Really existing socialization

The ‘dark side’ of freedom

According to Foucault, modernity coincides with the development and dissemination of techniques that target the most minute behaviours – movements, gestures, attitudes – of individuals, training them to become useful and efficient workers and citizens through constant exercise, observation, and examination. From hospitals to daycare centres and schools, through the workplace, the army and the church, disciplinary institutions attempt to make the flesh stronger by increasing the forces of the body while weakening the spirit by transforming individuals into obedient, docile subjects. Even as their bodies are turned into ever more efficient instruments for the accumulation of capital, individuals in the West have become increasingly submissive and compliant (Foucault, 1977: 138).

Today, individuals submit to indefinitely progressive forms of training in disciplinary institutions; they learn to follow rules and regulations that run the gamut from how to hold a pen, or how and where to sit, to the movements needed to operate a piece of machinery, fire a gun, or form a battalion. These rules ensure that the development and behaviour of individuals fall within parameters of normality while simultaneously correcting, branding, or punishing as deviant everything that falls outside these parameters. Disciplinary norms define what is healthy and what sick, what is sane and what insane, what is harmless and what dangerous. As para-legal standards, these norms function prescriptively, but they are also based on facts (often derived, either directly or indirectly, from medicine) about the psychological and physical constitution of individuals. From the cradle to the grave, the normalizing gaze of extra-judicial judges – teachers, doctors, social workers, supervisors, military personnel, among many others – examines and corrects our least behaviours.

In a now famous phrase, Foucault declared that the judges of normality are present everywhere (1977: 304). We now acquire our sense of who and what we are from the norms that these judges impose on us throughout our lives. This self-understanding becomes – in another memorable phrase – the prison of the body (1977: 30) because disciplinary norms serve as standards against which individuals judge themselves. Under constant surveillance, and the equally constant pressure to conform to disciplinary norms, individuals internalize these norms and become self-normalizing. This self-monitoring and self-correction effectively obviate the need for intensive observation. Since they are made aware that they may be subjected to the normalizing, panoptic gaze anywhere and at any time, individuals now examine and modify their own behaviour so that they will be accepted as ‘normal’, and fit in. In other words, individuals have become the perpetrators of their own subjection.

Foucault argues that disciplinary power was not, in the first instance, under state control; it was not originally the prerogative of the state. To be sure, Western states now deploy disciplinary techniques, especially in their police forces which provide ‘a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon of the social body’ (1977: 213–14). However, the disciplinary techniques that are now used by the police in the West first emerged on a ‘micropolitical’ level, in the institutions mentioned above, where power takes direct and strategic hold of bodies in order to alter and adjust them. Only after these techniques had developed and spread were they appropriated by the state. Moreover, Foucault contends that, even as disciplinary techniques were disseminated throughout institutions, the state developed a new, but complementary, type of power, which he calls biopower. Combining with disciplinary power, the biopolitical state eventually adopted neoliberal practices that now chart the treacherous waters between the Scylla of freedom and the Charybdis of security.

Foucault states that disciplinary power was ‘completely bound up with’ the rise of liberalism (2008b: 67) with its ‘freedom of the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of expression, and so on’ (2008b: 63). This link between disciplinary power and liberalism also suggests that liberalism’s commitment to freedom was Janus-faced from the start. Liberalism has had a ‘productive/destructive’ relation to freedom: it produced freedom, while simultaneously hemming it in with ‘limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera’ (2008b: 64). So, for example, trade should in principle be free, but it is invariably accompanied by protectionist measures. Freedom in the domestic market is another principle more honoured in the breach owing to anti-monopoly laws and other legislation. And, on the individual level as well, freedom is constrained as disciplinary power comes to the aid of liberalism, revealing its more ominous face. Although he qualified this idea in another set of lectures, ¹ Foucault reasserts in The Birth of Biopolitics that disciplinary power is the ‘counterweight and counterpart of different freedoms‘ owing to its technologies of ‘control, constraint, and coercion’ (2008b: 67). ²

Disciplinary technologies make liberalism’s fear of big government seem completely misplaced. More to be feared are the totalizing tendencies within the liberal economic order itself. For as discipline began to infiltrate social institutions, it not only served as a homogenizing and levelling force within society, but developed highly effective means (in terms of cost, intensity, and scale) for controlling individuals. As a result, modern societies have become ‘carceral’, open air prisons in which the behaviour of everyone is constantly observed, recorded, assessed and corrected in institutions that are now embedded within the state. As the legal power to punish was naturalized, and the technical power to discipline was legalized, law and discipline began to support one another, making it possible ‘to carry out that great “economy” of power whose formula the eighteenth century had sought when the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of people first emerged’ (1977: 303, trans. mod.).

