Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism 9781503632462

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
part i: our steely encasement
1. The Rise of Cybernetic Society: The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual
2. Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self
3. The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis
part II: an anatomy of heteronomy
4. Alienation: From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy
5. Reconsidering False Consciousness: An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition
6. Cultivating Consent: Reification and the Web of Norms
7. The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego
part III: to the lighthouse
8. Autonomy as Critical Agency: Reconstructing the Democratic Self
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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twilight of the self

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TWILIGHT OF THE SELF The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism

Michael J. Thompson

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2022 by Michael John Thompson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thompson, Michael J., 1973– author. Title: Twilight of the self : the decline of the individual in late capitalism / Michael J. Thompson. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021051935 (print) | LCCN 2021051936 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503632448 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503632455 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503632462 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Self—Social aspects. | Neoliberalism. | Social history—1970- | Democracy—Philosophy. | Political science—Philosophy. Classification: LCC BF697.5.S65 T46 2022 (print) | LCC BF697.5.S65 (ebook) | DDC 155.2—dc23/eng/20211109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051935 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051936 Cover design: Rob Ehle

for elena, with love Ben è colui d’ogni valore scarco Qual tuo spirto gentil non innamora.

Die einzig wahrhafte Kraft gegen das Prinzip von Auschwitz wäre Autonomie . . . die Kraft zur Reflexion, zur Selbstbestimmung, zum nicht-Mitmachen. —T. W. Adorno

Contents

Preface Introduction

ix 1

part i: our steely encasement 1. The Rise of Cybernetic Society: The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual

31

2. Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self

74

3. The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis

99

part ii: an anatomy of heteronomy 4. Alienation: From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy

129

5. Reconsidering False Consciousness: An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition

151

6. Cultivating Consent: Reification and the Web of Norms

169

7. The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego

192

part iii: to the lighthouse 8. Autonomy as Critical Agency: Reconstructing the Democratic Self

229

Notes

273

Bibliography

313

Index

331

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Preface

More than ever, the ideal of autonomy is in peril. Now, as in perhaps no other time in recent cultural memory, the extent of group uniformity engulfs the self and, with it, the cognitive, critical, and libidinal capacities that shape the individual. We live more and more in an age of heteronomy, that state of the self’s other-directedness that Enlightenment thinkers took as their central philosophical nemesis. Today, new intellectual fads, rooted in technologically mediated forms of group-think, continue to assail the very resources of thought and reason that were at the heart of the Enlightenment project. Once again, we can perceive the potent force of antirationality, what Kant termed “misology,” making its way in the world. It is not only the banner of conservative and reactionary forces but, now increasingly, those that masquerade as “progressive,” as “radical.” More than even in the days of postmodern and poststructural theory, we are turning away from reason as the core dimension of what it means to be and to think freely. Reason as a harmonizer of the self—conceived as a thinking, feeling being rather than as an instrument of power and domination has always been at the heart of the humanistic strand of the Enlightenment, and decades of myopic academic assault have left us with scant resources to combat the antihumanism of our age. In a previous book, I elaborated a system that established a critical theory of political and ethical judgment. What was missing from that account was a study of the kind of self that would be capable of achieving critical consciousness and an account of the pathologies of the self that prevent such critical consciousness from being articulated. In this book, I want to defend the idea of the individual and argue that the idea of autonomy is, in fact, a central category for reviving critical consciousness and a more robust democratic civic life. I believe that the forces arrayed against the individual are more powerful and more pernicious than at any other

x  Preface time during the course of the modern world. But it is not the individual as envisioned in the past that I want to rehabilitate; rather, I want to propose an individuality that lies in potentia, a kind of individuality that can come to grasp its essential relatedness to others and to the world. I do not defend the atomized, classical liberal self that is a fiction of independence and still serves as the ideological cornerstone of our collective consciousness, nor do I rehearse the claims of intersubjectivists and pragmatists who dissolve the self into a web of relations with their naive belief in deliberation and common sense. These positions can no longer be defended because of the deep powers of reification and alienation that shape modern consciousness and the inner structure of the self. Rather, autonomy denotes a self that is conscious of its potential solidarity with others, that questions the social world’s legitimacy with respect to its capacity to cultivate a community of concrete freedom. It further denotes a self that refuses participation in a world that does not promote the common interest and that understands its interdependence on others as a substrate for freedom—a freedom to posit and to act upon purposes and ends that are its own. Indeed, as I conceive it, at the core of any genuine theory of autonomy is a self that seeks its communality with others just as it seeks to defend its own individuality—an individuality that is able to question the ends toward which the community has organized itself and to posit new ends and purposes that give concreteness to freedom as an actually lived life. The dialectical sublation of the two is the moment when real freedom can be glimpsed. In this sense, autonomy as a manifestation of critical consciousness and agency entails stripping away the calcified sedimentation of reified thought, feeling, and sensation in order to see the world anew; to achieve autonomy, as I conceive it at least, means experiencing a shift in the very horizon of our ontology as social beings capable of an individuality that is harmony with common needs and goods. But today, individuality has suffered from many years of a resurgent, neoliberal transformation of our institutions and our social relations. As our relations to others have become increasingly shallow, instrumental, and brittle, the modern self has been rendered weak, incoherent, and powerless. It searches in vain for an identity, for stimuli, or some other resource to grant its existence some sort of meaning.

Preface   xi Modernity is the cultural and social framework that permitted the expansion of the self and its deepened capacities for subjectivity, selfdirecting reason, and aesthetic experience. It has opened a new font for generating a social world that would enable new forms of growth and human potential. The forces against this seek to foreclose this expansion of the self; they seek control and subordination. The inner world of the individual is therefore deeply political in the sense that it is the crucible for what is private and what is social: to be all one or the other is a distortion, a constriction of our capacities for development and freedom. As such, I see the decline of the self in late capitalism (if there is such a thing) as the withering of the inner world, of subjectivity as such that serves as the font of the new, not only for the self but at the same time for the collective. But, as Adorno once pointed out: “Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better.”1 In truth, a loss of our capacity to envision the new, to think outside the confines of the alienated world that ensconces us, is the true cultural deficit of our age. If we are unable to resuscitate some semblance of critical self-consciousness to nurture our civic agency, then I fear that the forces of capitalistic technology, a resurgent, one-dimensional bourgeois ideology, the increasing submission to the logics of efficiency over that human need, and the continued expansion of an ever more rapacious and extractive capitalist society will snuff out the requisite psychic energies needed for self- and social-transformation. This process of dismantling the autonomous self, one that could serve to invigorate our collective ethical life, has been long in the making. As Weber noted not long after the First World War: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness.”2 It is my hope that this prediction, which weighs on the shoulders of each of us, can be shown to be a false prophecy. This book is by no means up to that task, but it is my hope that it can inspire debate and provoke thought toward that end. I must acknowledge and thank others for discussing the ideas I present in this book with me. Jim Block has been a formidable interlocutor and friend, constantly chiding me to keep in view the potential for human

xii   Preface self-transformation. My continuous discussions over the years with Lauren Langman have also kept me focused on the relation between the psychic and the social. In addition, I have benefited greatly from conversations that have, in one way or another, found their way into the ideas of this book: with Stephen Eric Bronner, Michael E. Brown, Tom Bunyard, Andrew Chitty, Joel Crombez, Harry Dahms, Jeffrey Halley, Neal Harris, Reha Kadakal, Nicola Marcucci, Darrow Schechter, Dirk MichelSchertges, Steve Panageotou, and Heinz Sünker. I must also recognize the rich intellectual and humanistic environment of the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, where I am currently in psychoanalytic training and where I have learned much about the nature of consciousness, the unconscious, and the dynamics of the self. I have profited greatly from this collective wisdom, and I must absolve everyone mentioned from the errors that indubitably follow.

