Critical Theory_A Very Short Introduction
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Bloch understood socialism as a projection of utopia. It should serve as a reconfigured totality that provides new ways of treating humanity and nature as well as new opportunities for experiencing the richness of civilization. His outlook was eschatological, but it was never reducible to faith or symbols. Utopian anticipations can be found in the most basic human experiences and images that hark back to the garden of Eden. But the best also becomes manifest in the thrill of sports, the desire for love, nursery rhymes, daydreams, and the lightness experienced in a genuine work of art. Each is a dim prefiguration of the world we seek, and human history is one long struggle in the multiple dimensions of life to articulate and realize it.
6. The Garden of Eden is perhaps the most powerful image of utopia.
Underpinning all our disappointments and fears, including death, is the hope for redemption and the freedom that has been denied humanity. Utopia receives an ontological foundation in the experience of hope and the inherently incomplete character of existence. The task of critical thinking is to illuminate these unconscious and half-conscious yearnings by highlighting the “anticipatory consciousness” that allows for reinterpreting the past. Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity (1968), for example, emphasizes the religious roots of communism; it would serve to influence liberation theology that became so popular in Latin America and elsewhere in the former colonized world. Natural Law and Human Dignity (1961), meanwhile, insists that the hope for equitable treatment and the constraint of arbitrary institutional power has always animated the strivings of the lowly and the insulted.
Utopia makes us aware that what we have is not necessarily what we want and that what we want is not necessarily all we can have. Enlightenment thinking becomes open to criticism—according to Bloch—insofar as it reduces the rational to the real, and it remains blind to the unrealized utopian elements buried in magic, madness, childhood fantasies, and the like. Arguments can be made that he romanticized these states of mind, overidentified with those who laud them, and overestimated their salience for utopian philosophy. But the critical moment of Bloch’s enterprise is an attempt—one that stands squarely within the tradition of critical theory—to illuminate the ratio of the irratio. This is of importance not simply for making sense of magic and mysticism but for understanding the “false utopias” embedded in racism and other ideologies that privilege the intuitive and the irrational.
Bloch always maintained that the future is not some mechanical elaboration of the present. It does not emerge from a series of steps or stages that lead into the future by obliterating the past. At the same time, however, utopia should not be considered as an abrupt break with reality. In dialectical fashion, instead, utopia constitutes a specific and renewal of the past that renders conscious what exists but is not yet conscious. Every story is thereby open to interpretation and the interpretation to reinterpretation. Existence is always unfinished—its end is always “not yet” in sight. There is no absolute salvation or redemption. There is no Day of Judgment. The dream of the best life constantly glimmers anew as humanity reflects on what it has ignored.
Artifacts from every corner of the earth and previously unacknowledged treasures evince the incomplete dream of the best life. Bloch’s gaze wanders from Zoroaster and Confucius to legendary stories of the fictional Scheherazade and the sixteenth-century prophecies of Nostradamus to Romanticism, Marxism, and Modernism. Different understandings of time, death, kindness, and the most varied sentiments come to life in what Bloch termed the “utopian laboratory.” Tolerance and a cosmopolitan mind-set are essential for its functioning. All the more sad, and ironic, that Bloch should have defended the show trials scripted by Joseph Stalin in a notorious 1938 essay titled “Jubilee for Renegades”. No other thinker has ever produced a utopian conception as rich, varied, fresh, and pregnant with possibilities. There is hope for transforming every moment of the totality. But the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and attempts to realize the anticipatory potential of one element will inevitably impinge upon another. What Bloch termed “the world experiment” is incapable of being fully redeemed: utopia must always remain utopian.
The pacification of existence
Herbert Marcuse agreed. But the way in which he dealt with utopia was very different. His Eros and Civilization (1955) is an attempt to articulate the liberating desires, hopes, and fantasies that have been repressed since time immemorial. Marcuse had been interested in Schiller since the beginnings of his intellectual career. Young radicals of his generation embraced him far more than Goethe or the rest of the eighteenth-century Weimar literati. After Auschwitz and the Gulag, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation in a new cold war, Marcuse saw the need for a new vantage point from which critique might be launched. The beautiful illusion, the play impulse, and the idea of sustained happiness provided the fitting basis for an anthropological break with the reality principle and, its capitalist variant, the performance principle.
Freud had associated these terms with delayed gratification of pleasure and the repression of instinctual sexual desires lodged in the unconscious. All this was deemed necessary in order to survive in a world of scarcity. Marcuse suggested, however, that the modern world of scarcity was being artificially maintained. A kind of “surplus repression” was being enforced by the structure of advanced industrial society to assure its continuation.