Tied to the rise of liberalism, disciplinary power was the hidden support of the economic freedoms that liberalism permitted. It ensured that individuals would be both fit for work and politically submissive. It thereby enabled liberalism to observe the ‘internal rule of maximum economy’ (2008b: 318) and minimal government. Today, disciplinary power helps to prop up neoliberalism which (in both its German and American versions) turns the free market economy into the ‘principle, form, and model’ for the state (2008b: 117). Indeed, Foucault stresses the mutually reinforcing dimensions of disciplinary institutions, the biopolitical state, and the capitalist economy when he observes that capitalism

started by socializing a first object, the body, as a factor of productive force, of labor power. Society’s control over individuals was accomplished not only through consciousness or ideology but also in the body and with the body. For capitalist society, it was biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, the corporal, that mattered more than anything else. (2000: 137)

In important respects, Foucault’s vision resembles Adorno’s, because Adorno also claimed that liberal governments needed simultaneously to produce freedom and to limit it. In fact, as Axel Honneth has noted (Honneth, 1994: 177–8), long before Foucault described the conformity fostered by discipline as the ‘dark side’ of the processes that led to the formation of formally egalitarian legal frameworks and representative democracies (1977: 222), Adorno used the same phrase: conformity is the ‘dark side’ of freedom under capitalism (Adorno, 2006: 211). Economic freedom is certainly needed – markets and competition must, in principle at least, be free – but individual freedom is highly circumscribed in the West. Hence Adorno remarked that ‘the bourgeois attitude towards freedom was antinomian through and through’ (Adorno, 2006: 195).

Although Foucault echoes Adorno’s claim that exchange relations have become the measure of all things, ³ Adorno seems to differ markedly from Foucault in his contention that exchange relations are largely responsible for the totalizing, levelling, and homogenizing tendencies in the West (Adorno, 1997: 310). Like Foucault, moreover, Adorno often employed prison metaphors to describe the plight of individuals in Western nations. Individuals find themselves under the spell that is conjured up by exchange relations which, by turning the things they have made into reified things-in-themselves, end by imprisoning individuals as well (Adorno, 1973: 346). Making everything and everyone commensurable and identical, exchange relations ultimately serve as ‘the authority for a doctrine of adjustment’ (Adorno, 1973: 148). They foster the conformity to which they summarily reduce everything and everyone anyway by equalizing what is unequal.

Reification affects all aspects of human life. On the cognitive level, reification consists in the attempt to ‘relate all phenomena, everything we encounter, to a unified reference point and to subsume them under a self-identical, rigid unity, thus removing them from their dynamic context’ (Adorno, 2001a: 114; trans. mod.). On the societal level, reification has a similar character because it transforms individuals and their activities into ‘formally commensurable variations of the exchange relationship’ (Adorno, 1974: 229). Spellbound, individuals now tend to think of themselves and others as ‘the same’, while becoming far less tolerant of differences. If the normalizing disciplinary gaze ferrets out abnormalities and deviance, exchange relations force all things and people into the straitjacket of abstract equivalence, while marginalizing whatever appears to be different, maladapted, or nonconformist.

According to Foucault, neoliberalism emphasizes competition over exchange – or inequality over equivalence (2008b: 119). More than a decade before Foucault delivered his lectures on biopolitics, however, Adorno had already remarked that (as Marx predicted) competition diminished with the emergence of monopoly conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a result, late – or monopoly – capitalism neither needs nor fosters the kind of autonomy on which it relied in its earlier liberal phase.

Unfortunately, Foucault fails to measure neoliberalism’s aim of a competitive enterprise society against the reality of monopoly capitalism when he claims that neoliberalism marks a shift from an exchange-based society to a society based on competition. ⁴ To return to Adorno, once competition declined, class societies became mass societies as bourgeois entrepreneurs became salaried workers and wage labourers, and the economic autonomy that liberalism once valued as a boon to the accumulation of capital became superfluous. Although individual autonomy was always a mere by-product of liberal capitalism (whence its paradoxical character), even this limited form of autonomy is now undermined by integration.

With monopoly conditions and the loss of economic independence, institutional figures (primary and secondary school teachers, for example) assumed greater authority; they took on roles that parents alone had played during the earlier liberal phase of capitalism. Assuming responsibility for socializing individuals, institutions also promote conformity and adaptation, if not to norms in Foucault’s sense of that term, then to models of socially acceptable behaviour which are subsequently internalized. According to Adorno, deviation from socially accepted models is not just regarded with suspicion, it exposes ‘offenders to the vengeance of society, even though they may not yet be reduced to going hungry and sleeping under bridges’ (Adorno, 1967: 71). Reinforced by the mass media, conformity to behaviours like consumerism and status-seeking and adaptation to a society that makes a mockery of each of us qua individual have become nearly insurmountable impediments to change.