twilight of the self

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Introduction

Our age is defined by a fundamental contradiction and tension. On one hand, the basis of our modern democratic order and institutions, as well as the basis of the beliefs about who we are as persons, is rooted in a particular idea of the individual—that is, the belief that my choices, my beliefs, my ideas are my own and that the life I live is my own. On the other hand, we are witnessing a remarkable expansion of large-scale social systems that have synthesized technology, economic goals of efficiency, and surplus extraction, as well as political-administrative forms of authority. This post-neoliberal phase of society that has taken root in Western democracies operates by absorbing the individual into its own matrix, not by coercively annihilating the individual but by recircuiting its needs, desires, interests, the perimeter of its knowledge, and the depths of its imagination toward its own imperatives, logic, and goals. I believe we are perched dangerously on the historical cusp of losing one of the great cultural innovations of Enlightenment humanism: the self-reflective, ethically engaged, autonomous self. This book proceeds from the premise that individuality, indeed subjectivity itself, is on the verge of being absorbed into the systemic apparatus of a social order rooted in large-scale regimes of normative power and dominance. On the brink of extinction is the existence of a pattern of selfhood that is capable of genuinely democratic attitudes and agency, a self that can serve as the font for democratic ideals and aesthetic sensibilities that can disrupt the cohesive institutional and ideological frameworks that shape

  Introduction our world—a world penetrated by reification, alienation, and powerlessness. Stated in its most succinct terms, I submit that we are witnessing the disappearance of the critical, rational, autonomous self that was once the ideal of the humanistic Enlightenment that first countered the more cumbersome systems of power of the Middle Ages. What is disappearing from our culture is a self, understood as the individual’s moral and psychological infrastructure, capable of envisioning the new, of expanding the horizons of the possible beyond what the patterned world of commodified society that seeks to enclose and envelop it permits. What is being gradually erased—indeed, what has been in the process of being erased for decades—is the idea, as well as the existence, of an individual capable of critique. Along with this is the erasure of a kind of autonomous individuality capable of positing its own ends and purposes in the world. To judge and to generate meaning for action, for obligation, for our individual and civic lives—this is the vision of modernity worth defending even more as we are witnessing the twilight of this kind of selfhood. The dynamics and trends of modern culture are fostering a new kind of self, one that is incapable of the kind of critical autonomy needed for democratic civic agency. It is a self absorbed into the edifice of an administered mass society that disables the capacity to think or imagine any alternative to it. Some may say that such a self has never existed, that the idea of a self that was actually autonomous and critical, rooted in reason and reflection, has always been the myth of modernity. But such a position seems to me overly cynical and, to be sure, historically false. Throughout the unfolding of the modern world, the individual’s self-consciousness as a rational social agent has been at the center of the projects of modern democratic life, philosophical insights into human value and integrity, no less than the aesthetic insights of modern literature, painting, and music. Even though we may find it abstract to grasp the idea of a singular type of self that any period produces, I believe we can discern, through its various vicissitudes, a basic structure of the individual personality that can be traced over time and that changes in response to its social environment and context. The Greek world could not have produced Don Quixote any more than the world of steam engines and assembly lines could have produced Jesus of Nazareth. The structure of the self is coordinate with the kinds of social, economic, and cultural patterns that come to grip society and the values it

Introduction   espouses, as well as the shapes of social relations it engenders. The self is at once shaped by and a shaper of its world; it is formed by the dynamic relations that ensconce it; its specific character is rooted in the various forms of life that it occupies. I contend that recent shifts in modern society have effected a new and radical change in the self: a change that is witnessing its dissolution and degradation. One place this shift can be sensed is in the realm of democratic politics. Contemporary democratic institutions are rooted in eighteenthcentury Enlightenment ideas about rational individuality, where each of us is capable of rational endorsement, responsiveness to reasons, and persuasion. All of this seems to me to be in stark and chilling contrast to the world as it actually is: a world governed by a system that, even as it gains in scope and intensity, is also overseeing the death of the very spirit and cultural vitality that gave the modern world its self-confidence and its distinctive moral and political cast. A world where the dignity of the individual would be reflected in a robust form of social freedom, where our shared political institutions would be matched by our aesthetic and psychological explorations and enrichment of the self, a world that would hold out the possibility for a democratic order that maximizes a common good that has the good of the individual at its core—these were some of the aspirations that animated the project of modernity. Autonomy was seen as the paradigmatic self-structure for modernity. It was the specific, historically achieved structure of self-organization that enabled social norms, practices, and institutions to be metabolized by the enzyme of reason.1 Only those forms of life that had passed through the judgment of the autonomous self were to be seen as valid, rational, and free. Freedom was possible in the world once the individual moved from being a passive, role-occupying part of the whole to an active, self-conscious constitutive force in the world—an individual that not only followed the scripts available to it in the given world but also generated new ends and purposes, new forms of meaning and collective forms of life. But these ideals and theories could not have anticipated the rapid and deep changes that affected modern societies from the dawn of the industrial era to today. The emergence of mass society had the effect of crushing the moral-political ideal of a self-governing community of autonomous individuals. Cultural modernism registered the shock of

  Introduction these social changes as the individual searched inward, deeper into the self and its own psychology, for the energy to compensate what was being lost in the vast machinery of modernity. But as the twentieth century came to a close, it became clear that even this activity of the individual was being eclipsed. The vision of a world where our social arrangements nourish and promote the development of the individual has been engulfed by the reified logics of acquisitive individualism. Public life has gradually petered out, replaced by a world where our identities and our former domain of privacy have been subsumed by a new digital face of capital. Indeed, what was once the realm of bourgeois privacy has now succumbed to the engineered patterns of life orchestrated by market forces and the incorporation of our inner experiences into the commodity form. In such a world, it becomes increasingly difficult, perhaps even impossible, to imagine, to think the alternative. Previous manifestations of large-scale social systems did not suffer this same fate. The Roman world’s apocalyptic Christians or the Protestant radicals that undermined church authority a thousand years later were able to transform the cohesive system of the classical Roman world or the Catholic Church, respectively. They were able to imagine the new and to undermine the great institutional and cultural forces of their time. But these large-scale social systems have been dwarfed by our own technological, administrative, commodified world. Indeed, our culture is now marked by the desiccation of the self, as well as of society as a whole; a gradual bleeding out of the energies and motivational values that could give rise to a more democratically organized, more humane, and more individually satisfying world now plagues modern life. Ours is a culture of uniformity rather than conformity; it is a world where each has constructed the illusion of his or her own individuality and unique, authentic intrapsychic world. But, as critics as early as Rousseau were able to see, the nature of modern domination was premised on the capacity for the powerful to create within its subjects the requisite norms, values, and cultural patterns that would cement and naturalize unequal power relations.2 The security of domination relations was at issue in the modern world; neither the sword nor the guillotine would be the instrument of power but the very infrastructure of a self turned against itself. Culture and the psyche were the final domains to be conquered by the powerful in order

Introduction   to secure political and economic dominance. It is precisely this, I contend, that has happened in modern society, and we are currently living through its implications. One aspect of this phenomenon is the increased unification of social, cultural, and political institutions and spheres, of the invasion and recoding of our culture by the logics of efficiency, instrumentality, and surplus extraction that have defined the trajectory of capitalism as a social system from its inception. These variables are defined more and more by the dictates of capital at the expense of other social values and purposes: of the need for profit, the production of economic value, and the defense of oligarchic wealth. At the same time, the transformation of our institutions entails their gradual isomorphism according to the banal logic of the commodity form. Capital’s incessant capacity and drive to absorb everything external to it into the realm of the market, to commodify everything possible, has finally penetrated to the level of the personality, to the psychic world within. This has had—and, I believe, will continue to have—a profound effect on the moral and political landscape of modern culture. Add to this the increase of the alienating effects of technologically mediated relations and the shallow world of a commodified culture and we can see that the sociocultural resources that once propelled the progressive forces of modernity have in fact petered out. “So too in the world of individuals,” wrote Kierkegaard, all too presciently, in the first half of the nineteenth century, “remove the essential passion, the one purpose, then everything becomes an insignificant featureless outwardness; the flowing current of ideality stops and the life that people share becomes a stagnant lake.”3 Only several years prior, Marx had perceived the same dynamic as the resulting pathology of capitalism’s transformation of social relations and the regression of the individual stemming from alienation: “It replaces labor by machinery, but it casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns the others into machines. It produces intelligence, but also, for the workers, stupidity, cretinism.”4 These two insights blend into a single idea diagnosing a pathology that still holds true today: the stagnation and alienation of the self in a world that appears to us as dynamic and fluid, but is actually highly patterned and concealed, is increasingly coming to have a rigid command over its fate.

