the victim of the kind of exploitation and oppression that the French bourgeoisie had tried to overcome in overturning the rule of the aristocracy. The once revolutionary bourgeoisie had become the oppressive aristocracy in a colonial empire.
This insight might call for a new French Revolution in the nation’s collective self-narration: the French would be forced to acknowledge and integrate into their self-understanding the fact that their claim to liberté, égalité and fraternité has not or insufficiently been extended towards their colonial subjects and their descendants. It is precisely because they understand themselves as a republic that stands for these values, but one that acknowledges that it has failed to hold them up, that they might come to take up the mantle of responsibility and solidarity for their former colonies. Arguably, this would mean not just to re-build, in more egalitarian ways, the international relationship to those nation-states that were colonial subjects in the past. It would also necessitate a restructuring of the nations’ internal postcolonial relationship: the relationship between the white majority and a North-African and Sub-Saharan African minority. The idea is to confront the existing self-image with its repressed memories and to let this confrontation transform, through a complex process of public (and private) re-narration, the collective self-image of the French nation.
Reconciliation is understood here, that is, not simply as social integration. If the new collective narratives do not tell a story that helps us take moral responsibility for past crimes and draw from this the right conclusions, inspiring in us a more morally effective collective ethos, they ought to be rejected. They cannot simply plaster over the cracks in the moral foundations of the nation: that is, over the group conflicts that have come about through an enduring history of past oppression in the hope of achieving social integration and stability. Habermas is not looking, and this he shares with Hegel, simply for social reconciliation but for moral reconciliation. It is the kind of reconciliation that comes about, and this is very much a Hegelian thought, through confrontation and struggle. The French Maghrebin and Sub-Saharan Africans have every reason to confront French society and we may hope that this confrontation will lead to moral reconciliation (rather than simply social integration) in a new collective self-understanding which incorporates the voice of the other, the subaltern, the oppressed.
3.2) Affirmative
While it is moral rather than social reconciliation that the idealist is looking for, the idealist believes that a minimally affirmative re-narration of the past is needed to motivate us to struggle for and trust liberal-egalitarian institutions. The re-narration of the past needs to inspire, as any collective narrative does, a feeling of pulling together: in this case of striving towards the same goal of constructing and upholding liberal-egalitarian institutions. It is not only, that is, past moral failures we ought to point to but successful past moral struggles as well. In Habermas’s own words: The suggestion that the political order of a modern community could draw on a natural, unquestioned background consensus is misleading. What unites citizens of a society constituted by societal, cultural and doctrinal pluralism are, at first, merely the abstract principles and procedures of an artificial, because legally constituted republican order. These constitutional principles can only become a motivational force in the citizenry, however, once the population has gotten used to relations of political freedom and has found this a positive experience. This also means perceiving the constitution and the republic as an achievement (Errungenschaft) and this perception must be the product of a historical realization (Vergegenwärtigung) without which ties of constitutional patriotism cannot emerge. The latter are connected for us with pride in the successful civil rights movement, but also with the dates 1848 and 1871, with the dread of two World Wars, the bitterness of two dictatorships and the horror at the human catastrophe (Habermas 1995a, 48).
In the idealist mode of working through, that is, “pride” and “bitterness” or, as I would call it, “shame” come together. On the one hand, moral progress is preconditioned on learning from past moral failure and letting the shame associated with it color our collective self-understanding. On the other hand, we ought to appropriate our own collective past in ways that help us realize, in a more affirmative mode, that our freedom is the product of past moral struggle.
This has several important functions. First, to engage with history in what Friedrich Nietzsche has famously called a “monumental” mode (rather than just doing so in a “critical” mode, which sees us confront and denounce past failures) (Nietzsche 1997, 67) has a twofold effect: first, of motivating us to follow the example of the heroes of past moral struggle and to act in accordance with their values and beliefs. Second, of providing hitherto marginalized social groups with important sources of self-worth. The Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington DC has this twofold effect. By celebrating those who struggled against racist oppression, it tells not only the story that change is possible, that we are self-determining and morally effective agents. It also tells the story of those at the very bottom of the social hierarchy as the drivers of this change. 8
Second, it may help to (re)-establish trust in the cooperative endeavor of striving for freedom and equality and the constitution and the institutions of a state committed to this project. Germans and German Jews in particular can only trust their nation-state in as far as they take it to have learned from its moral failures and realized relations of freedom and pluralist tolerance as a consequence. Institutions that allow for formal freedom and equality do not warrant trust, and this is again a Hegelian idea, unless an analysis of their historical development leads to the conviction that they have come about in past processes of struggle and self-criticism. Real, substantial freedom and equality, rather than just formal freedom and equality, are possible only on the basis of a collective identity that is formed through a history of struggle and contention with past failures. While we are still and will always be engaged in this process of contenting with past failures, a process that fills us with shame, we can also take pride in the successful contention with moral failures and oppression that occurred in the past.