Like Foucault, then, Adorno criticizes the powerful role that public and private institutions now play in the socialization and integration of individuals. Both theorists also stress the profoundly normalizing functions of socialization. But in contrast to Foucault, who eschewed a Freudian account of integration (while surreptitiously making use of Freud’s concept of internalization in his discussion of panopticism ⁵ ), Adorno provided a psychoanalytic gloss on conformist tendencies in the West (while criticizing the conformist tendencies in psychoanalysis). On Adorno’s Freudian reading, it is the superego that allows society to extend repressively into the psychology of individuals; the norms and ideals internalized in the superego represent ‘blindly, unconsciously internalized social coercion’ (Adorno, 1973: 272). In fact, Christopher Lasch noted, following Adorno, that the superego became harsher and more aggressive when social institutions began to serve in loco parentis (Lasch, 1979: 305). Its ferocity helps to explain the weakness of the ego and the prevalence of narcissism, which Adorno was among the first to diagnose. Like the submissive individuals who internalize the institutional gaze in Foucault’s carceral archipelago, individuals in Adorno’s totally administered world are weak, compliant, and all too ready to adapt their behaviour to internalized social norms.

Adorno stresses the gullibility and impotence of individuals, their baleful and self-vitiating capitulation to the existing order. Individuals have been turned into mere pawns in a world ‘whose law is universal individual profit’. Indeed, our submission to exchange-based societies can be compared to genocide, ‘the absolute integration’. ‘Even in his formal freedom’, Adorno remarked, ‘the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots’ (Adorno, 1973: 362). Under monopoly conditions, individuals have become ‘irrelevant to a degree that no one could anticipate’ (Adorno, 1973: 343). If the principle of individuation still prevails, this is only to the extent that it obliges us to concentrate on what we mistakenly take to be our private interests (‘mistakenly’ because the pursuit of private interest is socially determined), thereby allowing capitalism to pursue its own interests unimpeded.

Work or starve; adapt or fall behind; conform or be cast out: these are the decisions that late capitalism leaves to individuals. To survive, individuals must constantly adapt to an inherently unpredictable, unstable, and often volatile economy, self-destructively promoting and strengthening the very forces that undermine their individuality. Adaptation to the social conditions that make us as expendable as any of the commodities we produce or consume is not just reinforced by sophisticated psychotechnologies in advertising and the culture industry, but by the prevailing positivist ideology which legitimizes existing conditions with its constant refrain: that’s just the way things are; things are like this. By these means, our needs are harmonized with commodified offers of satisfaction in the capitalist marketplace.

Ironically, perhaps, individuality became a sham and freedom a farce, thanks in no small measure to liberalism. By showing that individuation is a socially conditioned process that largely benefits capitalism, and by revealing how individuals have been turned into rank conformists malgré eux, Adorno and Foucault also give the lie to liberal ideology which makes the individual the very substance of society, its alpha and omega. Bourgeois individualism now masks an entirely different reality. If no one escapes exchange relations and the pressure of the internalized social norms that ensure the perpetuation of capitalism, so no one escapes subjection to disciplinary power and the biopolitical state. As a result, and to cite Friedrich Nietzsche (who had a profound influence on both Adorno and Foucault): ‘Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse’ (Nietzsche, 1982: 130).

The art of voluntary nonservitude

In light of Adorno’s and Foucault’s sobering analyses, it is at least plausible to speculate that state-phobic neoliberals are projecting the really existing socialization that is occurring under their watch on to a future socialist state. A defensive mechanism, this projective scapegoating deflects criticism by attributing to socialism traits and impulses for which neoliberalism would otherwise have to reproach itself. If Adorno and Foucault are right, liberalism’s economic freedoms exact an unconscionably heavy price: the freedom and autonomy of individuals, their capacity to think for themselves and to gain critical leverage on institutions and practices. In other words, liberal ideology conceals the fact that minimal intervention in the economy now requires maximal intervention in the lives of individuals. This projective scapegoating raises an issue that I want to address briefly: is it even possible to imagine a world that is qualitatively distinct from the current one? Again, I shall turn to Adorno and Foucault for answers.

At times, Foucault’s ideas about substantive social change appear to mirror the incongruity in Marx’s work between the inevitability of change and the need for active resistance. However, where Marx thought that socialism would emerge triumphant from the ashes of capitalism, Foucault denies that change will necessarily lead to something better. Still, he does speculate about a decisive rupture, caesura, or paradigm shift that might result in the death of ‘man’ (The Order of Things), about the emergence of a new form of reason (History of Madness), about the possibility of instituting an anti-disciplinarian form of right (Security, Territory, Population), and about a new ethic of bodies and pleasures (The History of Sexuality). He also implies that we can do more than simply wait for these paradigm shifts to occur. Change – either positive or negative – will happen without our intervention, but Foucault also invites us to fight in the battle that is currently being waged for our very ‘souls’ because who and what we are is ‘the effect of a subjection’ that is ‘much more profound’ than ourselves (1977: 30).

