Abstract
This article demonstrates how Adorno and Horkheimer’s turn to psychoanalytic concepts like sublimation and intra-psychic conflict strengthened critical theory. The piecemeal collective psychology they produced was used to understand fascism and anti-Semitism. But the full significance of these psychoanalytic explanations was concealed by Adorno, who elsewhere denied the possibility of psychology proper after the death of the individual. Adorno and Horkheimer’s underhanded borrowing from psychoanalysis for social analysis had the effect of filtering collective psychology through the lens of regression. To amend this, the article analyzes psychoanalytic explanations from an interpretive perspective, building upon Jessica Benjamin’s psychoanalytic feminism, to contest the tactics of immanent criticism and to revitalize the project of a less dystopic collective psychology.
Keywords
Introduction
As has been widely noted, Adorno and Horkheimer’s philosophical affinity with Freudian pessimism increased over the years. I focus here on their co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002, hereafter abbreviated as DE), the seminal work of early Frankfurt School critical theory. When Adorno and Horkheimer started collaborating on a project named Philosophical Fragments in 1939, later to become DE, they originally considered framing it as a critique of psychoanalysis (Noerr 2002). Their focus soon shifted to the broader critique of enlightenment as a Western civilizational process. Not fully shedding the earlier framework, however, every chapter of DE contains a psychoanalytic explanation of some sort. 1 In particular, Adorno and Horkheimer’s turn toward Freudian stories of sublimation, ego-id relations and mass pathologies increased the critical and explanatory leverage of their work. 2
Using psychoanalytic theories in their social explanations of anti-Semitism and fascism, Adorno and Horkheimer developed their own version of a collective psychology. The term ‘collective psychology’, by no means a value-neutral concept, refers to new affectively motivated relationships emerging within 20th-century totalitarianism and within monopoly capitalism in the United States. A new form of collectivity results when individuals no longer internalize parental authority into an inner conscience successfully. The subsequent un-repressed id of individuals is more vulnerable to external manipulation by politicians, media conglomerates, and other charismatic leaders. Collective psychology describes the affective manipulation of the masses in ways that reinforce their own domination, e.g. wasting a people’s psychic energy for resistance by stirring xenophobic fears (Adorno 1946, 2001). It refers to the shared psychic state of the ego being over-powered by a dangerous narcissistic and aggressive id. Techniques for the social control of the id’s affective force, for Adorno and Horkheimer, can incite the most violent racist and militaristic collective behavior.
However, Adorno and Horkheimer are treating psychoanalysis reductively. They neglect the wider potential of a collective psychology by limiting it to a theory of mass pathology. 3 Their opposition in principle to any libidinal group dynamics most likely arises from their increasing observation of propaganda surrounding the Second World War. Their stance is complicit with a long tradition of dichotomizing affect and rationality in sociology. But channels of shared affect, including the libidinal mechanisms theorized by Adorno and Horkheimer, make for too useful a sociological theory to limit it to the rise of totalitarianism and return of total warfare. The critical theorists of dialectics could benefit from a more dialectical view here. First I consider the logic behind their initial hesitancy to use psychoanalytic concepts at all and, more importantly, why they overcame it.
An immanent critique
Adorno and Horkheimer have serious reservations about psychoanalysis and whether it belongs more to the critical or ‘traditional’ mode of theory. They respond to the ambiguities of Freudian theory with an immanent critique. This means that they do not condemn or celebrate the whole of psychoanalysis, but instead try to extract its partial truth. The first step for them is to historicize psychoanalysis by exposing the unacknowledged influence of social context upon Freud’s new science. The self-renouncing Oedipal individual turns out to be a historically specific character of early bourgeois capitalism.
Historicization, though, is only the beginning and not even what makes critical theory’s engagement with psychoanalysis distinctive. Adorno and Horkheimer are not content with the cultural revisionism of psychoanalysts like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm. The latter theorists lose a bit of the inevitable discord between the social and the psychological, given the temporal backwardness of the unconscious. Adorno and Horkheimer find themselves in the odd position, for otherwise heterodox psychoanalytic theorists, of defending the classical hypothesis of libidinal instincts against neo-Freudianism. Instincts remain central in Adorno and Horkheimer’s psychoanalytic theory. Adorno criticizes both ego-psychology and cultural revisionism at length in his essay ‘Sociology and Psychology’ (1967–8) for abandoning the disjuncture between society and individual subjectivity, a possible source of social criticism. Horney and Fromm also forget that the unconscious is embedded in bodily instincts (the somatic sources Freud theorizes in 1991a). 4 In contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize the moral significance of internal psychic conflict between a bodily id, a personal ego and social objects in an alienated society.