The truth about our wrongful past may lead then to reconciliation in a double sense. First, as reconciliation with an aggrieving past: in re-narrating our identities we do not draw just on our past mistakes but also on past struggles that advanced, as negations, our collective process of moral learning. Such commemoration and celebration of past struggles simultaneously serves to reconcile us, secondly, with our present. It reminds us of the moral values that form the normative bedrock of (broadly) liberal-egalitarian communities and inspires us to uphold and fight for them. Reconciliation is not understood as mere social integration but as the reconciliation with a present state that holds the potential for realizing the unfulfilled promises of the past. While it uncovers the horrible things that human beings are capable of doing to each other, the process of working through also helps us realize that struggle towards egalitarian relations has always occurred and can thus occur again in the present and future. To look into the past is to confront ourselves both with repressed memories of past wrongs and with the fact that, as history shows us, we are creatures that can determine themselves in freedom and equality enhancing ways.
More concretely still, we may come to see that a process of moral learning has already occurred: our beliefs in freedom and equality are not empty formalisms but have been hard fought for in the French Revolution, say, or the slave revolt in Haiti. The idealist accepts of course that neither freedom nor equality have yet been fully realized and perhaps they never will be, but he sees in the modern age of Enlightenment, in which our collective self-consciousness has radically changed, the potential for such realization. To look into the past and to form, through this process of negation, a more realistic, more morally attuned self-image can help us do so. This image of working through the past is idealist in a double sense. It is firstly, affirmative, in that it believes in the possibility of reconciliation with the past and the present. It is, secondly, subject-centered, in that it takes the process of working through to be one of self-enlightenment, of an ascendancy to a higher stage of self-consciousness.
4) The materialist paradigm
Where the idealist paradigm is subject-centered, the materialist paradigm is object-centered. In contrast to the idealist paradigm it emphasizes the materialism of human nature and of social structures. It is also negativistic rather than affirmative: reconciliation with the wrongful past or the present should not be the aim of working through the past. The idealist paradigm takes working through to be primarily a re-constructive exercise, understood as a re-narration of our collective identity that combines what is good and bad about the past in an effort to realize a potential already present in our current institutional framework. Adorno’s materialist paradigm takes it to be more of a de-constructive one: to work through the past is to reveal the materialist causes of past wrongs and how these causes endure, structurally, into the present. Consequently, in contrast to the idealist approach, Adorno places emphasis on Freud’s naturalism rather than on Freud’s idea of sublation.
4.1) Object-centered
Adorno pushed his “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” against the wall of silence, denial and relativization of Nazi crimes in post-war Germany. At the time, people were either trying to “close the books on the past” and to “break free” from it by “removing it from memory” or to “ward off, abreact, and distort through the silliest of rationalizations” their feelings of guilt (Adorno 1998, 91). That the people of his time genuinely felt “no shame in arguing that it was at most only five and not six million Jews who were gassed” and that they drew up the “balance sheet of guilt […] as though Dresden compensated for Auschwitz” is to Adorno a sign of “something that psychologically has not been mastered (Adorno 1998, 91).” This collective “neurosis”, Adorno argues, needs to be met with an attempt to break “the spell” (Bann) (Adorno 1973, 345) of the past “through a lucid consciousness” (Adorno 1998, 89). The past for Adorno is still present and its spell cannot be lifted by ignoring, distorting or relativizing it: “the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive” and “what is conscious could never prove so fateful as what remains unconscious, half-conscious, or preconscious” (Adorno 1998, 100).
We should first note the obvious Freudian undertones here, which Adorno makes rather explicit when he claims that “a precise and undiluted knowledge of Freudian theory is more necessary and relevant today than ever (Adorno 1998, 101).” Unlike the idealist paradigm, however, it is Freud’s materialism (or naturalism) that Adorno emphasizes rather than his idea of sublation. For Freud, repressed memories are always memories of repressed natural desires. The goal of working through is to uncover and work with these desires. Freud’s theoretical focus lies on our human nature and the kind of pathologies that a clash between our natural desires and the repressive expectations of civilized societies produces.
The past for Adorno needs to be made “present” in ways that take seriously our “narcissistic instinctual drives” and the role that they play in the horrors of the past (Adorno 1998, 96). He appeals directly to Freud’s idea of the pathology inducing effects of repressed desires when he claims that the success of Hitler’s regime had much to do with a “callous world” which “promised less and less satisfaction” of the “individual’s narcissistic instinctual drives” and which found “substitute satisfaction in the identification with the whole (Adorno 1998, 96).” Another passage gives us a better idea of the kind of desires that Adorno might have in mind here. First, the natural desire for material security: “the organizational tightening of the weave in the societal net” in Hitler’s national-socialist regime gave people the impression that “everything is being taken care of” and of enjoying “protection from the universal fear of falling through the mesh and disappearing (Adorno 1998, 95).” Second, the natural desire for community and recognition: Adorno claims that in the Nazi era “for countless people it seemed that the coldness of social alienation had been done away with thanks to the warmth of togetherness [in] the völkisch community (Adorno 1998, 95).”
