The following is a dialogue between a character representing Freud's beliefs about the relationship between society and our psychic life and a character representing Adorno's beliefs on the same thing. Neither character should be read as directly representing the thinker in question, as I am not really that familiar with either. They are only vehicles for discussing a point I have been thinking about while reading Adorno's Minima Moralia. My first foray into the dialogue form, which I have been meaning to do for a while. Probably of limited interest to most, but I had fun...
Fred: ...and that's why I think that the formation and maintenance of society will always require us to substantially curb our instincts and desires. Let me summarise: repression and renunciation of our instinctual life, of our ego, is a condition for the possibility of society at all because of the constitutional inclination of humans towards egoism. Society enforces such repression through the promise of love, the threat of punishment (external authority), and the instilling of guilt in the individual (internal authority). These things are actually good, to some extent. We should align ourselves with the higher social goal of forming a great and successful human community, which requires the renunciation of our instincts and desires rather than the selfish pursuit of our own pleasure. However, this means that, in most cases, the formation of social groups means the aim of happiness for the individual necessarily falls by the wayside. Indeed, I would go further. It almost seems as if the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had been paid to the happiness of the individual at all. This is not as bad as it sounds, though. In individual consciousness, we each act according to the reality principle. The idea is simple: in order to gain some great future pleasure, we defer the gratification of immediate pleasures. Such a principle is constantly at work in our decision-making, and the choice to maintain a society at the expense of our happiness is analogous to this. We put aside our immediate well-being for the sake of something greater than us, society.
Theo: Are you serious about this last bit?
Fred: What do you mean?
Theo: Well, all night, you have been masterfully tracking down and describing the unconscious and instinctual basis for our conscious actions, both in the material conditions of our biology and the society we live in. But here, I think you've gone astray. You draw the completely wrong conclusions from your analysis.
Fred: In what way?
Theo: Well, listen to yourself: "the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had been paid to the happiness of the individual at all." What reason do we have to think this is true? This is nothing but a confession of your bourgeois contempt of instinct, itself a product of the unconscious rationalisations you have already dismantled. Your schema ends up being nothing but apologetics for the continued instrumentalisation of the individual subject in a society organised only for the value of prescribed mechanical coherence and the withering away of genuine human spontaneity. You proclaim to desire the open emancipation of the oppressed through an ever-greater Society but, at the same time, condone the necessity of even greater repression in order to achieve it.
Fred: Uhh, ok, well, how about less Marxist psycho-babble and more actual critique of my points? What do you actually mean by any of this? At least half of what you said (where it was intelligible) is a complete strawman of my position.
Theo: Sorry—I got a little carried away. Let me try and be clear on this point. Take first the case of the individual. The justification for acting according to the reality principle in our individual lives, the deferral of instant gratification for some future pleasure, is that we renounce our instincts to do something we want to do in order to get something that we want even more. This is what makes it a rational process. If someone worked their whole life, never having enjoyed a second of it, never having ended up using any of the money they made for anything they actually enjoy, such a life could hardly be called rational. Now take the case of society. If there is a necessary opposition between society and instinct that, in many cases, even precludes the happiness of the individual, as you seem to claim, then what justification do we have for deferring our instincts for this society? Thus, it is not analogous to the reality principle because the standard according to which we were judging something to be good for us, pleasure, has been taken out of the equation. This is my first point: if society is the way you say it is, without the possibility of pleasure, then it cannot even be justified as good. And I don't mean pleasure here in a narrow sense of feeling good. [Theo begins raising his voice to an almost uncomfortable level.] I mean the pure, joyous, intentionless pleasure that springs out of the unique wellspring of the individual acting according to their own unmediated values, that pleasure that plays no role in the instrumental management of the society it takes place in. [He is almost yelling now.] He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure has a stable idea of truth!
Fred: ...I take it you have a second point, too, then?
Theo: Yes, thank you. Even worse, your theory presupposes an extremely strong, and ultimately indefensible, modal claim about the status of the conflict between instinct and society. That is, you claim that conflict between them is necessary. As society becomes greater (larger, more encompassing, etc.), so does the repression of the individual ego. However, what reason do we have to accept that this is true other than prejudice towards conserving the existing socio-political arrangement? Such conviction is only borne out of the fact that you happen to be able to pursue an activity you find meaningful. You probably repress your own instincts a lot less than the many who are worse off than you in our society. This is my second point: if you discover that the society we live in strips us of many sources of pleasure and constantly demands us to renounce our instinctual desires in favour of nothing but the maintenance of that society, then the response should not be to shrug our shoulders and affirm its lofty goodness but (1) to recognise the poverty of defending such a society, and (2), to try and change it for the better, where better is to be understood as a society that does not repress the individuals making it up and also provides the grounds for real pleasure.
Fred: I think you misunderstand my claim here. On the first point, I agree that repression cannot be justified by recourse to pleasure, and I do think this is a rather lamentable fact. It is thus not strictly analogous to the reality principle. However, it is an unavoidable condition of sociality. In order to properly form social bonds, we must renounce instinct. For example, even the law is an expression of this fact. Each and every law is a condemnation of specific kinds of desires that must be curbed in order for society to function. However, the fact that it cannot be rationalised by recourse to pleasure is immaterial precisely because it is inevitable, precisely given it is not an option to opt-out of such sociality entirely. The two options for doing so are either complete individual isolation or total societal destruction, both of which would be an even more unhappy condition than the current alternative.