Instincts are largely the victims of the repressive Western social order of work and violence. In DE, Adorno and Horkheimer valorize the natural thing-like quality of the body and an intrinsic, however impossible, desire for personal happiness (DE 2002: 29; also Adorno 1967: 67). 5 This re-valuation of the body inaugurates the hedonistic turn in Marxian critical theory. 6 Personal bodily happiness is irrevocably lost due to the renunciations required of humans in civilization. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the domination of others emerges from this prior domination of inner nature, understood through Freud’s philosophy of sublimation.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s hedonistic reading of psychoanalysis expands the meaning of bodily instincts for critical theory. Instincts need not be reductively caricatured as the sexual cravings of the libido. First, the concept of instincts in critical theory is largely negative. Their ethical significance is best grasped by the thought experiment of imagining all the bodily domination required by industrial societies. Second, this account of bodily instincts is not strictly ‘biological’. It rather refers to the mental figuration of somatic demands and their insatiability (not necessarily incompatible with a social-constructionist perspective, according to Simon Clarke, 2003). Lastly, Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical hedonism sees some level of aggression as instinctual too and inevitably disruptive of social harmony. Pace Herbert Marcuse, they offer no vision of a libidinal utopia.
While Adorno and Horkheimer find the Freudian conception of instincts appealing, they have more doubts about Freud’s intent. Classical psychoanalysis fails to be critical in several ways. Freud’s scientism and moralism are the two characteristics that most upset Adorno (1968: 80–1, 2005: 61). Freud clearly thought that he was describing general truths about the human mind and its development. Thus, Freudian psychoanalysis participated in the construction of its object by reifying the psychic structure of the bourgeois individual. Due to Freud’s scientistic ambitions, his theory of the subject is not sufficiently historical. Though it breaks with a reductive biologism, Freud over-extends one topological map of the psyche (however, even Freud acknowledges that the Oedipus complex is not completely universal; see Freud 1959, 1950). Adorno and Horkheimer doubt that the validity of psychoanalysis extends beyond a certain stage of liberal capitalism, in which society cultivated the internal psychic conflict of the bourgeois individual reflected in Freud’s topography (DE 2002: 168).
In Minima Moralia, Adorno’s fragments on psychoanalysis can be quite caustic and dismissive (Adorno 2005: esp. sections 36 through 42; hereafter abbreviated as MM). Nevertheless, Adorno prefers the trope of alleging betrayal in his immanent critique: psychoanalysis has betrayed its own emancipatory truth-content. Adorno writes that in ‘alienating him [the analysand] from himself, denouncing his autonomy with his unity, psycho-analysis subjugates him totally to the mechanism of rationalization, of adaptation’ (2005: 64). While some psychoanalytic theorists revel in their theoretical irrationalist determinism, Adorno finds the loss of private freedom and moral autonomy very worrisome. Projecting the division of labor onto individual subjects, positing patients as automatons, some psychoanalysts diminish individual autonomy theoretically and therapeutically. The very ends of therapy are questionable to Adorno: to be cured is easily confused with successfully adapting to an irrational repressive order. Such therapy aims at normalization through ‘prescribed happiness’ (as opposed to genuine somatic happiness; 2005: 62). The psychoanalyst’s manipulation of emotional mechanisms by transference, for Adorno, is not unlike the collective-psychological operations of the culture industry and authoritarian politicians (2005: 61).
Psychoanalysis reneges on its own promise when it becomes hygienic and normalizing with the aim of successful adaptation to an alienated society. Adorno notes that Freud fails to reconcile two incongruent positions. Sometimes Freud writes like an emancipatory spokesperson for the body; at other times he becomes a cynical, moralistic apologist for renunciation (2005: 60–6). Freud’s all too ‘bourgeois contempt of instinct’ interferes with the more progressive aspects of his thought. His moralism ‘render[s] ineffectual the lingering awareness of the ancient wound, in which lies hope of a better future’ (Adorno 2005: 60, 66, emphasis added). Similar passages in MM indicate again that Adorno identifies the critical edge of psychoanalysis in the idea of corporeal instincts and understanding their specific persecution. Psychoanalysis is right for directing us back to the body even if somatic happiness can only be imagined negatively due to our alienation from nature (see DE for more on this irreconcilability; 2002: 192–3). The ‘ancient wound’ refers to the introjection of domination within the self to discipline the instincts. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s excursus on Odysseus in DE, this self-domination was the original self-sacrifice that enabled humanity’s mastery of nature in civilization.