  Introduction Much of my research over the past decade has focused on the problem known as reification, the thesis that the inner world of consciousness takes on the form of the rationalized, technical external world and reproduces those logics within the subjective field of the individual. This relation between the dynamics of the outer, social world and the inner, subjective world constitutes a crucial field for understanding how the status of the modern individual has been formed. Although generally thought of as a term of Marxian theory, as I studied this phenomenon more closely, I realized that the various studies on which I had embarked were converging on the following hypothesis: that the constitution of our individuality, our subjectivity, indeed the very pattern of the modern self, has been colonized by a regime of social norms rooted in heightened and intensified technical and commodified logics required for the coordination and maintenance of a social system based on the extraction of value and surplus and other needs of hierarchical social relations. Furthermore, these norms were becoming entwined with the very structure of our consciousness in a way that had hitherto been unappreciated. The very idea of the self—its functions, capacities, and status as a moral and political agent—has been transformed by the emergence of what I will call the cybernetic society. Cybernetic society is a phase of capitalism saturated by the logic of instrumental extraction and commodification—that is, where every sphere of society, polity, culture, and psyche are extruded through a uniform deep logic of efficiency and profit maximization, as well as the attendant logics of control and organizational management that secure it, leading to a corrosion of psyche and culture. This is a society where these technical logics of organizational management and control have been able to socialize the self, making it the simultaneous object and subject of control and surplus extraction. This theory follows on the salient insight of Georg Lukács, who saw the outlines for it in the early 1920s: “the atomization of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that—for the first time in history—the whole of society is subjected to, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws.”5

Introduction   This has been the primary systemic drive and aim of capitalism since the first industrial plants emerged in the eighteenth century. But this older paradigm of the relation between the human and technology, between the self and the megamachine, always existed within a dualist structure where the machine’s logic was external and apparent to the self. Chilling images of the computer HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey pursuing its human crew comes to mind. But today, the emergence of a new form of technology has shifted this paradigm. Now, technology has become “personalized”; it has been miniaturized and embedded within the reflexes of our own sense of self. As a result, the domains of privacy and the unconscious, previously potential reservoirs for explosive counterorganizational energies, have been packaged by the injection of the commodity form as experience, as fantasy, as the fundamental basis of our beliefs and thought. As never before, capitalism has been able to bring the commodity form not merely before our eyes but into the internal phenomenological and psychological framework of the self. The result is a profound intensification of the forces of reification on the self, a kind of hyperreification that demands a new look into the dynamics and mechanisms responsible for its production. When I thought, at a more philosophical and technical level, about how this was all happening, I began to discover that intentional structures of consciousness are increasingly mapped out by the normative webs and prepatterned practices of a cohesive institutional world that appears, on its surface, to be diverse, energetic, and complex but that, in truth, is underwritten by a deeper logic of coordination and socialization toward economistic ends of efficiency and oligarchically organized extractive wealth. What some have referred to, after Lukács, as “reification” is actually a much deeper phenomenon infecting the deepest structures and dynamics of consciousness that shape our world-constituting and self-reflective faculties. More precisely, I came to see that the technological and cultural permeation of late capitalist society shapes norms and practices to such an extent that it has repatterned the collective-intentional rule-sets at the root of our self- and world-generating powers. The result is that the modern world is circumscribed by these deep patterns of being and that they structure an ever-widening scope of our experience—from education, culture, politics, and the intimate life of the family to the internal world of the self.

  Introduction If we agree that the most important achievement of modern culture has been the articulation of the individual as a distinct mode of experience, a source of rational reflection, as well as a source of affective energy and ethical care, then we cannot help but witness, today, its decline, even its eclipse. I believe that we are witnessing a rupture in the political, cultural, and psychological strivings that characterized much of the modern period. Where the modern individual emerged out of a secularized reconception of the person that possessed an inner, self-directive capacity, the contemporary self is plagued by a lack of agency ensconced in a narcissistic sphere of self-absorption, shallow social relations, and one-dimensional subjectivity. Whereas the modern self initially emerged as a civic being, a being of conscience, the contemporary self no longer possesses the moral or psychic fortitude to stand against its socially constructed fate. It no longer can say, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” Rather, it needs the security of the group even as it passively accepts the machinations of the social order around it. The modern self is essentially isolated and without power. It feels the effects of a system of social relations degraded by the market, by commodification, by instrumentality, and by the dehumanizing consequences of the social pathologies of a system rooted in capital that has its own agglomeration rather than human benefit as its central aim.6 These shifts have occurred as a result of another set of changes that have gradually occurred as the result of macrostructural changes in the economic, technical, and administrative nature of modern capitalism.7 What we broadly understand as modernity emerged out of the fracturing of the cohesive powers of feudal patterns of power that dominated the Middle Ages. The church controlled cultural, educational, and spiritual dimensions of self and society, whereas concentrations of economic and political power were collected in the hands of aristocratic and landowning classes that sustained a stable system of extractive power over their communities. As market relations broke up these closed economic systems and Protestant movements gained cultural and political success, the stability of this cohesive power system was eroded. But even before this, papal reforms in the church from about 1000 to 1300 CE provided a new context for understanding justice. These reforms cast the individual as an entity with distinct moral status, translating this into a new legal and social

Introduction   status of the person: the individual was now no longer, as in the classical world, primarily a member of a group but an individual with rights and obligations, a crucial change that set the stage for the modern individual. Indeed, as Larry Siedentop notes, “Under way was nothing less than a reconstruction of the self. . . . Translating a moral status into a social role created a new image of society as an association of individuals rather than of families, tribes or castes.”8 The result of these shifts was a new way of thinking about the self and society. The rise of the individual did not entail society’s disintegration but rather a gradual displacement of communal forms of life and identification with more solidaristic forms of political cultural association and a new desire for self-governance in political, as well as individual, moral terms.9 Now, instead of a “natural” dimension of a group whole, society could be seen as a self-conscious association rooted not in tradition and custom but in principles of reciprocity, equality, and rights. Modern ideas of self-rule and civic life began to emerge in full cultural and political form in the northern Italian city-states during the Renaissance, as a more comprehensive sense of moral and intellectual importance was affixed to the individual gathered cultural force.10 The self that began to emerge between the seventeenth century and the early twentieth was therefore oriented toward moral responsibility and the importance of public life, but it was also increasingly unable to generate new forms of life and systems of meaning as technological and economic modernization outpaced it. The vitality that animated Western societies during this period was fueled by a search for a more humane social context for the development of the individual. In art and literature, politics and philosophy, this reflection on the nature of the individual and society served as a fulcrum against the awesome powers not only of throne and altar but of the newly emerged “satanic mills” and the unjust social order that spawned them. As late as the mid-twentieth century, this picture of the self was still active and real. The economic organization of society was still under a redistributive regime that protected the basic security of individual social membership and nourished an aspirational culture for social transformation. Liberation of the self was now primarily cultural, referring to the expansion of the horizons of experience. As the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote from the vantage point of the 1970s: “In modern art,