Resistance, in the form of struggles against subjection, always accompanies disciplinary power and biopower. For Foucault, power relations are inherently agonistic. Although resistance may be undermined by the disciplinary and biopolitical norms from which we derive our self-understanding (whence also our subjection to power), it is nonetheless the case that disciplinary power and biopower presuppose resistance, without which they would have no reason for being. No power without resistance. For if power were irresistible, it would be ‘equivalent to a physical determination’ that so thoroughly conditions and controls individuals that it would no longer need to be exercised because it would have become completely superfluous (Foucault, 2000: 342).

In his studies of power relations in disciplinary institutions and the biopolitical state, Foucault analyses resistance to power ‘as a chemical catalyst’ in order to ‘bring to light power relations, locate their position, find their point of application and the methods used’ (Foucault, 2000: 329). His critique of Western societies is grounded in both ‘the historical practice of revolt, the refusal to accept a really existing government’ and ‘an individual experience of refusal of governmentality’ (Foucault, 1996: 386). To be sure, Foucault also contends that power is not simply repressive, that it is also always productive because it creates and shapes phenomena (including individuals). However, he was undeniably critical of the subjection and subjugation of individuals: the aim of his critical analyses is to contribute to ‘the art of voluntary nonservitude, of reflective nondocility’ to subjection. ⁶

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault asks his readers to hear the ‘distant roar of battle’ against subjection (1977: 308). Yet one may certainly question the extent to which ‘specific intellectuals’ – including Foucault himself – are able to engage effectively in this battle. Are Foucault’s criticisms sufficiently untainted by the coercive constraints of disciplinary and biopolitical norms to prove useful in struggles against subjection? Following Kant in ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault agrees that the primary function of criticism is to explore the limits to what we can know about ourselves and the world with a view to taking the measure of our freedom (Foucault, 1996: 387). He is also prepared to admit that our understanding of these limits and the possibility of going beyond them is itself invariably ‘limited and determined’ (Foucault, 1997: 317). Consequently, given our limited understanding of the limits to our understanding, one may well ask how Foucault, who is as much the product and target of power as anyone else, cannot only pinpoint the factors that limit his own critical discourse but surpass them to envisage something genuinely different.

Foucault sometimes restricts his critical aspirations when he views his work in Brechtian terms and remarks on its estranging effects. So, for example, he claims that what lies at the heart of his work is ‘[t]he experience through which we grasp the intelligibility of certain mechanisms (for example, imprisonment, punishment, and so on) and the way in which we are enabled to detach ourselves from them to perceive them differently’ (Foucault, 2000: 244). At other times, however, he ascribes more radical aims to these modest attempts to alter our perception of the world around us by making the familiar appear strange. For he endorses a version of Marcuse’s Great Refusal (while denying that the Great Refusal has a single locus (1978: 95)) when he promotes the twin goals of successfully refusing ‘what we are’, and of imagining and building up ‘what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind”, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures’ (2000: 336).

But if Foucault saw his work as contributing to consciousness-raising – to the extent that it exposes the coercive political and social conditions that now constrain individuals – he did not problematize his critical analysis of power relations as radically as Adorno problematized his own critique of damaged life. In fact, Adorno took more seriously Kant’s insistence that critique must involve a thorough examination of the limits to the critic’s own understanding and self-understanding. Critics must engage in self-criticism by scrutinizing their ideas and concepts carefully. If they ‘will not be stopped from differing and criticizing’, they are still not authorized to put themselves in the right because their criticism is invariably sullied by the very reality they want to change (Adorno, 1973: 352). In other words, Adorno recognized that his own critical analyses were not just shaped, but tainted, by the historical conditions he criticized.

Since our ideas about alternatives to really existing socialization are as compromised as criticism (and for the same reasons), Adorno was cautious about offering positive alternatives. If, ‘in the right condition … all things would differ only a little from the way they are … not even the least of these things can be conceived now as it would be then’ (Adorno, 1973: 299). This is why Adorno complains that critics have little choice but to do ‘what the miner’s adage forbids: work their way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through the higher concept of the negation of the negation, and immerse themselves in the darkness as deeply as they possibly can’ (Adorno, 2001b: 144). Here Adorno readily concedes that his critique of the negative conditions that damage life under late capitalism cannot engender entirely positive images of alternatives. Determinate negation may make it possible to imagine something different, but only in a distorted and limited way. Negating existing states of affairs, determinate negation discloses something equally negative: namely that what exists is not yet what it ought to be, and that what ought to be does not yet exist.

Despite these important caveats about social criticism, however, Adorno shares Foucault’s view that resistance is key. Only ‘resistance to the forms of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected’ (Adorno, 2000: 167–8) can provide a glimpse of better conditions – and then, of course, only indirectly or obliquely. Indeed, for Adorno, critical thought itself is a form of resistance that may unearth possibilities for change. Agreeing with Foucault that criticism may produce a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, Adorno claims that critics fashion, entirely from contact with the world, ‘perspectives on the world that displace and estrange it’. To be sure, these perspectives are educed from the same conditions that need to be changed, making estrangement difficult to achieve. Yet Adorno also argues that, by looking ‘consummate negativity’ squarely in the face, critics can glimpse ‘the mirror-image of its opposite’ (Adorno, 1974: 247).