Freudian stories
Sublimation
In DE, Adorno and Horkheimer depend upon a theory of sublimation to understand non-economic forms of domination, like the bodily repression sanctioned by the social order. 7 In Freudian theory, civilization would not be possible without instinctual renunciation. Sublimation is the displacement of psychic energies from their aim of sexual satisfaction and their re-direction to a partial satisfaction in cultural practices: art, science, technology, and the intellect (Freud 1965: 121, also 1991b). This conception increases Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical purchase on long-range forms of domination. It facilitates their shift from a focus on class exploitation to the much broader critique of Western civilization, myth and Enlightenment.
Sublimation is a form of inward self-trickery, a compromise-formation between the ego and the id allowing partial fulfillment. It can only occur when the psyche has split asunder due to civilization’s domination of inner nature, separating ego and superego from the id. This is Freud’s topography of psychic differentiation, elsewhere considered ‘bourgeois’ by Adorno and Horkheimer. Yet they find prototypes of modern subjectivity to be already present in antiquity, for instance, in Homer’s epic tales of Odysseus and the sacrifices he makes. Odysseus represents originary self-renunciation, the act when the ego is first reified and it loses a more immediate, fluid relationship with the id. Later bourgeois identity depends upon the subsequent psychic differentiation and the possibility of internal conflict between them.
The first Freudian story then is about the dialectic of civilization that underlies the dialectic of enlightenment – the repressiveness of civilization, fating subjectivity to be split from its own nature whether in myth or enlightenment. The theory of sublimation enables Adorno and Horkheimer to transcend Marxist models of power and examine omni-historical forms of internal violence preceding capitalism. In their new framework, internal domination reinforces other forms of domination and is reinforced by them (viz. domination of external nature and against human others).
The Freudian philosophy of civilization gives critical theory an additional moral dilemma. Sublimation – qua the domination of inner nature – is not completely bad. Culture would be impoverished without its produce. Nor is it completely good – after all, it is a form of deception and violence directed against the body. And yet, it constitutes individual subjectivity. Adorno and Horkheimer do not accept the reified, inverse proportion between instinctual fulfillment and cultural expression in Freud’s original theory. 8 Rejecting this eternal formula, they envision variable levels and modes of sublimation with some historical thickness. Emendations aside, recognizing the existence of sublimation, even if variable, does entail accepting loss and disconnection from nature. Sublimation renews Adorno and Horkheimer’s anti-nostalgic resignation to history, increasing their interest in exposing ‘false reconciliations’ with the body as sham (DE 2002: 194). Likewise, the moral subtlety of Freud’s civilizational analysis fits well with an immanent social criticism that rejects the desire for absolutes to ground ethical judgment.
The Oedipal individual
The attitude of truthful resignation appears elsewhere in DE. Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory often deploys the trope ‘that wasn’t good, but this is even worse’. The second Freudian story they turn to, on the Oedipal genesis of individuals, exemplifies this sort of non-creative rhetorical maneuver. Adorno and Horkheimer follow Freud in thinking that bourgeois paternal authority creates individuals with moral autonomy through the Oedipus complex. The process is not without its problems. A distant but idealized proprietary father, also representative of external authorities, is introjected into the ego-ideal – one’s value-commitments. The aggression of the father is internalized in an unnecessarily severe moral censor – the superego. Even a ‘successful’ resolution of the Oedipus complex still results in a life of thwarted happiness, guilt, and susceptibility to neurosis via regression. Though they would concede all of this, Adorno and Horkheimer think that the Oedipus complex is good at one thing: creating non-authoritarian individuals.