  Introduction literature, and philosophy; in the mood, aspirations, conduct of life of the younger generation, we see a fresh flowering of that more ancient, more deeply rooted mode of human experience which perhaps is leading toward a less rigid, less frozen, and more humane rationality.”11 The affluent society of the 1950s and 1960s unleashed a new set of aspirations and deeper human needs than the material world of suburban security and industrial consumption could offer. Technology was seen as crushing the individual, the economic drives for consumption and growth an empty, impoverished form of life. Culture, not yet colonized by the forces of commodification, was reacting to the stringent order of the bureaucratized, commodified society. I submit that this situation has radically altered and that the self, as a source of critical autonomy and of creative, transformational desire, is rapidly disappearing, and a new, more submissive and less autonomous kind of selfhood is emerging in its place. Since the 1980s, we have been witnessing the growth of a cohesive system of social power rooted in economic imperatives that is absorbing the individual into its matrix of subordination and control. The rapidly increasing gradient of technological change has been fused to economic imperatives that have shaped a world narrowly organized around surplus extraction and mass consumption. Economic growth has become the central and, in many respects, single value orienting the dominant institutions of modern Western cultures. All other values are either to be subordinated to this more dominant value pattern or extinguished. As a result, the contemporary self lives, desires, and thinks within the prepatterned confines of this cohesive social reality. As I see it, the self needs to be understood as more than the cognitive and epistemic structures of consciousness alone; it refers also to the affective, libidinal, cathectic, intrapsychic dimensions of subjectivity that shape the ways we validate the kinds of norms, desires, and values that grant some degree of legitimacy to the world we inhabit. The energy of our affects has much to do with the ways our ideas are shaped and organized. In this sense, perhaps the most insidious change in the structure of the self has been the transformation of desire away from objects that enhance our experience and freedom and toward the objects of the system itself. Indeed, it is perhaps more correct to say that genuine desire itself has been subverted; capitalism in its current phase of the commodification

Introduction   of everything, preempts desire. Each time I feel a need, a restlessness with my aloneness, I reach for a device to connect me with the prepackaged experience of the commodified world. With this erosion of desire, so, too, goes the very energy for political transformation and the capacity to think capitalism’s alternative. “The commodity’s mechanical accumulation,” writes Guy Debord, “unleashes a limitless artificiality in [the] face of which all living desire is disarmed. The cumulative power of this autonomous realm of artifice necessarily everywhere entails a falsification of life.”12 What Debord perceived in the late 1960s has itself become the dominant mode of cultural production and, as I will explore in the pages that follow, the construction of the modern self, as well. Ours is a society that has commandeered the great developments of science and technology for economistic ends, robbing art and culture of their once-prized critical autonomy from the material ends of profit and exchange. It is a society that, above all, has undercut and stifled the powers and robustness of the individual, pressing each of us into intricately engineered patterns of being and acting. Now, the once-repressed energies of the individual unconscious have been sopped up by the commodification of desire, of the simulacra of sex, of play, of the reified oral fixations of consumption without end. As Mark Fisher once insightfully pointed out: “What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.”13 It is in the midst of this reality, of the prepatterning of the self, that what I am calling the cybernetic society achieves its culmination. Only when the norms and values, practices and institutions of capitalist economic logics have penetrated the cultural sphere of society and the psychological structures of the individual can we speak of a truly inverted world, an elaborate cybernetic steering of the self by systems of control that manifest not as raw power but as a transformation of the relational matrices of sociality that articulate new inner impulses within the self. As a result, I maintain that we are witnessing an eclipse of the individual: the deformation of the cognitive and psychic capacities for autonomy as a critical, developmental, and creative form of agency, an agency capable of both negating the social relations and values that sustain domination and

  Introduction deploying the creative energies rich enough to build alternatives to them. It seems to me that there is a historicity to this phenomenon: where the nineteenth century saw the subsumption of precapitalist forms of labor and economic life, the twentieth the subsumption of political and administrative means of coordination and social control, the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries are witnessing the absorption of culture and the subsumption of the self into the imperatives of capital and the processes of accumulation. Now, all of these sectors cohere where new kinds of power and domination are fused to new forms of social, political, technological, cultural, and self-organization—the world of the cybernetic society. The origins of this crisis of the individual are not hard to see. The neoliberal counterrevolution that began in the late 1970s, against the redistributive, social-democratic welfare state forged in the postwar era, sought primarily to unleash capital and financial speculation in order to evade redistribution but also to breathe new life into rates of profit that had fallen since the 1960s. Besides the legal-political architecture of the welfare state, it also had another barrier to overcome for the rate of profit to expand. This was the problem of the saturation of markets that plagued the 1970s. Central to this problem was that demand began to wane as the industrial production and consumption boom of the 1950s and 1960s began to weaken. There were only so many washing machines, cars, and televisions that could be purchased per household to sustain corporate profits. New markets had to be found, and new regimes of labor had to be instituted for profit rates to be resuscitated. Two trends were born from this economistic need. First was the undercutting of labor power and wages that resulted from attacks on organized labor and the spatioglobal elasticity of capital that conspired to make production both more flexible and cheaper. At the same time, new management techniques were instituted to socialize workers into a culture of the firm, displacing former coworking solidarities as labor unions shattered. Class consciousness was thereby absorbed into a more alienated, meaningless sense of identity as an employee or “associate” of the firm.14 Second was the need to jump-start consumption by commodifying essentially everything—not merely physical objects but also experience and personal identity. Consumption gradually became a means to find and to highlight one’s self-expression and identity. The alienation felt by

Introduction   an increasingly dominant corporate culture could only be compensated for by consuming in order to construct one’s very identity; popular, massproduced musical experiences, the spectacles of corporatized team sports, clothing and material fashion, and, in time, wholesale self-conceptions were all becoming commodified, prepatterned experiences that could fit one’s frustrations with the legitimate dissatisfactions with modern work regimes. Work, play, sex, family life, creativity, and leisure have all been thoroughly commodified in the process—that is, transformed from activities with the potential for creation and spontaneity into organized activities that are calculable, capable of being measured, sellable, and zones for aggression and sadomasochism. As such, the fetish of the commodity morphs into a wholesale reification of the self gradually constricting the intrapsychic space once left for reflection, the experience of contradiction, and autonomy. Each new generational cohort is more totally subsumed by the elaborate fabric of commodities and, with it, the very self-consciousness that one’s sense of self, one’s very identity, is an active product of commodification.15 As Adorno pointed out, reflecting on the liquidation of subjectivity in the commodified society: “The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of concealing the identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretense of individualism, which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual.”16 The two trends unleashed by the neoliberal turn in capitalist economics and culture beginning in the late 1970s mutually reinforced one another: the continued degradation of work, deskilling, lowering of wages, and erasure of class consciousness were complemented by a resurgent reengineering of desire toward consumption and a new “naturalization” of needs. It also underscored a basic hypothesis of Marx: that a declining rate of profit could coincide with a rise in the mass of profit (or surplus value). The decline in the rate of profit over the course of the decades since the 1950s has not led to a decline in either the size or the concentration of profit in class terms; what it has set in motion is a move toward rent-extraction and a transformation of labor—expanding absolute and