Foucault and Adorno on socialism

The fact that our imaginations are trammelled by social conditions may help to explain why neoliberals can only imagine more of the same when they attribute totalitarian traits to socialism. Indeed, Foucault is critical of neoliberal state phobia, calling ‘inflationary’ the neo-liberal attempt to paint all forms of the state with the same colours as Nazism and totalitarianism because, inter alia, this attempt conjures up ‘the great fantasy of the paranoic and devouring state’ (2008b: 188). ⁷ At the same time, the failure of our political imagination may also help to explain why the aspirations of ‘really existing socialism’ have themselves been severely limited, and why self-styled socialist states have often been fatally marred by authoritarianism and dictatorship.

In fact, it should be noted that Foucault’s and Adorno’s views of really existing socialism were largely critical. To give but one example, Adorno accused the USSR of betraying socialism by demanding the complete submission of individuals to the state (Adorno, 1973: 284). On Adorno’s view, moreover, socialism generally only endorses what capitalism already puts into practice: the continued domination and exploitation of both human and nonhuman nature, and the frantic race for bigger and better productive forces which often end by destroying cultures, traditions, and human lives (Adorno, 1974: 156). However, in contrast to this critique of the economics of socialism, Foucault takes a different tack. Conceding that the ‘problem of the economic rationality of socialism is something about which we can argue’, Foucault does not enter into the fray. Instead, he perfunctorily notes that socialism can be said to have ‘an economic rationality’ to the extent that it advances proposals – or tries to implement proposals–for managing the economy on a more rational basis. Equally briefly, Foucault notes that socialism has an ‘historical rationality’ and an ‘administrative rationality’ (when, for example, it adopts techniques for intervention ‘in domains like health, social insurance, and so on’) (2008b: 92).

Eschewing a critique of the economic rationality of socialism, Foucault takes aim at a different target: socialism’s lack of a ‘rationality of governmentality’. Socialism’s failure to reflect in a sustained way on what distinguishes a genuinely socialist government from other types of government helps to explain why socialism has allied itself historically with at least two different types of governmentality in the West: liberal governmentality and the governmentality of the police state (2008b: 92). In a more barbed criticism, Foucault adds that, in the absence of ‘an intrinsic governmental rationality’, socialism merely champions ‘the relationship of conformity to a text’ (2008b: 93–4); it conceals the fact that it has not developed a socialist art of government with professions of its fidelity to Marxist tracts.

When he charges that socialism lacks an internal governmental rationality, Foucault explains that socialism has never asked: ‘What would really be the governmentality appropriate to socialism? What governmentality is possible as a strictly, intrinsically, and autonomously socialist government?’ (2008b: 93–4). Contrasting the art of government to a theory of the state, Foucault also observes that Marxism has been criticized for lacking a theory of the state, while questioning whether socialism really needs one. In place of a theory of the state, what socialism needs is ‘a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action’ (2008b: 91–2). Since a specifically socialist art of government cannot be found in socialist parties and governments, or in the texts on which they slavishly rely, Foucault declares that it ‘must be invented’ (2008b: 94).

Figures of the other

On Foucault’s reading, the liberal art of government has subjected itself to one important internal limitation: the capitalist economy. But if liberal (and neoliberal) governments try to interfere as little as possible with economic processes, and even set themselves the task of modelling themselves and their institutions on these processes, liberalism has exercised virtually limitless power over individuals. In the face of its quasi-totalitarian exercise of power, Foucault provided critical tools for those who resist by focusing on the techniques and practices of disciplinary power and biopower. Although he planned to write a report on socialist politics (2008b: 100 n53), this project never materialized. His provocative claim that a socialist art of government must be invented was meant as a challenge to which others might rise (and his untimely death meant that only others could rise to it).

Foucault did ask ‘whether we may not overcome in some way this curse against the economic sovereign which was formulated by political economy at its foundation and which is also the very condition of existence of political economy’ (2008b: 283). He also hinted at what a socialist art of government might look like when he suggested that relations between governors and the governed should be completely transformed, and claimed that this transformation would in turn transform both. Noting that many voters thought the election of François Mitterand had initiated such a transformation, Foucault added, crucially, that what this transformation was thought to have affected was the ‘relation of obedience’ between governors and governed (Foucault, 2000: 455). Indeed, he also insisted that the question of how to govern individuals should not be dissociated from the counterquestion of how not to be governed ‘like that and at this price’, of how not to be governed ‘so much’ (Foucault, 1996: 384). Not being governed so much means finding a way to make a place for individuals ‘in a reality of which governments have attempted to reserve a monopoly for themselves – a monopoly that we need to wrest from them little by little and day by day’ (Foucault, 2000: 475; trans. mod.).