Adorno’s observations reveal two Freudian insights essential to his idea of working through and his wider philosophical system. First, repressed natural desires have pathological consequences on the individual and collective level. Human beings start doing terrible things to each other, and this is a claim that appears repeatedly in Adorno’s mature work, when their material security, or, as he calls it, their desire for self-preservation, is thwarted. Second, and here Adorno’s Freudianism gets a distinctly Marxian tinge, what thwarts our natural desires, for material security and for non-alienated social relationality, is the capitalist social structure. The “universal fear of falling through the mesh” is, for Adorno, connected to the boom and bust cycles of crisis capitalism. The “coldness of social alienation” is a product of a social relationality entirely mediated by what Adorno calls, in explicit reference to Marx, the “principle of exchange” (Adorno 2006, 60). This is the double-sense of Adorno’s materialism: a concern with natural human drives, desires and impulses coupled with a concern for the ways in which they interact with the materiality of capitalist social relations.
Working through the past for Adorno has the specific function of demonstrating to us the extent of the materialistic determination produced when our natural drives interact with a repressive social structure. He does so by revealing to us the materialist causes of the crimes committed in the Nazi era. We need to make the past present, as he stresses, in a way that goes beyond moralizing “reproach” and in a way that “withstands the horror by having the strength to comprehend even the incomprehensible (Adorno 1998, 100).” The “incomprehensible” here refers to the fact that the Nazis were in an important sense normal human beings. They were driven by the same natural desires – like those for self-preservation and recognition – that we are all confronted with and they reacted to structural pressures in morally reprehensible but all in all predictable and explicable ways. It is in this sense that the “danger is objective” and that we should be wary of “the phrase that everything depends on the person” which “attribute[s] to people everything that in fact is due to the external conditions” (Adorno 1998, 93).
By looking at the past primarily in the mode of grandstanding and moralizing, by pointing our finger at those who committed past crimes, we commit a fatal double mistake: not only do we stand in danger of ignoring the structural causes of the undoubtedly immoral behavior that took place, with the possible consequence of said structural “conditions remain[ing] undisturbed”, but we ignore and further repress the very real human desires that stood behind these crimes. To do so is to block any way forward that accepts these desires as part of our human nature and works with them in ways that bring us closer to a society that is a good place to live for creatures such as us. Revealing the truth about our objective, natural side may lead to a reconciliation with it and this, to Adorno, is the precondition to social relations in which we are reconciled with one another.
To work through the past is to work through the present. It is to reveal that the wrongful past “lives on” in the “conditions” that enable people to “commit the unspeakable”: that is, the ways in which the social structure creates, by working on our natural desires in certain ways, individual and collective psychological “neurosis” (Adorno 1998, 90). Such revelation alone will not be sufficient, however: “The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated (Adorno 1998, 103).” As long as “the majority of people”, even “in the midst of prosperity […] feel secretly that they are potentially unemployed, recipients of charity, and hence really objects, not subjects, of society” this “discomfort can be dammed up, channeled toward the past, and manipulated in order to provoke a renewal of the disaster (Adorno 1998, 97).” As long as capitalism lives, another Auschwitz is always possible. The “spell” (Bann) remains unbroken. As long as that which made Auschwitz possible is still alive, we are all caught up in a “guilt nexus” (Schuldzusammenhang), but our emphasis should not lie on a backward looking attempt at singling out individual perpetrators and morally condemning them. We should, rather, emphasize our own entanglement in and thus collective responsibility for changing the kind of structures that incentivized and enabled their crimes. 9
Any attempt at working through the past that does not try to understand the psychological and structural causes of wrongful behavior, the materialist stresses, remains toothless. Learning from the past is, to an important degree, precisely an attempt at understanding the similarities in the causes of present wrongful attitudes, practices and behaviors and those of the past. Such analysis may also reveal a structural continuity: a continuity of the kind of conditions that enable relationships of oppression.
4.2) Negativistic
Its focus on “continuity” rather than “change” goes hand in hand with a rejection of the Hegelian idea of a “positive theodicy” – the idea that we have reason to feel reconciled with history because past struggles (born from oppression and suffering) can be shown to have contributed to moral progress. Against the positive theodicy of the idealist paradigm, Adorno calls for seeing history in the light of a negative theodicy. The individual suffering of the past and the endurance into the present of the very structures that made it possible, gives us every reason to reject the present. The “sufferings of a single human being”, as Adorno claims, “cannot be compensated for [aufgehoben] by the triumphal march of progress (Adorno 2006, 8).” In a world in which millions of human beings suffered in the Nazi concentration camps and died in their gas chambers, we cannot and indeed must not feel reconciled with the past. A reconciliation with the present, what is more, would be called for only if the kind of structures that enabled Hitler’s rise to power no longer existed. Adorno’s “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” makes clear that Adorno did not think this to be the case in postwar Germany. More importantly, for our purposes, he would not think it to be true of present-day Germany either, or, indeed, anywhere in a world firmly in the grip of an increasingly global and poorly regulated capitalism.