They fear, though, that the conscientious individual who possesses such an internal superego is disappearing. The individual dissolves and merges with the affectively driven masses of monopoly capitalism (DE 2002: 168–9). Bourgeois individuality loses its boundaries when civilization no longer requires intra-psychic differentiation. The 19th-century bourgeois model of intra-psychic conflict, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, at least made possible individual conscience and sublimated expression. In monopoly capitalism, however, mindless political obedience and commodity cultures short-circuit the relations between the id, ego, and superego. The ego can no longer mediate between external reality and the unconscious. Instead, techniques of social control act directly upon the id, exploiting the unconscious mechanisms of the masses. Today the functioning of the economic apparatus demands that the masses be directed without the hindrance of individuation. … If, previously, the bourgeois had introjected the compulsions of conscience and duty into themselves and the workers, now the entire human being has become at once the subject and object of repression. (DE 2002: 169)
Indeed, Adorno and Horkheimer regard neo-Freudian revisionism as superficial: it does not acknowledge the moral functions of the Oedipus complex as a powerful social-psychological mechanism for overcoming infantile omnipotence. Adorno once reflected that the significance of the Oedipus complex lies in the education of difference. 9 Elsewhere Horkheimer argues that some familial coercion is necessary to educate the self-centered infant on how to become social (1972: 111). Narcissism, the primary state of the infant for later Freud, needs to be checked (and perhaps no psychoanalytic idea has had as many mutations in cultural criticism). Adorno and Horkheimer tend to view the individual as a precarious achievement worth defending in the face of its dissolution into a more sinister collective psychology. In their estimation, the internalization of paternal authority is better than direct manipulation by extra-familial authorities of mass society. That wasn’t good, but this is even worse.
To criticize the emerging collective psychology, Horkheimer idealizes the traditional private sphere as a retreat away from the world’s cruelty. Moral socialization takes place in the home, wherein maternal love represents an alternative reality principle (Horkheimer 1972). Horkheimer thinks social ‘helplessness’ due to increasing economic insecurity in monopoly capitalism has eliminated the Oedipal family, including its patterns of object-love and identification: the father is no longer a role model. The increasing atomism and rationalization of society fractures the family even while, ironically, the valuation of the nuclear family becomes sacrosanct. The post-Oedipal family creates premature adults who are emotionally stunted, narcissistic, and prone to identification with leaders who operate as mass super-father substitutes (Horkheimer 1959: 383).
This is the context of Adorno and Horkheimer’s wrong-headed apology for the Oedipus complex. Certainly Adorno and Horkheimer are not admirable in their lack of post-Oedipal imagination. Psychoanalytic feminist Jessica Benjamin (1977, 1978, 1988), writing extensively on the masculinist fear of the ‘fatherless society’, identifies the problematic assumptions they make in their narrative of the decline of the individual. First, they assume that some coercive authority is necessary for the development of independent moral reasoning. Hence their defense of paternal authority as a lesser evil. But the presumption that narcissism needs to be checked has a masculine bias. Constructing a more relational psychoanalytic perspective, Benjamin observes how masculinity is defined by the child’s forced separation from the infantile-maternal dyad. Adorno and Horkheimer’s emphasis on overcoming narcissism for moral autonomy is deeply gendered given modern patterns of socialization. Thus they display gender-blindness in assuming the standpoint of the male son’s identification with the father (even Freud came to recognize this as problematic).
Second, they reduce patriarchy to a family arrangement not related to broader gendered cultural processes. In contrast, Benjamin surmises that the very privilege of techne in modernity, in the rise of instrumental rationality across social spheres, depends upon a masculine-feminine splitting (Benjamin 1988). Part of the problem too is how Horkheimer idealizes the private sphere, neglecting gender stratification in his bow to the maternal principle. The structure of Horkheimer’s defense of sexual difference is really a throwback to the 19th century when many social theorists argued for a similar conception of separate spheres. Lastly, the notion that ‘internalization’ is actually decreasing is empirically untrue, Benjamin argues. If anything, new managerial techniques of parenting make the moral internalization of authority more likely.
Another criticism I would add concerns the stark opposition Adorno and Horkheimer draw between individual psychology and collective psychology. The two are considered to be mutually exclusive in their decline-of-the-individual thesis. Collective psychology, predicated upon post-Oedipal family forms (i.e. those where paternal authority is in doubt), replaces the non-authoritarian psychology of the bourgeois individual. Individuality, as the ‘lingering’ value of critical theory, fits well with Adorno’s well-known reappraisal of particularity. Reference to a mass social dimension has the negative connotation of homogeneity over difference for him. The externalization of the internal superego into society is a symptom of a widespread psychic regression. Because of this dissolution of the psychic individual, Adorno is the first to admit that Freudian psychoanalysis is no longer relevant, that it is ‘obsolete’ in Marcuse’s famous words. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic exaggerations of corporeal desires, childhood memories and the individual unconscious persist as an imaginary defiance of the standardized society. By capturing a particular historical moment of bourgeois individuality, psychoanalysis lends critical theory the power to think differently and picture alternatives in the face of bureaucratization and monopolization.