  Introduction relative surplus value—to expand extractive logics into new areas of life and to secure oligarchic control over financial capital.17 This has translated into a new cultural power for capital as it is now able to shape institutions from education and artistic production to the superfluous technological advances. Increasingly, capitalism is not only falling out of step with social need and social good; it actively shapes a self that is increasingly devoid of the psychological and motivational resources needed to democratize and transform it. My concern in this study is with the implications of this macro trend in modern capitalism on the self—that is, on the inner organization of subjectivity that continues to shape the modern individual, especially since the advent of neoliberalism. I should say more about the technical aspects of this thesis. As I mentioned above, my hypothesis is that a kind of hyperreification is at the core of this dynamic in modern culture. As I see it, reification and modern forms of social domination occur via subtle processes of social learning that shape the web of social norms that shape our consciousness, as well as the collective-intentional rule-sets that constitute our social reality. For this reason, I have come to see reification not as an epistemic or cognitive category but as an ontological category: by shaping the normative structure of consciousness, it is able to shape the relations and practices that constitute our social reality and articulate for us a world that is fundamentally alienated and heteronomous. Reification is the way that the system is able to transform the self into an instrument of its own self-constitution. It is the very mechanism that promotes the dissolution of the individual and the incapacity for communicative, deliberative, and recognitive theories of ethics to achieve critical force. Social domination therefore needs to be seen as having both a material component—that is, resources that grant capacity to a subset of any community to be able to control the activities of others and social institutions—and an internal or normative component—the capacity to shape the institutional logics that will, in turn, socialize the consciousness of individuals. If this is the case, then we can see that this kind of social dominance is more easily achievable on a broader scope than in any other time in human history. New developments in applied technology and the increasing concentration of global capital are combining in new ways that

Introduction   reach more deeply into the development of the self than any time prior in human history.18 I want to explore how the individual is in decline as a moral, aesthetic, and critically autonomous person and how the intimate forces of technologically infused regimes of management, education, work, and consumption have socialized and corrupted the powers of the self to serve as a fulcrum against the forces arrayed against it. The logic of capital, of the organizational logics of the corporation, and of organizational patterns of control is now the primer for all other institutional and cultural spheres. As Gilles Deleuze argued as the cybernetic society was being born: “just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination, which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.”19 As the welfare-state model of capitalism fades away, our very prospects for security have become ever more brittle. The individual is no longer a product of the conflicts and struggles of self-development but rather an overburdened entity that pulses with anxiety and its attendant coping mechanisms. As Randy Martin once observed: “After enough years of public authorities’ denials that they can take responsibility for the public good and security, people believe this to be the case and lose trust, not just in governmental but in institutional solutions (be they public or private) to social problems. Crime may be down, but insecurity is up.”20 Lest we think that this reification leads us to some simplistic uniformity of beliefs and practices, the self under the pressures of the cybernetic society not only acquiesces to the basic logics of social domination but at the same time reacts culturally against the existential anxieties the system causes. The rigid, immutable hierarchies of administrative-technical society shaped by oligarchic wealth entail the emergence of new forms of irrationality stemming from the withered self’s heteronomous need for coherence and inner direction. As Ernest Mandel points out: “the ideology of ‘technical rationality’ is incomplete and therefore internally incoherent. It completely fails to account for the spread of irrationalism, and the regression to superstition, mysticism and misanthropy which accompany the alleged victory of ‘technological rationality’ in late capitalism.”21 To go even further, consider how a new concern with identity, group-think, a susceptibility to conspiracy theories, the rise of neofascism, no less than the disorganization of progressive movements along the lines of cultural

  Introduction politics—all point to the modern self’s incapacity for critical autonomy and an incapacity for social solidarity in any politically viable sense and instead to a search for identity and collective effervescence with others that seek to provide an antidote to modernity’s atomized loneliness. This is because transformations in the social matrix of our relations have been coordinate with changes in the organizational structure of the self. The age of organization and efficiency, of hyperconsumption and total commodification, of socialized technology and quantification has had a swift and deleterious impact on the psychological structure of the self. This age of hyperorganization has witnessed a cohesiveness not only between the various sectors of social reality, such as culture, economy, and polity, but also between the realm of the social and the interiority of the subject. The social patterning by techno-administrative means is also patterning the self, thereby securing the systemic imperatives of accumulation and wealth-defense that is at the heart of modern neoliberal capitalism. What I mean by this is that the cohesiveness of what I am calling the cybernetic society describes an interlocking of social spheres and institutional logics that promotes the colonization of the self. It is a mode of social life that results from the systemic dominance of culture, politics, economics, and individual consciousness by the logics of efficiency, control, predictability, and hierarchical organization. Authority in the cybernetic society is of a new variety—different from the forms of power of feudalism, traditionalism, charisma, or even rational domination, working on our inner structures of the self toward compliance rather than on force or coercion. What I am calling the cybernetic society further refers to the various ways that modern capitalism has been able to merge the logic of efficiency, the application of technology across all planes of relevant social reality, all for the purposes of extracting surplus and managing desire and demand to stimulate consumption. But also, and just as important, it refers to the ways that organizational logics and patterns have been able to restructure what were previously independent spheres of social life—culture, economy, polity, psyche, and so forth—into an interdependently organized and self-regulating system. This feature of self-regulation is crucial: the need for capitalist forms of surplus extraction to eliminate all barriers to its accumulation regimes and provide for them a psychopolitical legitimacy

Introduction   and the institutions that support it. Ours is an age of the megasystem, one where the individual must be molded and shaped to reproduce the external system rather than coerced into doing so. “The new cybernetic world,” wrote Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1960s, “is not concerned with people but with ‘systems’; man becomes replaceable and expendable. . . . To the new utopians, . . . it is the ‘human element’ which is precisely the unreliable component of their creations.”22 This has been the problem for capitalist societies from their inception—namely, how to discipline labor, how to normalize consumption practices and values, and how to legitimize unequal wealth possession and possessive individualism. This is precisely the solution that the emergence of financial capital, neoliberalism, privatized networked technology, and increased oligarchic wealth have made possible: not a world where power is a matter of coercion but one where the self’s inner psychic world aspires to only that which the system itself can fulfill, a kind of self that withers in the face of manufactured and prepatterned needs and has become incapable of generating a political life built around genuine human needs and, instead, revolves around the systemic dynamics of capitalism. Indeed, central to the thesis of the cybernetic society is the idea that social systems have evolved to the point where they are able to successfully steer practically every sphere of institutional life by embedding within them the logic of capital itself. This has culminated in a kind of culture where the self no longer has any space to develop or to rework itself that is not already shaped by the commodified logic of the market and remains unaffected by its normative parameters. At the core of this is the idea of a self-regulating social system that achieves its ends only by recircuiting the self toward a system of compliance to the norms and institutions established by the prevailing reality. The cybernetic society must reengineer the self away from any form of individuality that it cannot colonize and control; it must subsume the self, pattern its internal dynamics and character structure toward what will be most efficient, most productive for the system as a whole. It achieves this through ever more efficient means of simplifying the entrance of the self into its own framework of norms, practices, and values. Previous periods of socialization left certain structures of the self intact such as sexuality or self-expression, nontraditional forms of belief, and so on. In the postwar