While Adorno was concerned primarily with the exploitation, alienation, crisis and material insecurities that are the product of capitalist social structures, his argument can be applied to any kind of social structure that exploits, marginalizes, alienates or degrades human beings. The structural racism that has oppressed the descendants of African slaves and indigenous peoples in the America’s for centuries is still alive, albeit in less obvious forms, today. Seeing how this is the case, African-Americans and indigenous peoples have no reason to feel reconciled with the past (or the present). Not only do we have no reason to emphasize history’s affirmative character, however, to come to Adorno’s radical conclusion. Rather, we have good reason to emphasize its overwhelmingly negative character instead: After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history – the unity of the control of nature, progression to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men (…) (Adorno 1973, 320)
Reconciliation is not warranted not only because major human catastrophes, especially Auschwitz, have already happened in its wake but because its structural constitution makes it more than likely that such catastrophes are still to come. Given that this is the case, it would be cynical to feel reconciled to a history understood as the affirmative unfolding of reason. Instead we are pushed by past suffering and its endurance into the present to take the stance that Walter Benjamin (who is a great influence on Adorno) ascribes to the angel in Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus”: His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet (Benjamin 2007, 257).
To see history as a “single catastrophe” is to see it as a repetitive, continuous process, in which the same practices of oppression and domination occur again and again and again. As Benjamin puts it, “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism (Benjamin 2007, 256).” History is in this sense constituted through a “negative identity” (Adorno 2006, 92). Importantly, however, as Adorno stresses in his Lectures on History and Freedom (Adorno 2006), to see history in this way must not mean to see it as merely repetitive. The materialist historiographer, engaged in materialist Aufarbeitung, has to look both at the structural continuity of history and at the particular moments in history that reveal a moment of discontinuity: a rupture that has both the potential of reverberating into the present and re-ordering our thinking.
Auschwitz was both a predictable and a singular event. Predictable because it was the product of a structural continuity that we can point to when looking into the past. It is singular and unique, firstly, because it involved the suffering of individual human beings, whom we must regard, unlike those who tortured and killed them, as more than a mere “specimen” (Adorno 1973, 362): as concrete individuals, with their own life stories, experiences, hopes, desires and expectations. It is singular and unique, secondly, because of the sheer scope and particular industrial quality of the mass murder that was the Holocaust. The Nazis reminded the entire world, with horrible force, not only of the great fragility of democracy but also, by entirely denying it, of the worth of human life. Auschwitz constitutes then the linchpin of what we might call, in contrast to the idealist’s positive theodicy of history, a negative theodicy: a catastrophe so horrible that it re-orients our thinking about both history and the present. Paradoxically, doing so gives us hope that we might, by finally coming to see them in a different light, overcome the very structures that made Auschwitz possible in the first place. The Enlightenment logic and its specific late capitalist form gave rise to Auschwitz; after all it were the unemployed and those who feared unemployment in a nation shaken by the kind of economic crisis typical of late capitalism who voted Hitler into power. Auschwitz gives us the opportunity, however, as a species, to finally place radical doubt on the notion of progress that has guided our thinking and acting up to this point and to the specific forms of social relationality to which it has given rise. It is in this sense that we must understand Adorno’s astonishing claim that “progress occurs where it comes to an end” (Adorno 2006, 152).
I suggest that we might think of settler colonialism or the transatlantic slave trade as Adorno thought of Auschwitz. As, on the one hand, the product of a developmental trajectory and logic: that is, the project of enlightenment and civilization, of bringing the unruly world (and ourselves) under control through the rule of reason. But, on the other hand, as a moment of rupture in this trajectory, as one that both refocused it, giving birth to new, enduring structures and path dependencies, and as one that has the potential of revealing to us its dark side. The European colonial aggression against the indigenous peoples of North America or the transatlantic slave trade are the product of a civilizational narrative, a scientific racism and a drive for capitalist industrialization and expansion born in the enlightenment era. But they are also unique moments in time that refocus the enlightenment trajectory, creating new forms of structural continuity: settler colonial and racist institutions, norms, beliefs, values and narratives that endure into the present. Adorno teaches us that a re-focusing on these moral catastrophes is precisely what allows us to perceive and acknowledge this endurance: if we perceive our present institutions, norms, beliefs, values and narratives and their genesis through the lens of what we might call the “negative founding moments” of the states of Canada or the USA, we come to see them in a different light. As many indigenous activists and scholars have argued, to look at the Canadian State with an emphasis on its settler colonial founding and how this founding has created enduring social structures we might come to view its legitimacy (or at least the legitimacy of its relationship to the indigenous minority) in a new light. 10
The idealist paradigm focused on the idea of historical progress, of rationalization and learning from past mistakes. It sees in modernity the potential for reconciliation through truth. The materialist paradigm is far more skeptical. Rather than on change and progression, on evolutionary stages of social development, its focus lies on continuity: on the structural endurance of those features of our social world that enable and incentivize oppression, violence and exploitation. Where the idealist reveals that while we have made terrible mistakes we have also learned from them, the materialist urges us to heed the silent warning call of Benjamin’s angel of history: human beings have always been capable of slaughter and this will not change in the future. But there is also hope. Through a thorough study of past catastrophes and their causes we can come to understand the psychological and social nature of human beings: what drives them to act in certain ways and under which circumstances. Such knowledge is the most important tool available to us in preventing further catastrophes. To prevent catastrophe is, for Adorno, the only legitimate goal that our study of history may have.