Imperialism, militarism, economic exploitation, patriarchal family structures, religious dogmatism, and the false needs generated by consumerism all render it irrational. Only a kind of primal guilt maintains the identification with its values and institutions. Punishment is sought and employed to quell the desire for liberation and archetypical thoughts of rebellion by the sons against the unequal distribution of work and satisfaction imposed by the primal father. Too terrible to recall, shrouded in mist, these rebellions and vague dreams of liberation must be expunged. Deadened by the culture industry, bereft of alternatives, lacking in reflexivity, caught within the whirl of a fast-paced yet ultimately meaningless existence, individuals thus lose control of their history.
Insofar as repression fosters irrational resentments and violence, social and political activity focuses ever less upon liberation than destruction. But this only further intensifies the utopian longings along with guilt and the subsequent need for new punishments based on ever more manipulative and unnecessary methods of delaying gratification. Material progress thus rests on psychological regression. Unable to deal with their guilt, the individuals living in advanced industrial society constantly reproduce the repressive values of the performance principle.
Utopia is the denial of all this. It projects sublimated forms of creative activity that bind subject and object, and that free the libido from all constraints. Humanity is psychologically reconfigured in utopia. Scarcity is overcome, and individuals cease to view one another in instrumental terms. People are placed before profits, work turns into play, and a new sensibility takes shape that is almost biologically repulsed by cruelty, exploitation, and violence. And that is not all. Time is no longer conceived in linear terms but rather, following nature, as an internal circular process akin to what Nietzsche termed the “eternal recurrence.” Sustained happiness thus finally becomes a speculative possibility in the thought that death is not the unfolding of life. An Essay on Liberation becomes the vehicle for Marcuse to depict a utopian existence in which:
techniques would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated. Emergence of a new Reality Principle: under which a new sensibility and a de-sublimated scientific intelligence would combine in the creation of an aesthetic ethos.
Eros and Civilization in particular has generated an avalanche of criticism. But it remains an imaginative tour de force. That work transformed the deeply pessimistic outlook of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and his other metapsychological speculations int
o the foundation for a radically utopian vision. Anchoring the desire for restructuring the instincts, intent upon challenging alienation in the most dramatic way, Marcuse offers a liberating counterpoint to the sadistic perversion of human nature in the concentration camp universe. He insists that only the “pacification of existence,” a sustained experience of happiness without fear of death, can bring about the triumph of Eros over Thanatos. Utopia is the only viable standpoint for confronting a world in which progress is actually an expression of barbarism.
Eros and Civilization was published at a time when intellectual life in the Western world was dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre and the Existentialists in France, Günther Grass and the “Group ’47” in Germany, and the Beats in the United States. Marcuse offered something different. His vision contested their pessimism and, later, challenged young people to broaden their minds and embrace ethical idealism of a new sort. Marcuse was no fool. He knew that his utopia was predicated on a contradiction that prevented its realization: only already liberated individuals can bring about a liberated society. He was also aware that his vision was speculative in character and critical for precisely that reason. But some believed that his ideas constituted a threat to the rational foundations of critical theory.
Jürgen Habermas’s “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” (1968) offers a devastating attack on Marcuse and a very different point of view. His claim is that technology has an ontological structure and that talk of a new science is illegitimate without articulating criteria for verifying truth claims. A counterargument would suggest, however, that such criticisms are external rather than immanent. They don’t speak to what is at stake. The real issue is whether Eros and Civilization offers an appropriately ideal standard to indict reality. Or, more bluntly, how genuinely utopian is its vision and how radical are its implications?
Erich Fromm undertakes his criticism of Marcuse with just these questions in mind. His arguments appear in various essays collected in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970) and The Revision of Psychoanalysis (1992). Highlighting the primacy of social conditions on character formation, Fromm had already questioned Freud’s metapsychological claims and instinct theory during the 1930s. This estranged him from the inner circle of the Institute for Social Research and led, in 1939, to his formal severance from it. As far as Fromm was concerned any philosophical grounding for psychology, or metapsychology, is useful only insofar as it is linked to clinical practice. Without connection to the real experiences of real individuals, such a metapsychology will necessarily rely on an arbitrary manipulation of concepts and ignore the problems associated with alleviating personal suffering. Fromm points to various technical mistakes made by Marcuse.
Polymorphous sexuality, for example, is defined by Freud in terms of prepubescent sexuality so that the supposedly utopian longing for its fulfillment (claimed by Marcuse) is actually predicated on infantile fantasies. Eros and Civilization is thus seen by Fromm as forwarding a notion of utopia that actually serves as a veil for regression and the obliteration of the ego. Even if this were not the case, however, critical theory should still emphasize the primacy of therapeutic attempts to foster the maturity, independence, and rationality of individuals in capitalist society. Any other position, whatever its utopian claims, severs theory from practice and speculative claims from empirical validation—thereby betraying the original vision and rational character of the critical enterprise.
