5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
world does not yet know psychology, the oversocialised knows it no longer.’
Repressive desublimation functions in Frankfurt School sociology as that psychic
process which links what Adorno called the ‘post-psychological individual’ to the
historical emergence of fascism and totalitarian societies.
It was against this psychoanalytic backdrop that Adorno and Horkheimer theorized
the self-cancelling dynamic of the civilizing process in Dialectic of Enlightenment,
proposing a structural fixity in which all forms of rationality and identity are
constituted through a violent coercion of inner and outer nature; or, to put the matter
in a more psychoanalytic idiom, subjectivity and inter- subjectivity are always-already
the direct outcrop of the heteronomous, hypnotic power of superego law. Accordingly,
the search was now on within the first generation of critical theory to locate the good
Other of instrumental reason. In this connection, Adorno reserved a privileged place
for high art as dislocating repressive types of logic and bringing low all forms of
‘identifying’ thought. Marcuse, for a time, thought that it might be possible to recast
sexual perversion, and specifically the domain of fantasy, as somehow prefigurative
of a utopian social order—on the grounds that the primary processes slipped past the
net of the reality/performance principle.
These and other images of Utopia arose from the School’s intriguing blend of
Marxism and Freudianism. And yet the issue of critique—specifically the
vantage- point from which the School launched its devastating condemnation of
capitalist culture—has dogged followers of Frankfurt sociology. In Perversion and
Utopia, the American philosopher Joel Whitebook writes of the performative
contradiction in Frankfurt School sociology between asserting that identity is
necessarily as rigid, spiritless and abstract as the reified object it dominates in the
administered world on the one hand, and of confidently maintaining that an in-depth
psycho- social critique of these processes can be undertaken on the other hand.
Something is amiss here (from which world, exactly, were the Frankfurt School
analysts able to critique such systematic pathologies?), and for Whitebook the answer
lies in the Frankfurt School’s global portrayal of all subjective synthesis as violence or
domination. Developing upon perspectives advanced by the work of those associated
with the second generation of critical theory, specifically the writings of Albrecht
Wellmer, Whitebook argues that Adorno mistook distortions of language in
contemporary rationalism for language as such, and was therefore led to deny the
social-historical gains of discursive rationality tout court. (Like Wellmer’s The
Persistence of Modernity (1991), Whitebook’s Perversion and Utopia is an attempt to
release the frozen potential of the first generation of Critical Theory from its aporetic
confinement to the philosophy of consciousness, but in a manner that fully