5) Working through the past: the materialist paradigm as corrective
Where does the materialist’s criticism of the idealist paradigm of working through leave us? I argue that we should understand the materialist paradigm as a corrective that points to the blind spots in the process the idealist paradigm describes: that of re-narrating our collective identity through confrontation with our tainted past. Such a process, even if understood primarily in an idealist mode, can be an important tool in the struggle for social justice taken up by the Black Lives Matter movement, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign or similar postcolonial movements.
It can play this role, to return to my reconstruction of the idealist mode from the work of Habermas, in two ways. First, by toppling or vandalizing statues, movements like BLM or Rhodes Must Fall point to the racist legacy of those whose deeds are commemorated (Schulz 2019). In particular when this targets national heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were slave holders, or Winston Churchill, who was a white supremacist, activists publicly confront the self-image of the national community: their activism reveals how even the lives and actions of great moral exemplars, of those who founded a long lasting democratic republic or a great statesman who helped free Europe from the Nazis, where implicated in the project of racial supremacism that structured the world in the wake of European imperialism. In doing so, such activism confronts the self-image of the American or British national community with the repressed truth about the extent of its racist past. Such confrontation may in turn, and this is how Habermas describes the project of working through, lead to an evolution of American or British collective identity to incorporate and accept responsibility for the darker parts of its past, while simultaneously re-affirming the republican and liberal values that the (now) tainted national heroes also stood for.
Working through in an idealist mode, I have argued, stands not only for confrontation, however, but also a hopeful affirmation of the past. We must not only move to confront an unjustifiably self-congratulatory collective self-image by pointing to the troubling aspects of our shared past. We should also point to past moral struggles against oppression. It is in this vein that the BLM movement commissions and supports art that celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. 11 I have argued that such commemorative affirmation of the past, which tells a story of moral heroism against oppression, may have a twofold effect. Seeing how it was the oppressed who stood up for themselves, despite facing a threat of violence and mortal danger, it may, first, act as a source of self-respect for those whose agency has often been denied or overlooked. It may also, and this is partly how the BLM movement sees its celebration of the MLK Jr. legacy, inspire and motivate us to emulate past moral struggles and to fight for the values of freedom and equality these struggles stood for, giving us hope that moral progress is possible.
Telling the story of progress can (and this is where I disagree with Adorno) play an important role, that is. But it cannot be the whole story, and here Adorno has a lot to teach us. The central aim of BLM and similar movements is not to point to the moments of progress in the past, of overcoming slavery, Jim Crow or successfully struggling for equal civil rights, but to the ongoing oppression of African Americans and the ways in which this oppression has structurally endured. The structural conditions that make the oppression of African Americans possible and likely, notwithstanding all the progress in terms of formal equality, are still in place.
As much as anti-racist activists are right to both celebrate past moral struggle and point to the structural endurance of oppression, there is a reason why such movements tend to give more weight to the latter. The more we tell the kind of monumentalist narratives involved in celebrating MLK Jr. and other civil rights heroes, the more we shift our focus towards change and progress instead of continuity and towards singular events rather than long-term causal chains.
The story, as it is commonly told, of MLK Jr. and the formal acknowledgement of the equality of African-Americans in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a thoroughly Hegelian one. MLK Jr., and the civil rights movement he led, challenged an unjustified hierarchy and the ideology that serves to uphold it, a confrontation which presented the white, racist majority with an opportunity for moral learning and one they took up. 12 Confrontation leads, as Hegel describes it throughout his work, to ascension, to social evolution, or to put this in a more Habermasian language, moral progress.
To focus too much on this story of progress, however, is, potentially, to lose track of the ways in which African-Americans are still treated as second-class citizens today. The commemoration of MLK Jr.’s legacy, which revolves around the often televised and reprinted “I have a dream speech” in front of the Lincoln Memorial, makes it seem as if MLK Jr.’s great rhetorical powers captured the American heart and soul, shifting American attitudes in a heartbeat. In reality, MLK Jr. was treated as a terrorist by the US law enforcement agencies and died with a public disapproval rating of 75% (Cobb 2018). That public disapproval was higher in the year of his death than in the years of his greatest triumphs – the march on Washington and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts – was mainly due to the fact that MLK Jr. was very much aware that his campaign to end anti-black racism could not stop at the formal extension of civil rights. In his final years he sought to address the deeper, socio-economic issue of structural racism, pushing for changes that would have been far more costly for the white property owning class (Cobb 2018). Here, he was unable to effect genuine change before he was murdered. The structural racism that he rightly described as denying equal opportunities to African-Americans has changed its shape but still effectively blocks access to crucial social resources for racial minorities. The materialist points us to the fact that the memory of the civil rights movement is not only a reminder of our capacity for moral progress but also our capacity for extending formal rights while effectively upholding social hierarchy.
The idealist paradigm is primarily interested in the construction of collective myths that work with the unavoidable omission and emphasis of storytelling in ways that have a certain affirmative, practical force. In this sense, they rekindle feelings of mutual trust and recognition, provide assurance of our shared equality and motivate us towards justice-oriented cooperation. The idealist paradigm is engaged in what we might call the construction of “positive myths”: the kind of stories that have egalitarian rather than inegalitarian effects.