Or so Adorno claims. The claim to have limited the relevance of psychoanalysis to the individual psychology of the past is somewhat disingenuous on Adorno’s part. As he and Horkheimer well realized in DE, psychoanalysis continues to provide theories relevant for post-Oedipal libidinal configurations, theories with reference beyond the boundaries of the individual to the psychic-affective dynamics of groups and mass society. And despite Adorno’s epistemological preference for the strict separation of psychology and sociology, reflecting the real alienation between the individual and society (1967–8), he himself constructs psychoanalytic explanations of social facts through concepts of personality-structures, paranoiac pathologies, character-types, bodily-economic frustrations, etc. Therefore Adorno’s methodological self-descriptions – where psychoanalysis only stumbles upon ‘social moments’ in the innermost private recesses (Adorno 2000) – are misleading. A better understanding of Adorno’s actual theoretical practices must account for his tactical and sociological mobilization of psychoanalysis to understand the libidinal structures of fascism and capitalism.
Mass pathologies
In the chapter on anti-Semitism in DE, Adorno and Horkheimer recite another Freudian story, this time taken from Freud’s psychology of groups and group leadership. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1959), Freud explains the behavior of different social groups – the crowd, church and army – through their ‘libidinal constitution’. Freud subdivides the libidinal relationships of groups into two collective-psychological dynamics constituting the nature of group-ness. First, members of a group (of same rank) are united by identification. Identification is a psychic mechanism where an affiliation is introjected into one’s ego in a non-erotic way. Often developing from a former object-relation, the incorporated object becomes a part of the ego and alters the ego’s behavior, as in the imitation of a role-model.
Second, groups idealize a leader who seems larger than life and functions as a father figure. Such idealization is based on the genesis of a collective ego-ideal. Instead of forming a narcissistic cathexis internally with one’s own ego, as the normal individual does with the ego-ideal, the narcissistic libido is displaced outward to a shared ego-ideal embodied by the leader. Freud calls this a ‘hyper-cathexis’ (Freud 1959). It conditions the hypnotic powers that group leaders can exercise. Adorno and Horkheimer deploy Freud’s group psychology for their own socio-historical analysis. They agree that the individual ego is weaker in groups and more liable to external manipulation by authorities. Both psychic dynamics of identification and idealization are used by them to explain rising social homogeneity and dangerous group behaviors, such as the dis-inhibition of collective emotions of anger and frustration in xenophobic collective actions. This is their psychoanalytic explanation of aspects of anti-Semitic fascism. 10
With this logic, though, the psychoanalysis of social groups is restricted to negative judgments of regressive libidinal dynamics – collective affective mechanisms we would be better without. In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno constructs an intricate typology of interviewees with a high score on a scale measuring the ‘potentially fascist character’ (Adorno et al. 1964). Different character types are susceptible to different forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. The rebellious-destructive urges of the authoritarian character are distinguished from the conformism of the conventional character and the paranoiac fantasies of the crank character. In this typology of pathological characters, Adorno classifies syndromes typologically according to psychoanalytic criteria, such as the relative strength of the id when compared to the superego, the level of ambivalence in identifications, and the resolution of the Oedipus complex (or the degree of irresolution). 11
The external superego and the possession of a group ego-ideal both belong to the psychic configuration of the potentially fascist character in all of the aforementioned sub-types. When the superego is weaker, the id can defeat the ego’s control and become free to hook up directly with external super-egos. Adorno writes of a ‘merger between id and superego’ in fascism (1967: 80). In this new relationship between the id and an external superego, Adorno writes, ‘the remnants of irrationality [of the unconscious] function merely as so much oil to be squirted into the works’ (1968: 95). Such pacts between the id and social totalities explain the affective dimension of mass society: leaders are libidinized and the individual conscience is suspended, lowering the inhibitions that once prevented externally directed aggression.
Adorno and Horkheimer appropriate Freud’s group psychology to explain increasing anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States (in DE; also see Adorno 1946). There are several steps to this psychoanalytic social explanation, beginning with the individual’s loss of moral autonomy and susceptibility to group influence. As mentioned above, media and political elites are able to manipulate the individual through a group superego and ego-ideal. Mass narcissism results when the mediating ego can no longer control the id, which turns outward to contribute to a collective cathexis, as in nationalistic identification.