  Introduction era, specifically the 1960s and 1970s, these became sources for contradicting the logic of the system and undermining its core legitimation logics. But the cybernetic society has been able to capture these dimensions of the self in its web of norms and patterns of culture. The creative energies and power of sexuality are attenuated through their commodification in pornography just as drives for self-expression are captured by the market’s ability to shape and organize it according to patterns it can exploit. Culture is now no longer the sphere of difference capable of undermining the system’s logic; it is now its dutiful adjutant. But whereas the welfare-state phase of capitalism gave rise to psychological and cultural strivings for extramarket values, the cybernetic society’s economic anxiety does not permit the questioning of its fundamental values; rather, it gives rise to a culture of neoauthoritarianism and reactionary populism.23 As insecurity rises, reactionary forces gain in strength as they revitalize group mentalities and look for security within the closed walls of reactionary identities. Even progressive forces have been shaped by these logics. Today, it is the protection of personal and group identity that has taken the place of the social solidarities of the past that sought to rearrange economic power and the directive capacities of elites toward the common good. In either case, the fundamental values that bind the logic of the system together in the minds of its participants remain essentially intact and secure. This has been achieved by transforming the fundamental institutions—formal, nonformal, and intimate—according to a new set of values, new ways of organizing the organizational and psychological structures. The merging of the individual with technology and capital is captured in the new forms of personalized technology, the “device,” that serve not only to alienate us from ourselves and our relational world but also, just as dangerously, to displace an authentic, spontaneous intrapsychic domain by the universe of commodities and commodified sensibilities.24 As Albert Borgmann writes: “In a device, the relatedness of the world is replaced by a machinery, but the machinery is concealed.”25 We therefore become literal extensions, even particular embodiments, of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine.” My use of the term self in this book is not to be understood in some clinical sense nor in some overly broad philosophical sense. As I employ it, self refers to more than the inner organizational structure of the cognitive,

Introduction   affective, evaluative, libidinal, cathectic, and volitional dynamics of a person’s subjectivity. It defines the ways that we react to the outer world, how we articulate relations with others and with the self, and constitutes the inner framework of meaning for the individual and its capacity to generate ends and purposes for itself. The self is the basic substrate that is formed by socialization via our institutional lives and serves as the background framework for our conceptions of self and world. The danger is that the self’s distinctiveness can be compromised via its absorption of external social norms and ends that it comes to see as its own. The self’s power as a critical agent declines to the extent that its own capacity to generate ends and purposes are displaced by the prepatterned forms of life that systems of social authority are able to inculcate within us. The root of the thesis that guides this book is that the self is, in a sense after Kierkegaard, not a substance or entity but an emergent product of the way we relate to ourselves or, as he put it, a “relation that relates to itself.”26 What Kierkegaard had in mind is the sense that each of us can, or perhaps cannot, bear the relation we have to ourselves; that is, do we live the lives we self-consciously authorize, or are we living a life that has been authorized and generated by others? My exploration of the defects of modern subjectivity take this insight as crucial; that is, the modern self is under threat of extinction by the social logics that seek to incorporate it into their own schemata. The robust, autonomous self possesses dimensions that are angular to the prevailing reality; it has the capacity to reflect on the conditions of its own existence, to be able to cognize and judge both self and world. The autonomous self is not separate from the world; it is embedded within it, but it has the reflective capacity to think about the world as an object of thought and to judge it. But under the pressures of what I am calling the cybernetic society, the self is being collapsed into the one-dimensionality of the imperatives of the systems that ensconce it, and instead of possessing the ability to cognize the world in objective terms, it merely extends that world further, unable to sever itself from its given logic. In this sense, a self, as I see it, is the articulation of a relation to oneself: how one conceives of oneself, how one cognizes and imagines oneself, determines what the substance of one’s life actually is. Defective states of selfhood are therefore those where the relation one has to oneself has been

  Introduction disrupted and colonized by external ideas, conceptions, values, norms, and imaginative schemes. The twilight of the self, as I am calling it, is the result of this disruption in self-relating: it is the smothering of what would otherwise be a self-reflective, critical self that has been saturated by the inculcation of external normative schemes. Seen in this way, autonomous selfhood is a selfhood where the relation one has to oneself is selfconsciously self-authorizing. But for this to be the case, the conception one has of oneself must be grasped ontologically; that is, such a self must be able to understand that one is relationally and practically embedded with others. This does not mean that we are dissolved into the relations we have with others. Rather, it means that, even in my own private states, I am always affected by others and affecting them; who I am is the product of the ensemble of current and past practical relations to others. Power and domination are therefore crucial in this sense because, particularly in modern societies, they operate by infiltrating the self and reorganizing this self-relation. Their efficacy is measured by the extent to which they are able to organize our own ends and purposes for the ends and purposes of others, for the projects, the intentions, and the desires of others. The self loses its potency and enters the phase of twilight the more that it ceases to be in critical contact with its own capacity to posit ends and to call into question the collectively sanctioned goals of the community as a whole. For this reason, domination requires our compliance, and its effects on our social relations also starve the self of its relational nurturance, its need for developing in tandem with others in solidaristic forms of life that are generated and authorized by us. Perhaps more to the point, domination constricts the self’s capacity to emerge in its fullness and robustness; the higher the coefficient of domination within any society, the flatter, the more underdeveloped the self will become as its relation to itself and the world becomes increasingly determined by external dynamics and forces. It is important to emphasize that the self is always formed and always exists in relation to others, that it is not static or in some way a black box from which our agency can emerge. Rather, it is always in formation and in reformation. The more that the self is rooted in external logics, norms, and values, the less potential for change will be possible and the more one’s agency, one’s ego, will become an extension of those

Introduction   external forces and interests. In this respect, the “ego” represents the core agency of a person and is itself patterned by the ways that self and other relate and create matrices of meaning and value. In this sense, the self is the crucible for the relational dynamics of any society. What is important about the modern idea and the moral status of autonomy is therefore not its Cartesian or Kantian cognitive isolation from relations but, rather, its more Rousseauian and Hegelian cast, its ability to judge the very matrices of self and other of which it is a part—to critique, from an internal point of view, the forms of social being that interlace with the self. This insight means calling into question the ways that political consciousness and praxis have changed in recent decades. Whereas the nineteenth century witnessed strikes and protests driven by individuals with a desire for material justice and equality, by the real needs and interests, and the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by an idealism to deepen democracy, today’s youthful protesters post selfies on social media, the spectacle of protest compensating for inner frustrations, a need to be part of a crowd, a need for the thrill of sensation that crowds out the deeper structures of injustice and inequality that actually pervade their world. Whereas a new form of sociality was being born in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one rooted in a new conception of the individual and solidaristic association, the parallel process of the massification of society was also proceeding in tension along with it. The individual was being lost in what Georg Simmel referred to as the “tragedy of culture,” where anomie and alienation are more prevalent than solidarity and community. As time has gone on, even mainstream social science has picked up on the severity of this problem with the idea of the loss of “social capital.”27 But, however we measure and think of the problem, it continues to register in the ways that the individual has lost status as a moral and aesthetic resource against the dominant trends of uniformity and the patterned world that technological administrative capitalism has solidified. My basic thesis is that the dominant tendencies of modern society can be explained by understanding these social shifts via a theory of the cybernetic society: a phase of social development marked by social relations that have displaced the organic forms of community and mechanical forms of solidarity that characterized earlier phases of social reality and replaced them with one rooted in efficiency, control, and conformed

  Introduction socialization. The values that permeate this world were once the object of critique and struggle; they were once the conscious antithesis of the Enlightened, humanistic forces of progress and democratization. They resisted the transformation of a society from one that was constructed for the common interest to one that was to be for the benefit of elites. But power now is primarily a matter of compliance: compliance to the coordinating norms and values that constitute the social order itself—that is, to the systemic regimes of activity that ensure the production of surplus and secure wealth-defense. These new forms of power are embedded in our cultural world and in the schemes of development that shape our norms and practices. As Aldous Huxley presciently noted: “In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children.”28 Where thinkers such as Foucault saw a disciplinary society that carved up different institutional spaces—the school, the prison, the clinic, the asylum—as being distinct, enclosed spaces with their own logics of closure and discipline, cybernetic society unites the different spheres of society through the permeation of instrumental and administrative rationalities and positing ends of efficiency and profit that create a dynamic of isomorphism among what were previously discrete social spheres. Discipline now becomes displaced by the logic of organizational management, where it is not so much the discipline of the subject that is of importance but the maintenance of a system of control since now the technical and cultural means are available to ensure that the system itself will be able to socialize and normalize its own reproduction without immediate fear of a legitimation crisis or revolt. Now that “the factory has given way to the corporation,” as Deleuze argues about the nature of a society of control, “the family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge toward an owner—state or private power—but coded figures—deformable and transformable—of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.”29