The materialist paradigm is primarily engaged in the de-constructive task of ideology critique. Its materialist viewpoint opens the possibility of engaging with the idealist endeavor of “myth-creation” in a thoroughly self-critical and self-reflexive way. Self-critical, because the materialist corrective points to the blind-spots in the egalitarian and moral progressivist narratives the idealist is interested in: even if past moral struggles have pushed us to a more inclusivist (and thus morally appropriate) collective self-understanding, the social hierarchies that are the product of former, less inclusivist self-understandings have structurally endured. Self-reflexive because the materialist urges the idealist to consider the ways in which the process of working through itself, as praiseworthy as it may otherwise be, reflects the power struggles of different social and political factions. It is in these two ways that the materialist paradigm may act as a corrective to the idealist understanding of working through the past. I turn to both in this order.
5.1) The structural endurance of social hierarchy
Where the idealist points to evolutions in collective self-understanding and how these effect moral and political progress, the materialist remains more skeptical. She points to the fact that changes in the ways in which we narrate and present our collective identity have not always led to an adequate change in material relations. Most practices still serve, quite clearly, the same material interests that they have always served, only that those who justify these practices have adapted to new discursive demands. You can no longer openly – that is, publicly and explicitly – demote African-Americans to second class status but policies and practices in the police, judiciary, housing, city planning, electoral and employment sector speak, to name just a few, a very different language. African-Americans, as the BLM movement stresses, are racially discriminated against, often fatally so, by the police; the mass incarceration of black men for minor crimes keeps them out of employment and hinders them, through laws that prevent convicts and ex-convicts from voting, from making use of their political agency. Gerrymandering (the practice of setting boundaries of electoral districts in ways that prevent a certain group of people from winning this district) as well as election laws that require voters to pre and re-register and bring identification has further curbed the amount of influence that African-Americans have on politics. African-Americans, what is more, are also much less likely to be invited to a job interview and landlords will usually deny them residential access to white neighborhoods, which ensures continuing segregation. 13
The materialist sees all of this as the structural continuity of a social hierarchy that serves the interests of the dominant social group, and which has endured, while evolving and adapting to new social realities and moral demands, from the moment which saw the first West African slaves forced to labor for their white slavers. A similar story can be told, as indigenous theorists like Glen Coulthard stress, about the Indigenous peoples in Canada, who were the victims of white settler colonialism and who continue to be the victims of settler colonialism today. While the discursive and legal relationship has drastically changed – after all Indigenous peoples are now seen as a culturally self-determining groups with special affirmative action rights – the underlying material relationship, as Coulthard points out, has not. The original colonial settlement was, for all the talk of “civilizing” the Americas, all about land. Whenever land and its exploitation by Canadian or transnational corporations is at issue today, the particular perspectives and the original Indigenous ownership of these lands tend to be ignored (Coulthard 2014, 4).
Looking into the past can point us to the materialist truth of the continuity of hierarchical social structures where this revelation of the truth can have a twofold effect. It can, firstly, help us understand the ulterior and often subconscious motives of current practices and policies, no matter their public justification. The history of American interventionism, for example, shapes our perception of present-day American interventionism; Iraq War protestors were rightly skeptical of the moralizing justification narrative of regime-change and their skepticism was based partly on the past history of capital interest standing behind American interventions. Similarly, African-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the Americas have every reason to be distrustful of practices and policies that affect them, given the oppressive and exploitative relationship between them and the white majority that has been an enduring feature of the US and Canadian societies.
The truth that the materialist tries to uncover by looking into the past, and this constitutes a second important contrast to the idealist approach, does not lend itself to the establishment of relations of mutual trust. It may in fact point to the legitimacy of resisting such establishment as long as the existing material relations do not warrant it. The process of working through the past, in the materialist paradigm, cuts through the ideological delusion of a tolerant and multicultural Canada or that of a US society in which everyone can make it from dishwasher to millionaire and points instead to the reality of enduring social hierarchy.
5.2) Self-reflexivity
The materialist points not only to the endurance of social hierarchy, however, but to the ways in which such hierarchy or power struggles between social factions may motivate and shape the process of working through itself. The celebrated processes of working through in Germany or Cambodia, for example, were significantly shaped, both in how they came about and how they developed, by configurations of power and interest groups that thought to engage in such processes for political purpose.
The German process of working through took a number of turns, two of which were particularly important: the rebellious 1968 student movement and the decisive era in the 1980s and 1990s that saw the wider German society and political elites acknowledge the horrors of the Nazi past. The latter step saw Germany turn into a global role model for attempts to come to terms with a troubled past, with Timothy Garton Ash speaking of a German “DIN-Norm” of remembrance and some commentators, mostly of the critical kind, polemically calling Germany the “world champions at remembering” (Assman 2013, 59). Both turns crucially involved the employment, by certain interest groups, of practices of confronting the past for ideological purposes and political gain. The German 1968 movement, to focus on the first turn, was not solely or perhaps not even primarily a movement to uncover past wrongs. The German 1968 movement was an anti-conservative political movement that struggled to overthrow what they saw as a militaristic, authoritarian and above all capitalist regime. The 1968 movement was in large parts, as Assman and others do not hesitate to point out, not focused on the (Jewish) victims of the past. The German 1968 movement wanted to win the intergenerational power struggle against their right wing and conservative opponents. The process of working through the Nazi past was a welcome tool in this struggle: a “political weapon” in Assman’s words, which gained the movement tremendous “symbolic power” (Assman 2013, 47). To uncover the crimes of the previous generation was to claim moral superiority. The present-day capitalist regime, according to the message of the movement, was the successor of a fascist regime that had committed horrible crimes against humanity. The Nazi crimes were also the crimes of a capitalist world order and the movement demanded a complete break with the past which meant a break with the West German regime and the western capitalist order as such.