Then, the pathology of paranoia springs from mass narcissism. ‘The sick individual confronts the other individual, in megalomania as in persecution mania. In both cases the subject is at the center, the world a mere occasion for its delusion’ (DE 2002: 157). The main feature of the paranoiac-narcissistic subject is an inability to incorporate or tolerate external differences. Instead, anything incommensurate with the group subjectivity is repudiated. The subject eliminates difference through ‘false projection’ (DE 2002: 154), a reverse mimesis in which the subject makes the object mirror itself.
12
If an out-group does not match up with the dominant ego-ideal, it is demonized through paranoiac projection, e.g. irrational stereotypes about the omnipotence of the other. The projective narcissistic fantasies of the paranoiac subject are satisfied by violent acts of aggression:
The ego projects aggressive urges emanating from the id which, through their strength, are a danger to itself, as malign intentions onto the outside world, and succeeds in ridding itself of them as reactions to that outside world, either in fantasy by identification with the alleged malefactor or in reality by ostensible self-defense (DE 2002: 158, emphasis added).
The consequence of this ‘ostensible self-defense’ is ‘in reality’ the concentration camps.
Interpreting psychoanalytic explanations
All social explanations of action depend upon processes of interpretation. Investigators in one social context assemble theory and evidence to make sense of the actions in another social context (Reed 2011). A partial understanding of why humans acted the way they did is gained. Psychoanalytic explanations in the social sciences can likewise be analyzed as interpretations. This involves examining their constituent significations and observing how they compose a meaningful narrative. For the purposes of this article, the usefulness of an interpretive analysis lies in understanding what makes a theory critical, that is, how it blends together sociological observations with normative interpretations. The psychoanalytic explanations constructed by Adorno and Horkheimer have three main significations: social-scientific concepts involving psychological referents (e.g. sublimation, narcissism, instincts) and the conceptual relationships these elements presuppose (1); the social facts purported to be explained (2); and, lastly, some utopian or dystopic code grounding the critical theorist’s value-judgments (3). Hence, in the decline-of-the-individual thesis, Adorno and Horkheimer seek to explain the persuasive power of propaganda and the culture-industry over the masses (2). The psychoanalytic theory they appropriate for this purpose contains the distinction between an internal superego – formed through Oedipal conflicts – and an externalized superego that charismatic leaders can wire (1). The normative component (3), which I elaborate more below, supports their condemnation of the increased irrationality of mass society. An important element of their value-judgment is the defense of individual moral autonomy, or Mündigkeit, in a social world where private freedom is increasingly absent (Adorno 2005).
Interpretive analysis enables readers to evaluate sub-claims of Adorno and Horkheimer’s psychoanalytic explanations, rather than be overwhelmed with the complex whole of DE or MM and the Freudian stories they contain. Several possible points of contention stand out. The assertion of a vanishing internal conscience (2) is problematic when treated empirically (Benjamin 1978, 1977). The psychoanalytic theory (1) that distinguishes between an internal and external superego is also open to criticism. Benjamin exposes the problematic belief that the internal superego can only be formed within the proprietary family.
When it comes to judgment, an interpretive perspective collides with the immanent method of Adorno and Horkheimer. Like Hegel’s dismissal of pure normativity as moralistic, Adorno and Horkheimer resist any external application of ethical standards upon reality due to the fact-value distinction it reinforces. The object itself contains its own constitutive, but not fully actualized concept, except where the reified object is completely illusory and irremediable (Rose 1976). Values are not external to facts but integral to them. The basis of ethical judgment resides immanently in the non-identity of the object. This line of thought culminates in a sophisticated transcendental objectivism or, in my view, a denial of the necessity of interpretation in critical theory. Attempting to overcome epistemologies of the subject, Adorno re-introduces an identity between the intelligibility of the interpreter and the intelligibility of the object. 13 A more robust interpretive perspective would instead argue that social theory cannot and should not try to eliminate the temporal, meaningful difference between subjects in the partial understanding nonetheless achieved. Interpretation theory acknowledges the kind of non-identity that Adorno otherwise champions.