Former associates within the inner circle took all this very seriously. They believed that Fromm’s assault on metapsychology constituted a revision of Freud’s radical legacy. It threatened to obliterate the legitimacy of engaging in the kind of anthropological critique of civilization that inspired Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Theodor W. Adorno subjected Fromm’s views to fierce criticism in “Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis” (1946). Marcuse also counterattacked with a criticism of Freudian “revisionism” that first appeared in the pages of Dissent (1956) and ultimately served as the appendix to Eros and Civilization. Important issues are involved here that speak to the character of critical theory and the direction it should take.
If Fromm is correct, then critical theory must again—though in new ways and under new conditions—view itself as a theory of practice. It should offer practical ideas for dealing with exploitation and repression, and rely more strongly on the ethical traditions associated with humanism and the Enlightenment. Embracing metapsychology, by contrast, affirms the ontology of false conditions. Only negative dialectics and visions of an anthropological break can then preserve the possibility of resistance and the radical idea of freedom. Theory trumps practice. Privileging clinical therapy to better the psychological plight of individuals becomes a form of compromise with the status quo and an adaptation to repression. Adorno put the matter strikingly in Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” But then: it’s also possible that the wrong life can be more or less wrong, and living it can occur more or less rightly.
What’s missing?
The Frankfurt School offered understandings of the best life very different than those provided in Utopia (1516) by Thomas More or the American best seller Looking Backward (1887), by Edward Bellamy. These classics of utopian literature integrated standard assumptions of the world they sought to contest like slavery or technological progress. Works that envision an anthropological or even a genuinely radical break with the reality principle are rare. The dangers implicit in that idea actually constitute a fundamental theme of dis-utopian works like We (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, or Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) by George Orwell. All of them provide a trenchant critique of communist totalitarianism and technological progress. They also warn against moral libertinism and the vision of sustained happiness. Utopia—or, better, the dream of realizing it—is treated by them as a seductive narcotic with a special set of dangers.
Perhaps that is as it should be. Attempts to turn utopia into reality had bloody results long before communism and fascism entered the historical scene. The idea of apocalyptic redemption forecloses compromise. Utopia has always been laden with the self-righteousness born of prophecy—and, as often as not, the celebration of violence. Utopians traditionally justified the terrible means they employed by the liberating ends they supposedly guaranteed. There is ample reason for deriding utopia as irrational and abstract, vague and indeterminate, oblivious of human nature.
But the dream of the best life is an enduring theme of humanity. Utopia might be the most underestimated concept in the philosophical lexicon. It also has exceptional practical importance. Every mass ideology has a utopian component. The great movements were never inspired, and the barricades never mounted for purely pragmatic reasons. “Man does not live by bread alone,” Bloch wrote, “especially when he doesn’t have any.” Utopia has an existential component: it is the ideal for which countless individuals have proven willing to die.
Theorists should remain wary of depicting utopia too realistically. But there is always room for a sketch that can be retouched and redrawn. The sketch provides little more than the outlines for what will always remain an unfinished painting. Utopia is ultimately a regulative ideal: it provides us with a sense of how little civilization has achieved and anticipatory traces of what might be achieved in the future. Utopia has inspired revolutions. But it has also inspired the arduous, boring, and sometimes dangerous efforts at reform. Even therapeutic attempts to better the lives of individuals make reference to ideas and ideals concerning how life should be lived. Utopia need not make political actors blind to social reality and ethical constraints. The sketch can clarify the multifaceted problems attendant upon furthering the best life. It can also show how humanity is still a work in process. Utopia was never meant to obliterate the individual. Better to view it as privileging a “multiplicity in unity” and fostering a richer and more complex form of individuality.
The best life escapes being captured by images,
circumscribed by depictions, and reduced to philosophical categories. That is its strength. Utopia exposes how reality exists under what T. W. Adorno termed the “wicked spell”—the fetish surrounding immediate gratification that erodes the critical imagination. Perhaps utopia does only exist in the moment when one is lying on one’s back in the grass looking at the sky, freed of want and pressure like Ferdinand the Baby Bull, the hero of children’s books, or in the flash of time that departs as soon as it is experienced. But, then, utopia does not rest on a single longing or a single desire—even the longing for immorality or the desire for sustained happiness and ultimate meaning. The truly subversive idea in Brecht’s utopian play Mahagonny (1929) was that “something is missing”—but then something is always missing.
Chapter 6
The happy consciousness
Hegel believed that progress is ultimately furthered by the person who is out of step with the majority. Only this person, the genuine nonconformist, really experiences the constraints on freedom. Only this person is in the position of questioning the prevailing understandings of happiness. For Hegel, indeed, the “unhappy consciousness” is the source of progress. That is also the case for the Frankfurt School. Its members posed many criticisms of modern life and the culture industry. But the danger that advanced industrial society presents to the unhappy consciousness is perhaps the most telling. At stake is the substance of subjectivity and autonomy: the will and ability of the individual to resist external forces intent upon determining the meaning and experience of life.