5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Ideology, says Habermas, is a structure of communication that has become
systematically bent out of shape by power. Distortion marks the point at which social
rationalization intrudes into everyday life, or of what Habermas terms the ‘lifeworld’
—the domains of cultural reproduction, socialization and personal identity. Like the
early Frankfurt School, Habermas argues that the increasing penetration of a
rationalizing, bureaucratizing logic into cultural life has degraded social relations and
the autonomy of personhood. The uncontrolled growth of anonymous systems of
administration and economy increasingly reach into every sphere of social life. But
this besieging of the lifeworld by economic and administrative subsystems is not just
a matter of social domination: on the contrary, such pathology becomes incorporated
into the rigid, monotonous character of contemporary identity-patterns. Indeed,
Habermas speaks of an ‘inner colonization of the lifeworld’, which suggests that
desire and passion are increasingly colonized and controlled by the ideological
dictates of the social system itself.
Habermas regards psychoanalysis as a discourse that traces the communicative
distortions of social power and ideology upon subjectivity. In Knowledge and Human
Interests (1972), he argues that unconscious repression is an effect of linguistic
distortion. ‘The ego’s flight from itself,’ says Habermas, ‘is an operation that is
carried out in and with language. Otherwise it would not be possible to reverse the
defensive process hermeneutically, via the analysis of language’ (1972: 241). In this
communications reading of Freud, repression is understood as a process of
excommunication. Drawing on Alfred Lorenzer’s psychoanalytic research on linguistic
pathologies, Habermas claims that the unconscious is constituted through an
excommunication of language from public, intersubjective relations through a
process of privatization. The unconscious, on this reckoning, is conceived as that
which is excluded from public, intersubjective communication. As Habermas
(1972:223) argues: ‘The psychically most effective way to render undesired need
dispositions harmless is to exclude from public communication the interpretations to
which they are attached.’ From this angle, Habermas contends that emancipation
entails the elimination of unconscious distortions of communication in order to secure a
self-reflective movement toward political autonomy.
As with the first generation of critical theorists, and especially Marcuse, Habermas’s
recasting of repression as a process of excommunication has significantly stimulated
and influenced contemporary social theory. In contrast to the individualistic
interpretation of Freud developed by Marcuse, Habermas’s communications reading
of psychoanalysis directly confronts the intersubjective nature of repressed desire,
thus making the psychoanalytic tradition more immediately relevant to the concerns