Therefore, immanent criticism is a distinctive kind of rhetoric about norms but not a special kind of normative judgment. However, the normative interpretations deployed by Adorno and Horkheimer as part of their psychoanalytic explanations are distinctively dystopic and even pragmatic. In the decline-of-the-individual thesis, instead of proposing an alternative utopian vision, the bourgeois individual stands in for the norm of their ethical judgment, not as a moral absolute, but as a pragmatic decision informed by a contextual evaluation of bourgeois subjectivity. The internal superego functions as a surrogate for some utopian content, in their normative interpretation, in order to criticize the trend toward collectivism. This manner of constructing a normative interpretation, however, leads them into several difficulties.
Benjamin questions the tactical maneuver of normalizing a weakened patriarchal structure, a rather uninspiring ‘image of revolt’ considering alternative images of intersubjective mutuality also present in child development (Benjamin 1978). Adorno and Horkheimer’s ontology of the subject is too individualistic. Their basic model of socialization, the one-way external pressure upon infantile omnipotence, has been decisively refuted by relational psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the idea that patriarchy vanishes in the ‘society without fathers’ is incorrect. Gender domination has many other manifestations outside of the family (Benjamin 1988).
Adorno and Horkheimer’s explanation of mass pathology incorporates other psychological concepts, such as aggressive instincts, narcissism, paranoia, and group identification. What makes this theory normative is the utterly dystopic resignification of collective psychology itself. Adorno and Horkheimer are not as quick here to offer another ethical stand-in other than individual Mündigkeit. Their valorization of this previous psychic formation forces them to condemn any group-level libidinal configuration as affective and irrational. Their lack of dialectical view of intersubjective emotional bonds is unfortunate. A long tradition of anthropologists as well as many contemporary psychoanalytic theorists would no doubt dispute the absolutism of their stance that these shared emotional experiences are always regressive.
The problem with Adorno and Horkheimer’s association between affect and irrationality is two-fold: not only does it preclude a broader account of the cultural significance of collective emotions. It also tends to reduce the multidimensional social reality of racism and violence to affectively motivated action. Critical theory is impoverished by the reduction of racism to collective, affective irrationality. The re-emergence of a collective psychology in Benjamin discloses a way beyond this regressive coding of affect. One of Benjamin’s main criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer is that they isolate their consideration of paternal authority from wider socio-cultural processes such as the rise of instrumental rationality, a common topic of critical theory. Awareness that the roots of the ‘spirit of instrumental culture’ reside in gendered psychic development de-stabilizes the conflation between the affective and the irrational. Even formal rationality has a collective psychic-affective structure (Benjamin 1988). Pursuing these complex interconnections between cultural and affective processes is the way forward for any future collective psychology.
My intent has been to contest Adorno and Horkheimer’s interpretations to strengthen critical theory’s appropriation of psychoanalytic explanations, not to abandon them. It may seem that this aim is actually at cross-purposes with Benjamin’s critique of the Freudian story of civilization’s repressive foundations (1978; also see Whitebook 2000). For Benjamin, the classical antinomy between dangerous instincts and their moral regulation leads to Freud’s pessimistic impasse – the resignation that some coercive authority, or internal domination, is needed for moral autonomy. While Benjamin is right to reject Adorno and Horkheimer’s backward-looking normalization of the bourgeois proprietary family, I disagree with the dichotomy Benjamin draws between her relational theory and Adorno and Horkheimer’s classical Freudianism. 14
A more intersubjective psychoanalysis, Benjamin writes, describes the active capacities for recognition that children exercise throughout development. This alternative account of psychic development makes critical theory’s proclaimed ‘end of internalization’ seem less threatening. It is mistaken for assuming that moral capacities are formed through external coercion rather than mutual recognition. However, this contention can be separated from the question of the ethical significance of classical psychoanalysis. 15 Freud’s metapsychology has a mythical-ethical dimension that powered Adorno and Horkheimer’s social criticism (even as they concealed its full significance). It is not unusual for theorists sympathetic to classical psychoanalysis to find themselves reflecting on the precarity of moral action, the suffering of the body, the inevitability of loss, and even on the importance of recognizing difference – all themes manifest in Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical collective psychology. The valuation of recognition is not an exclusive possession of relational psychoanalysis, and there is no reason for the normative interpretations of relational and classical theories to be opposed in this regard.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Patrick Greaney, Brian Hamilton, Chad Kautzer, Danielle Lamb-Books, Isaac Reed and Peter Simonson for their comments and conversations.