Foucault declares that ‘the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is … to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state’ (Foucault, 2000: 336). Interestingly, he also suggests that liberation would involve fostering new modes of individuation that would allow individuals to enjoy much greater autonomy. Here he echoes Adorno, who also insists on the need to transform existing processes of individuation with a view to making individuals far more autonomous than they currently are. However, since Adorno makes a more concerted attempt to envisage alternatives like these by using determinate negation, I shall end this paper by returning briefly to his assessment of the problems afflicting individuals under late capitalism to find some talking points for the invention of a socialist art of government.

To survive under the competitive conditions that characterized the liberal stage of capitalism, the bourgeoisie was obliged to become self-regarding and self-reliant to an unparalleled degree. Individuation occurred when bourgeois entrepreneurs had to fend for themselves by identifying, promoting and defending their particular and private interests against competing ones. As Raymond Geuss explains, ‘the modern individual is a product of the market: each individual is essentially defined and constituted by his or her own “self-interest”, which is the form the impulse toward self-preservation takes in a market society’ (Geuss, 2005: 12). Hence, Adorno contends that individuals were free under capitalism only as ‘economically active subjects’, that they were free only to the extent that their autonomy was fostered to promote competition.

Today, however, the conditions that once promoted a limited degree of autonomy no longer obtain: the little autonomy that individuals once enjoyed has almost completely evaporated. If autonomy had always been ‘a function of a society based on exchange’, late capitalism now undermines it by means of integration. Transformed into mere ‘executive organs of the universal’ during capitalism’s liberal heyday, individuals are now ‘irrelevant to a degree which no one could anticipate’ (Adorno, 1973: 343). They are ‘dragged along, dead, neutralized, and impotent as ignominious ballast’ (Adorno, 1974: 135). Turned into inanimate objects, dead things, individuals ‘could easily be taken for prepared corpses’; their ‘healthy’ behaviours resemble ‘the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating’ (Adorno, 1974: 59). Nevertheless, individuals continue to subordinate themselves to exchange relations, which drain them of life by reducing them to so many commensurable units of value, simply in order to stay alive.

Turning individuals into fungible, interchangeable commodities, late capitalism undermines the social solidarity that is needed to overcome it. Socialism’s ‘most honorable mode of conduct’ – solidarity – has become ‘sick’. In the West, solidarity is based on rank conformity, on ‘swimming along with the current of world history’; in the East, it ‘passed over into the trust that the Party has a thousand eyes, into enlistment into uniformed workers’ battalions which are assumed to be stronger’ (1974: 51, trans. mod.). Indeed, when he problematizes solidarity in this way, Adorno goes beyond Foucault, who never focused in a sustained way on the problems that undermine solidarity today. Again, since Adorno believes that we can acquire ideas about more effective forms of solidarity only by scrutinizing these problems closely, his analysis of the forced solidarity of individuals in the Soviet Union, and his discussion of the reification and narcissism that undermine solidarity in the West, are meant to generate ideas about alternatives to existing forms of solidarity.

Examining one problem that adversely affects solidarity today, Adorno observed that discussions among members of activist groups are frequently corrupted by strategic manoeuvres. In principle, of course, all members of a group should be given a fair hearing and contribute equally to decision-making. However, group discussions are often manipulative; they are simply directed towards scoring points for particular positions. Opposing views are ‘hardly perceived and then only so that formulaic clichés can be served up in response’. Opponents are turned into something ‘useable by means of engineered discussion and coerced solidarity’; but they may also be discredited, or ‘speechified out the window for the sake of publicity’ or narcissistic ‘self- advertisement’. It is the influence of a group member (or members), rather than the force of the better argument, that often prevails (Adorno, 1998: 269). These remarks are amplified in Minima Moralia when Adorno adds that ‘there is no conversation that is not infiltrated like a poison by an opportunity to compete’ (Adorno, 1974: 137). ⁸

To be sure, Adorno commented favourably on protest movements in the ’60s when he remarked that, despite the decline of the individual, ‘traces of a countervailing trend [have] become visible among various sections of the younger generation: resistance to blind conformism, the freedom to choose rational goals, disgust with the world’s deceptions and illusions, the awareness of the possibility of change’. Yet he did not hold out much hope: only time would tell ‘how significant a movement this is, or whether society’s collective drive to self-destruct will triumph nevertheless’ (Adorno, 2003: 123–4). Since Adorno was concerned about our narcissistic tendency to submerge ourselves in organizations and groups led by authoritarian or charismatic leaders, and he strongly criticized our socially conditioned desire to ‘win’ arguments rather than working cooperatively and democratically to find solutions, he underscored the need to invent forms of praxis that allow individuals to flourish within groups rather than being suppressed by them.