Adorno’s rejection of the German 1968 movement, which wanted to enthrone him as one of their intellectual leaders, becomes plausible against the backdrop of this materialist reading. On the face of it, his rejection, which greatly angered the movement and led to significant backlash against him, is surprising: both the movement and Adorno made capitalism out as the great evil of the modern world and, more importantly, both Adorno and the movement believed that the structures that enabled the Holocaust were still present in Germany today. Indeed, the movement’s clash with one of its great intellectual heroes was just what the conservative German media landscape had been waiting for. To the German “feuilleton” the clash was something discussed with Schadenfreude and bemusement but otherwise remained somewhat of a mystery. Predictable tropes of “theory” versus “praxis” where drawn on to explain it, but I believe that Adorno’s reluctance to claim the movement was entirely consistent with his own worldview and philosophical system. Rather than showing a real interest and empathy for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust or for the kind of structural pressures and mass-psychological phenomena that enable and define totalitarian rule, the 68 movement pointed to the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes in an attempt to take the moral high ground in a global ideological power struggle. Even worse, it uncritically accepted one side of the struggle, conveniently omitting from its narrative the mass murder committed by the Stalinist regime in the East as well as the horrors that the struggle between the East and the West – which it sought to continue – brought to the world. In other words, the 68 movement abused or, at the very least, fundamentally misunderstood the project of working through the past that Adorno had called for. Their attempts at working through where, firstly, insufficiently structural: rather than engaging with the uncomfortable reality of the structural complexity of the Nazi past and the present it has led to, the 68 movement employed formulaic images for ideological purpose. Very few in the 68 movement sought to draw a connection between the terrors of Stalinism and that of the Nazis, that is, to the ways in which certain structural pressures and historical contingencies create situations that lead to violent individual and mass pathology.
On the other hand, to come back to the dialectical complexity of Adorno’s philosophy of history, they ignored the particularity and singularity of the suffering caused by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in particular. There was little emphasis on individual victims and their stories and experiences (which only became a focus of German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in the 1980s). Instead, the Holocaust was pointed to in order to discredit the conservative adversary. The 1968 movement used the suffering of the individual Jewish victim, to put it more strongly, as a stepping stone towards what they thought of as moral progress. To the Adornian this stance is morally obnoxious. The individual suffering of those who were tortured and killed in the concentration camps stands on its own and must not be abused for ideological purposes. The attempts of the 1968 movement to co-opt him must have seemed to Adorno, who experienced the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi era first-hand, as adding insult to injury: it degraded him and the memory of the six million murdered Jews to a tool in an ideological power struggle.
Similar problematizations are readily available for all real world attempts at working through the past. To point to but one more case: the memory of Pol Pot’s crimes against humanity, especially at the infamous S-21 interrogation and torture center, served the Vietnamese as a legitimation of their occupation of Cambodia, which, at the time, was not backed by the international community. In the “Tuol Sleng” museum and genocide memorial at the former site of the S-21, which was opened only 3 months after the Vietnamese had prevailed against the Red Khmer, memories of torture and murder were fused explicitly with narratives of Cambodian aggression against Vietnam: the Tuol Sleng genocide memorial, as Rachel Hughes argues plausibly, played the role of setting a narrative counterpoint to attempts by the USA and the Chinese to de-legitimize the Vietnamese occupation and the ensuing creation of the “People’s Republic of Cambodia” (Hughes 2017, 181).
What follows from this? We might conclude that “working through” is a scam, that it cannot be considered a genuine process of critical self-reflection that evinces moral care for the victims of past injustice, or that it is too much of a tool in existing social and political struggles. Such a conclusion would the product of a naïve view of social reality and the role that morality can play in it, however. In the real world every moral struggle is also a political struggle. The materialist’s skeptic viewpoint urges us to acknowledge this fact about processes of working through and to rope in, through skeptical deconstruction, such processes and their agents, whenever they threaten to run away on a moral high horse.
6) Conclusion
I have argued that the process of collectively working through one’s own tainted past may take place in two different modes, guided by different aims: in the idealist mode working through aims at uncovering the dark parts of our past, where this uncovering has the aim of confronting and ultimately transforming our collective identity. This confrontation notwithstanding, the idealist seeks to reconcile us with our collective selves, not only by openly confronting and acknowledging past moral transgression, which will help to re-establish lost trust, but by pointing to past moral struggles as the source of our values and institutions. The materialist asks us to look past moral progress and to uncover the endurance of structural pressures that enabled or caused past oppression and violence.