Theo: Well, I agree with you there: we should neither be engaged in a total dissociation from society, because a life without others is not a life lived, nor in a reactionary attempt to turn back the wheel of history to a life we wrongly perceive to be without the things we both regret. However, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. Just because some repression will always be necessary does not mean there cannot be better or worse possible configurations of the repression/society trade-off. You treat this inevitable fact of sociality as if it makes all kinds of repression equal, but it does not. All I need for my claim is that things can be better with regard to how much the ordinary human must repress their own desires in order to function as a member of society. However, if we can imagine a realistic and functioning socio-political organisation where people are even slightly less repressed than they are now, either by internal or external forces, then these two forces are not necessarily opposed at all, and we have reified mere correlated difference into logical opposition. This is why I accused your theory of being apologetics for bourgeois existence: because the elevation of the repression by society into something opposed to individual pleasures snuffs out in advance the possibility that we can do the individual better. And once we view our own experience of pleasure as mutually incompatible with the progress of society, we learn to write off our own subjectivity as a defective component in the objective matrix of industrial life rather than the thing in service of which society should exist at all.
Fred: Well, perhaps I put the point with some hyperbole. I will grant you that they are not necessarily opposed. However, I do not need for my claim that they are. Their continuous correlated difference is enough to secure a weakened hypothesis: that as society tends towards greatness, repression of individual desire tends to intensify. This claim is compatible with the idea that things could, in fact, be better (your second objection to my view). Indeed, I have said as much in print. For example, in my book Society and Its Dissatisfactions, I write that "this struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction...between the primal instincts of Eros and death. It is a dispute within the economics of the libido...and it does admit of an eventual accommodation in the individual, as, it may be hoped, it will also do in the future of civilization, however much that civilization may oppress the life of the individual today." I even go as far as saying that changing our relation our material conditions is probably the best way of ameliorating this conflict: "[I] think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands". My point is that if we are to be realistic about the organisation of society, we must be realistic about the structure of the human psyche, and, more generally, about what is necessarily repressed for a society to function. This means being realistic about the fact not all problems can be solved by giving people money and equalising society in every way. There are, and always will be, irreducible psychic conflicts in any society.
Theo: Sure, we should be realistic, but once the necessity claim is dropped, it is unclear exactly how we even disagree with each other. You would surely agree then that, given there is no essential disagreement between society and instinct, we ought to attempt to bring about a society that minimises the repression of individual subjects? But if you do, this would make your claim that there is a tension between society and instinct basically trivial. It amounts merely to reporting the fact that the socio-political organisation of society is in conflict with individuals' desires—if course it is. As I have already said, the imperative must then be not the resigned affirmation of the current society's repressive demands as the necessary corollary to its functioning but the search for a better one that makes pleasure possible for all in spite of its functioning. Indeed, given that pleasure, in the sense outlined above, is the very yardstick for why we should have a society at all (what else justifies its existence?), this ought to be the sole good that society, and our thinking about it, is aimed towards: the pleasure of all involved. All psychic conflict does not have to be eliminated for us to see that there is a set of possible conflicts better than the actual set today. Your theory only entrenches the opposite thought: that we exist in service of society and that we ought to sacrifice ourselves for it rather than the other way around. This gets it backwards. There is no lofty goodness to society if it is also actually good for us, actually good for all.
Fred: Well...yeah, we should definitely bring about a configuration of society that minimises the repression of individual subjects and maximises pleasure. I never denied that. However, my point has always been that due to the structures of society and the structure of our psyche, this is much harder than you give it credit for. Your point is the trivial one because it gives people the mistaken impression they can escape the neuroses and repression inherent in any social organisation by attempting to rewrite it (or burn it down) in their image. Given your work on Fascism and Nazism, you, more than anyone else, should recognise the dangers of a utopic ideology that sells its adherents on a vision that society can simply be unilaterally reorganised. We pay-
Theo: Not what I'm saying!
Fred: We pay, for security, peace, and prosperity, by accepting an inescapable, but ultimately tolerable, malaise. A malaise induced by the renunciation of our instincts. And we should count ourselves lucky that we are functioning at all. Just look at all the comforts of modern life, of modern society. We may not always steer our society towards the optimum configuration of individual subjectivities being cultivated, but we also do not risk falling into chaos and destruction. Plus, I do not think tha-[a loud thump, followed by a loud smashing sound, can be heard]. What was that?
Rumpus Rowan: [He brushes off some broken glass from his clothes. His head is clearly bleeding.] I have been listening with great interest to your conversation. It seems to me that, like many questions about politics, the substantive disagreement is about what, precisely, is possible. One thing you both seem to agree on is this: we should, to the best of our ability, create a society in which we live harmoniously with each other and do not have to repress our individual instincts. But given each of your priors about what is actually possible, the content of this belief comes out vastly different in each case. Many political disagreements basically come down to this. Without delving too far into this particular disagreement, my sense is that our peculiar form of socio-political organisation is uniquely destructive of our political imagination. We don't have to be naive about what is actually possible to change or ignorant of the vast systems that successfully regulate society in order to think that we can do a lot better than we are doing.
Fred: Who are you, and how did you get into my house?
Theo: I know I said that the modern police are nothing but a manifestation of the fascist tendencies latent in industrial capitalism, but...they are on their way.
Rumpus Rowan: [Sprints out the door, leaving only a cartoon cloud of dust and a small trail of blood.]
Fred: Huh. Well...can I get you another drink?
Theo: That would be great, thanks. [Under his breath.] I think that man agreed with me...
Fred: What?
Theo: Nothing.
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