Foucault warned against the twin dangers of totalitarianism and individualization (Foucault, 2000: 325), and Adorno issued a similar warning when he complained that ‘collectivism and individualism complement each other in the wrong direction’ (Adorno, 1973: 284). Collective action is undermined by late capitalism, which compels individuals to focus exclusively on their private interests if they want to survive. In response to these problems, Adorno argued that our narcissistic self-absorption might be overcome by expanding the selves that we are trying so desperately to preserve in order to encompass the species as a whole. According to Adorno, the preservation of the species is ‘inexorably inscribed within the meaning of rationality’. It is not just that reason has always been an organ of adaptation to the environing world; it is also the case that reason ‘should not be anything less than self-preservation, namely that of the species, upon which the survival of each individual literally depends’ (Adorno, 1998: 272; emphasis added). Emancipated from the idol in the mirror (Adorno, 1973: 349), the ‘subject of ratio, pursuing its self-preservation, is itself an actual universal, society – in its full logic, humanity’ (Adorno, 1998: 272).

Here Adorno not only implies that the survival of individuals ultimately depends upon the survival of the species, but that individuals cannot flourish as individuals unless and until all other individuals flourish as well. In fact, the central task of his critical social theory is ‘to make transparent the dialectic of individual and species’ (Adorno, 2006: 264). Paradoxically, perhaps, individuals will fully realize themselves as individuals only by actualizing the ‘universal’ dimension of their existence as members of the species. Yet, it is important to emphasize that Adorno does not use the phrase ‘species being’ to refer to a pre-existing human essence that we have lost and may one day recover (an objection raised by Foucault). ⁹ Instead, he follows Hegel and Marx when he remarks that the notion of species being, Gattungswesen, is ‘a result, not an ∊ιδoς’ (Adorno, 1998: 258). Specifically, ‘species being’ refers to potentialities, to human powers and possibilities that have not yet emerged or developed owing to the constraints of reifying exchange relations.

Nevertheless, Adorno also issues a strong warning: the species must not be hypostasized. On the one hand, it is ‘part of the logic of the self-preservation of the individual that it should … embrace … the preservation of the species’ (Adorno, 2006: 44) because the ‘transfer of self-preservation from the individual to the species is spiritually coagulated with the form of the ratio’, or reason. On the other hand, this transfer risks pitting the ‘general rationality’ against ‘particular individuals’ (Adorno, 1973: 318). The goal of preserving the species is inherently problematic because ‘there is an intrinsic temptation for this universality to emancipate itself from the individuals it comprises’. When it embraces the species, reason may succeed in freeing itself ‘from the particularity of obdurate particular interest’, but it may nonetheless ‘fail to free itself from the no less obdurate particular interest of the totality’. In fact, Adorno declares that dialectic of the individual and the species is ‘a problem of the greatest possible gravity’ (Adorno, 2006: 44–5).

Implicitly targeting really existing socialism, Adorno adds that ‘a moral philosophy and a moral practice that ignore this antagonism between the highly justifiable interests of the whole and those of the individual, between the conflicting interests of the universal and particular, must inevitably regress to barbarism and heteronomy’ (Adorno, 2000: 144). Here, Adorno may appear to take away with one hand what he has given with the other: while the technical forces of production make the emergence of species being a real possibility, Adorno questions the prospects for its emergence when he emphasizes how difficult it is to articulate the dialectic of the species and the individual. This problem is only compounded when Adorno states that there is no ‘idea of progress without the idea of humanity’, while endorsing Marx’s claim that humanity does not yet exist. To make any progress at all, we must appeal to humanity, but we do not yet know what humanity is.

The argument becomes even murkier when Adorno speculates that the progress that will bring humanity into being depends on the emergence of a global subject. For Adorno, this subject is the sine qua non of progress: ‘[e]verything else involving progress must crystallize around’ it because ‘humanity’s own global societal constitution threatens its life if a self-conscious global subject does not develop and intervene’ (Adorno, 1998: 144). In the face of the increasingly totalitarian expansion of capital, only a global subject can challenge the potentially catastrophic threats to human and nonhuman nature that the relentless and ruthless pursuit of profit now poses. By ‘global subject’, Adorno explains that he is not referring to ‘an all-embracing terrestrial organization’ (such as the United Nations), but to ‘a human race that possesses genuine control over its own destiny right down to the concrete details’ (Adorno, 2006: 143).

Of course, one problem with this argument is that the global subject needed for the emergence of humanity seems to presuppose that something like ‘humanity’ already exists. Nevertheless, Adorno does offer a possible solution to this problem when he endorses Peter Altenberg’s view that ‘extreme individuation is the placeholder for humanity’. Humanity, Adorno claims, can be conceived ‘only through this extreme form of differentiation, individuation, not as a comprehensive generic concept’ (Adorno, 1998: 151; cf. 2006: 155–6). Here Adorno suggests that the species will emerge only when individuals are far more radically individuated – that is, when what is non-identical, different, other, is no longer excluded and marginalized but able to develop and thrive.