I have argued that we should view the materialist’s intervention as a corrective to the idealist’s reconciliatory outlook. The materialist helps us approach the endeavor of working through in a more self-critical and self-reflexive fashion: those, like African-Americans or the indigenous peoples of America, that suffer under enduring oppression have every reason to reject a collective process of re-narrating our identity through uncovering past wrongs that does not simultaneously address their structural remainders. What is more, we must stay wary of the ways in which such processes may turn into an instrument for those seeking to use it to gain ideological superiority in social and political power struggles. Working through, as a process, warrants trust only if it revolves around genuine compassion for the victims of past oppression and systematic violence, as well as shame for what has been done to them.
Importantly, however, we must stress materialism’s role as a “corrective”. We ought not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. To learn, robustly, from past mistakes must involve the constructive (and not just deconstructive) task of re-narrating our collective identity in ways that orient us towards more egalitarian values and aims. Humans are storytelling animals – which is something the idealist and the materialist can agree on. They are moved to action by stories about the past and how it has led to the present. By evaluating the actions of past agents such stories re-emphasize existing values and beliefs and emotionally re-enforce them. They justify present arrangements and move us to act in certain ways and not others. We cannot move forward politically, as George Sorel or Spinoza have rightly argued, without a strong story that emotionally appeals to people and motivates them to action (Bottici 2007). Stories are needed to hold on to an oppressive present but they are also needed to overcome oppression.
What is more, it would be foolish not to publicly commemorate past struggles against oppression. If all we were to do is to point, as the materialist would have it, to the continuity of oppression and the superficiality of past social transformation, we would seriously de-incentivize present day struggle against oppression. If even the Civil Rights Movement, which cost many lives including that of its most famous leader, did not effect real change how could we hope to do so today? Present day movements, like Black Lives Matter, have to draw on and commemorate successful past struggle, in an attempt to reproduce it. History in what Friedrich Nietzsche calls the “monumental mode”, where we take inspiration from the great deeds of past heroes, is an inevitable part of politics.
Notwithstanding what has been said so far, we must take the materialists’ skepticism seriously. If all we see is the potential for moral progress and the inspiration that commemorating past heroes may bring, we stand in great danger of hiding the fact of inequality and oppression behind the story of moral progress. The French Revolution did not get rid of class hierarchy, but exchanged, as Adorno plausibly observes, one privileged class, the aristocracy, for another, the bourgeoisie (Adorno 2006, 34–35). The changes effected by the Civil Rights Movement did produce an African-American elite of entertainers, entrepreneurs and politicians that was unthinkable before. Many African-Americans remain in relative poverty, however, subject to police brutality and unfair treatment by the judicial system and the housing and employment market.
Rather than paralyzing us, however, I believe that this tension between two contrasting perspectives, one too optimistic, the other too pessimistic, can be productive. There lies great potential in drawing on the “truth” of past suffering and struggle as a source of reconciliation and of present-day moral progress, but it is also evident that such a story requires continuous negation from a more skeptical view point. Re-construction calls for de-construction, which allows for new efforts at re-construction that necessitate de-construction and so on ad infinitum. The image is one of an open-ended circular process that aims at changing both the (individual and collective) subject’s consciousness and the objective, material structures simultaneously. 14
To take seriously the materialist, however, is also to take seriously that a sufficiently self-critical and self-reflexive process of working through – that is one in which continuous negation is brought to the process – is dependent on certain material conditions. In particular, a process of re-narrating our collective identity is likely to slide into an overly monumental and thus delusional mode, when the authors of this process are those who are structurally advantaged already. While a process of working through has to be one, in a minimal sense, of coming together and cooperation, of public and democratic deliberation, it can only avoid the dangers of reproducing existing power hierarchies if it leaves room for a plurality of voices, for contestation and dissent. Arguably, this is best achieved by institutionalizing the process in ways that place those who are the victims of enduring oppression behind its steering wheel. When working through the enduring structural oppression brought on by settler colonialism or transatlantic slavery it is indigenous and African-American voices that count. While this inversion of which voices are usually heard in public debate is a minimal condition for a good process of working through, it is not enough.
Where enduring structural deficits are not addressed alongside it, those who are the victims of such deficits have every reason to refuse cooperation in a project of collective re-narration as morally self-congratulatory tokenism. A necessary pre-condition for a process of working through that has the potential of engendering structural change lies in the way in which we narrate our foundational myths. We must re-narrate the collective past not in ways that serve to create, as is typical of the nation-state, positive, self-congratulatory founding myths. Rather, we must engage in what I have called, drawing on Adorno and Benjamin, a “negative theodicy”. Such a narrative places what we might call a negative founding moment at its center and focuses on the ways in which this past moral failure still reverberates into the present. Paradigmatically, we might think here of the era of settler colonialism in Canada, the USA, South Africa or Australia or of the transatlantic slave trade. We would only do justice to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s complex philosophy of history, however, and here lies a connection to the idealist paradigm, if we also pointed to the moments of rupture, of creative resistance against oppressive structural determination and how these moments have created pathways for our present struggle for freedom and equality.