Introduction   At the phenomenological level of the self, these structural and functional imperatives slip out of cognitive grasp and are experienced in the form of shredded social relations, shallow, narcissistic or overweaning family life (or its malignant obverse of abuse and neglect), the everpresent weight of competition for education, employment, and a futile search for satisfaction and security. Even more, the increased alienation is compensated for by more consumption and more identity-construction to prop up the empty self. Political life is either totally dismissed and absent, or it is a field in which to lose the self. Demonstrations no longer have organized, politically viable aims but vague moral aspirations whose participants receive psychic jolts in the form of collective effervescence rather than genuine solidarity and sober political realism in the service of real social transformation. The demise of the self as a critical agent, as an entity capable of autonomous reflection and motivation, has given way to one that is stuck in the groove of a system that seeks to steer it. This is what is at the heart of the cybernetic society: a cohesive, isomorphic pattern of social spheres that steers the individual through the normative transfiguration of consciousness and praxis. The root of the word cybernetics is the Greek word to “steer” or to “pilot,” as a ship; it refers to a system that is able to control and govern its various parts not through coercion but rather according to the logic of the organism; it is a mechanism that has taken on the status of an organism, where the parts that constitute the whole lose their own vitality and their own self-direction and take on their roles in uniformity for the system’s imperatives. This dimension of the problem leads me to the second thesis that I put forward in the pages that follow—that of what I am calling the subsumption of the self, by which I mean the mechanisms by which the self becomes incorporated into the self-regulating matrix of social norms and practices that erode critical autonomy. I take the concept from Marx, who talked about the process of the “subsumption of labor,” whereby the practices of labor were first absorbed (subsumieren) by the logic of capital (or what Marx referred to as “formal subsumption”) and then, in time, labor would itself be transformed by that same logic (what he termed “real subsumption”). Marx describes this process as a “mode of compulsion,” a drive that is “not based on personal relations of domination and dependency, but simply on differing economic functions.”30 In this sense, what

  Introduction comes to compel and dominate the structures and practices of labor are no longer personal forms of domination and control but rather subordination to a systemic logic dictated by the quantified movement of profit accumulation. Marx argues that capital is able to transform the practices of labor and embed them within the logic of capital—of the efficient maximization of exploiting labor—and in the process transform them into something new; a new ontology of labor emerges, one that can only have further alienating consequences on the self.31 The subsumption of the self transposes this process onto the mechanisms of socialization that shape the intrapsychic organization of individuals. It entails a repatterning of the normative structures of consciousness and the very intentional capacities of the individual according to the logics of capital and the administrative apparatuses that encode it in our various institutions from economy to polity to culture. This repatterning occurs when the social schemata that are formed by these logics serve as the background conditions for the self: for one’s desires, the conceptual grids we use to mediate the world, and the forms of meaning and value that they communicate to us. This means that, in contrast to older theories that held to an automaton model of the reified individual, the subsumption of the self that occurs in the cybernetic society preserves the illusion of autonomy by embedding within consciousness the very desires and aspirations that can be filled by the system itself. It is the totalization of the false totality: the envelopment of self into the very machinations of the economic imperatives of total commodification. Everything from musical production, education, values, ideas about what is good, beautiful, and so on, are part of the highly textured fabric of the commodified world. The self is no longer in tension with this world but has been consumed by the system of things that it will consume in turn.32 This degrades the self’s sense and capacity for spontaneity and autonomy just as it suffocates the development of alternative imaginaries to the dominant structures and norms. In this sense, I want to broaden the application of this thesis by Marx to understand how the individual comes under the socializing pressures of the patterned system of norms that are internalized by the social system as a whole. Just as Marx’s theory of the subsumption of labor explains the way that labor itself comes under the quantitative reshaping of the commodity form, how the qualitative

Introduction   dimensions of skilled labor are transformed into quantitative dimensions of wage labor, so, too, with the self: the capacity for autonomy, for shifting our practical perspective on the world, now becomes compromised. The goal of subsumption—both of labor and of the self—is to make its object more manipulable, more apt for control and prediction. The self that undergoes the process of subsumption has had its generative mechanisms for cognition, judgment, and affect patterned according to the needs of the system. Reification now reaches its apex, and the consequences on self and society have been nothing short of catastrophic. All of this means that a decidedly different paradigm for autonomy and the self needs to be considered if a critical philosophy of the present is to proceed, and this is the last thesis that I seek to develop in this book. I think that a conception of autonomy as critical agency is possible only once we are able to develop a kind of thinking that takes into account the properties of our relations with others and the purposes for which those relations are organized. Critical cognition needs to be able to think in terms of a critical social ontology—that is, according to the ways that the social forms of life we inhabit are designed, how relations are structured and the ends or purposes toward which my practices and norms are organized. Autonomy needs to be understood not in the Kantian sense of the private, self-legislating conscience thinking in formal or procedural terms. Rather, it must be able to undermine and explode the powers of reification by immanent critique—by counterposing pathological social forms with those that would enhance social freedom. Only once we begin to ask about the ways that our social world is constructed—how the dependent relations displace interdependent ones or how the pursuit of common goods are pushed aside for private advantage—will the edifice of the cybernetic society begin to crumble. The individual can only become a critical agent once again when it is able to have in view its own socially embedded essence, when our feeble “I-consciousness” transforms into a “we-consciousness.” A reconstructed concept of autonomy as critical agency therefore seeks to expand our ideas of what individuality means. Contrary to liberal approaches, we must see that autonomy is a capacity of the self to reflect on the collective, associational world of which it is an integral part. It is

  Introduction a capacity to think through what kinds of associations, institutions, and goods that we as a society should commit. To think as an individual in an expanded sense, to have the requisite self-conception of oneself as a relational, cooperative being ensconced in collective practices that realize common purposes and ends, means to be autonomous in a critical sense. For it is only in this sense that the self possesses what we can call a rational form of self-consciousness. This way of thinking about our autonomy also, in the way that I am conceiving it, dialectically expands and enriches what the concept of association actually means. Only autonomous selves can articulate and sustain forms of sociality imbued with solidarism and common purpose—forms of association that are self-conscious of their practices, relations, and purposes and seek what is common to enrich each member of the association. In contrast, our culture seems to be moving either toward an anomic atomism, on the one hand, or a tribal conventionalism, on the other. Autonomy is, as I will seek to argue, the central concept needed for a revitalization of democratic politics, culture, and psychology. Only once we shift our ontological perspective toward a self-understanding as sociopractical beings will we be able to properly grasp the degree of pathology that infects society and self and continues to plague our culture. Only a revitalized conception of autonomy will be able to reinvigorate forms of critical consciousness, make resonant once again the place of judgment in an age of control and conformity, and serve as a fulcrum against the power of reification. Autonomy is therefore not an irrelevant category, as misled latent postmodernists or falsely self-confident intersubjectivists would have us believe. Rather, it is the font of any critical form of judgment and any democratic expression of politics. A reconstruction of what autonomy means and why it is important entails moving away from the procedural, Kantian paradigm, which is rooted in postmetaphysics, and instead assuming a model that can once again grasp the ontological features, dynamics, and potentialities of social cooperation and the kinds of relations, ends, and purposes toward which rational, democratic selves should be committed. This idea picks up on the project, first undertaken by thinkers like Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, among others, to provide the basis for a new kind of solidarity rooted in individual