Adorno also implies that ‘extreme’ individuation will take place only through sustained and critical self-reflection, and, on this point as well, Adorno and Foucault seem to agree. For, as I mentioned briefly earlier, Foucault gestures towards new modes of individuation in later work, as well as new figures of humanity. ¹⁰ He makes a critical self-relation – le souci de soi, or care of the self – the key to inventing practices that may shape more fully differentiated, autonomous subjects who are able to resist power more effectively, possibly even transforming the power relations that now produce docile and obedient subjects who have been socialized in such a way that their primary concern is to adapt and fit in.

Both Adorno and Foucault also believe that individuals who have transformed themselves through critical self-reflection may become more effective agents of resistance. To be sure, Adorno goes further than Foucault when he implies that critics can act temporarily as stand-ins for the species because their concerted attempts to think for themselves, as they critically examine the social conditions that adversely affect their own capacity for independent thought and action, make them more autonomous, or mature in the Kantian sense, than other individuals. Yet Foucault certainly shares Adorno’s ideas about the important connections between critique, autonomy, and maturity. For both, critique is based on ‘an attitude at once individual and collective, to emerge, as Kant said, from one’s immaturity’ (Foucault, 1996: 398).

Adorno also adopts his own version of Foucault’s goal of establishing a new modus vivendi between the governed and their governors. Here again, he makes use of determinate negation. Envisaging a relationship between governors and the governed that is nonreductive and nondualistic, Adorno suggests, is not just that individuals should become more fully individuated, but that they should play a far more active, independent and critical role in society than they currently do. For there is ‘no available model of freedom save one: that consciousness as it intervenes in the total social constitution [Gesamtverfassung] will through that constitution intervene in the complexion of the individual’ (Adorno, 1973: 265). Simply put, freedom requires that the individual and societal institutions mutually condition one another. Rather than being pawns of socio-economic forces that make a mockery of their individuality, individuals should be enabled to shape the institutions that in turn shape them (Adorno, 1998: 247).

By way of concluding

Like Foucault, Adorno has been accused of failing to offer a ‘practical visa’. Yet both theorists soundly denounce the demand to provide detailed blueprints for change. According to Adorno, philosophy is needed ‘only as critique, as resistance’ (Adorno, 1998: 10); it wants to know not how the world should be changed, but ‘why the world – which could be paradise here and now – can become hell itself tomorrow’ (p. 14). The most Adorno is prepared to offer are the pointers, indices for a better future that he derives from the determinate negation of our negative predicament. Adorno shares Foucault’s view that a critical assessment of modernity does not (and should not) constitute ‘the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done”’. Instead, critique is meant to be ‘an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is’; it is meant as a ‘challenge directed to what is’ (Foucault, 2000: 236).

Although our ability to imagine alternatives is limited, Adorno and Foucault insist that uncompromising social criticism is imperative because critique can identify the problems that individuals currently confront and the faultlines in Western societies that may be susceptible to change. However, they rightly leave to those who are attempting to transform these relations the crucial task of deciding not just what shape they should take, but how to achieve them. If ‘hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears’ (Adorno, 1974: 98), the critique of existing forms of individuation and collectivism can do little more than provide an indistinct, and entirely fallible, outline of alternative states of affairs.

Based on Adorno’s and Foucault’s critiques, however, one can say, at the very least, that socialism would need to jettison all those coercive practices that subjugate individuals in order to produce docile, obedient, compliant and conformist subjects. This is certainly what Foucault suggests when he speaks about the transformed relations between governors and governed under Mitterand, but it is also what Adorno’s critique of collectivism and individuation under late capitalism and really existing socialism implies. Superseding the dark side of liberalism, socialism should enable individuals to become more autonomous and self-determining – or mature, in the Kantian sense. A socialist art of government would need to create and encourage practices that allow individuals, not only to develop their own unique powers and potentials, but also to govern themselves. In other words, and very broadly, Adorno and Foucault claim that the primary objective of a socialist art of government is to reinvent democracy to allow a more robustly individuated citizenry to participate in it. ¹¹

Nevertheless, before democracy can be reinvented, existing modes of collectivism and individuation must be superseded. To do this, Adorno and Foucault argue, socialism’s most honourable form of conduct – solidarity – must itself be reinvented. Adorno describes the double bind in which those who seek radical social change find themselves. On the one hand, to ‘talk of a “we” [that] one identifies with already implies complicity with what is wrong’. On the other hand, a ‘purist attitude … that refrains from intervening likewise reinforces that from which it timorously recoils’ (Adorno, 1998: 4). And, while Foucault certainly shares Adorno’s view about the impasse that those who resist now face, he also hints briefly at a solution. To give Foucault the last word: one must certainly question whether it is ‘suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts’. At the same time, however, it may be necessary to elaborate this very question in order ‘to make the future formation of a “we” possible’ (Foucault, 1997: 114–15).