Introduction   reason but also the essence of human life as interdependent, reciprocal, and essentially relational. In this sense, the key problem of modern society has continued to be that of the danger of losing our grip on our own capacity for self-direction and individual, as well as collective, self-determination. The truly autonomous, rational self cognizes its own interdependence on others; it seeks the cultivation of common goods because they are a source of the individual good—an individual good that, in turn, can cultivate a social world where a free way of being can become concrete and not remain merely noumenal but become ontological. We cannot understand these ideas outside of the concept of power and how it has been changing since the end of the twentieth century. Alienation means, at its most fundamental level, the shift from being a causal agent over one’s life and social world to being a mere plaything of the forces of others. It means surrendering the most potent power we have as individual agents: that of the capacity to dissent, to disobey, to refuse in order to build something better, something more humane and more rational. Tapping into this crucial energy of autonomous individuality is crucial if democratic vitality is once again to reanimate modern politics. Now, more than ever, we are confronted with forces that seek to fit each of us into a grand pattern of being, to manage and engineer not only our institutions but also our inner thoughts and desires, the very essence of our subjectivity. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that the forces that make up the cybernetic society must negate the power of spontaneous intelligence and the critical force of individual reason. Against this, each must struggle and encourage each other to do the same in order to resist the strong pull of cybernetic social systems. “I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind,” John Steinbeck boldly proclaimed in the middle of the twentieth century, “for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.”33

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part i

our steely encasement

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chapter 1

The Rise of Cybernetic Society The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual The present time is the age of communication and control. —Norbert Wiener

The Eclipse of Autonomy All societies take on their respective forms through their constitution by different patterns of belief and action. At their most basic, they comprise normative structures of meaning that give definitive shape to the collective life of a community. These structures of meaning are not freely constructed by the agents themselves but are situated within already existing frameworks of power and organization that give shape to the kind of social world that we inhabit and that will also form us. This dialectic between the modes of power that hold together the objective systems of social integration, on the one hand, and the subsequent development of individuals, on the other, is at the center of any coherent approach to social analysis and criticism. The transformation of modern societies since the dawn of the industrial age has gradually revolved around a growing, ever-extensive integration of the core institutional spheres of society. The systemic nature of modern forms of technology and the purposes toward which they have been applied have created a kind of gravitational pull on the development of self—a pull toward increasing integration with the patterns and goals of society as a whole.

  our steely encasement The concept of the individual, in this sense, may seem an anachronism. Clearly, each of us possesses a subjectivity, a will, a distinct sphere of consciousness and conscience. But we derive these from building blocks that are social in nature or that are shared and imparted to us through processes of individuation and socialization. The moral and political importance of the individual is therefore a crucial feature of modernity, for its relative robustness of development within a culture constitutes the extent to which democratic politics and a culture of common human needs can predominate over the interests of the powerful or the excesses of technological systems. The key problem that I want to address in this book is that this very robustness of individuality, of the concept of an autonomous self, is withering, that certain forces and tendencies exist in modern culture that actively erode the requisite building blocks for critical, democratic forms of individuality. A core reason for this can be seen in the structural and functional dynamics of modern forms of social power and the effects these have had on the collective forms of reason that undergird our culture. When we consider the relation between the dynamics and structures of society and the structures of reflection and consciousness, we need to consider the ways that forms of power and domination shape the dynamics of socialization and self-formation. Any investigation into the capacities of the self, of the forms of practices that it enacts, and the structures of consciousness and cognition that the subject possesses is fundamentally related to the structure and process of society as a whole. The interface between these layers of social reality forms the nexus for understanding the contours of culture and consciousness. The primary thesis of the Enlightenment thinkers who proposed autonomy as a keystone to the vault of modern political and social life was that it was only through the capacity for self-determination that any semblance of freedom could be enacted. This self-determination was itself dependent on the capacity for rational self-consciousness and the ability to articulate valid, self-grounding principles for action that were binding not only on oneself as an agent but also on the community. The project of modernity therefore had this aim of achieving self-determining self-consciousness. The problem has been that the modern world has effected a great change in the way that the individual relates to society. Premodern eras saw a more inclusive and practical relation between the individual and

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    community. This tended to result in the suffocation of individuality rather than its cultivation. But as the bourgeois world developed, so, too, did the social parameters requisite for individualization. The horizon of the individual expanded just as modern forms of rationality emphasized a new mode of self-understanding. By the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, the modern self was increasingly understood as a self-conscious, morally reflective being. Urban centers, although expanding, were not yet alienating metropoles, and political forms of authority were breaking away from monarchical and feudal forms of power. But the rise of industrial capitalism began to set things in a very different direction, and by the early twentieth century, it was clear that the self’s relationship with society had been radically altered. Now, the largescale systems of politics, economics, urbanism, and technology conspired to alienate the individual, cleaving him or her away from a manageable cognitive and ethical relationship with his or her surroundings. This experience of modernity is decisive for our understanding of what it means to be an individual, what it means to be a self-determining person. The opening pages of Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities gives a sense of what this new world felt like: Automobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark clusters of pedestrians formed cloudlike strings. Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casual haste they clotted up, then trickled on faster and, after a few oscillations, resumed their steady rhythm. Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and dissipating. . . . Like all big cities it was made up of irregularity, change, forward spurts, failures to keep step, collisions of objects and interests, punctuated by unfathomable silences; made up of pathways and untrodden ways, of one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was like a boiling bubble inside of the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions.1

Musil’s depiction of the experience of modern life gives us insight into the kind of disorientation brought on by the emergence of mass society. The experience of the individual during this period of mass urbanism and industrialization and commodification expressed violent shock that rapid social change wrought on the self.

  our steely encasement But it is precisely this kind of disorientation to which the cybernetic society has responded. The dialectic of this disorientation is the need for regularity and predictability, for the dominance of the quantum over human value, of efficiency over human need. It is a society that needs to extinguish conflict—both socially and, as much as possible, within the self—to maximize patterns of regularity and efficiency. The world that has emerged with the evolution of global capitalism after the neoliberal counterrevolution is a world dominated not merely by finance but also by regularity, predictability, and coordination in order to secure the efficiency of long global chains of production and consumption. If disorientation was the phenomenological experience of the age of high industrialism, the age of cybernetic society is one of internalized control, self-integration, predictability, complexity, and compliance to the prevailing norms of society. This rationalistic texture of modern culture is one that, as Eviatar Zerubavel has described it, is “precise, punctual, calculable, standard, bureaucratic, rigid, invariant, finely coordinated, and routine.”2 The eclipse of autonomy begins with this experience. It commences a gradual but ineluctable process of social change in which the individual’s capacity for self-determination and moral reflection become frustrated and, in time, distorted by the rise of technical, administrative, and organizational logics and norms that are made necessary by a civilization bent on maximizing economic productivity, conformity to market-based norms, and patterned forms of behavior, thought, and activity. As a consequence, the psychological properties that would otherwise have given the self a foundation for critical, autonomous forms of reasoning have instead been largely absorbed by the strong forces of social integration of modern mass society. Not only the fundamentally rational features of consciousness but, in a sense, even more crucially, the capacity for evaluative judgment and the value-complex of the individual have become either resonant with the prevailing social reality or suffer from personal pathologies that nevertheless disturb the subject’s psychic integrity. These key problems need to be seen as built into the structure of the cybernetic society, the term I am using for that phase of modernity where the scope of technical means of control and social organization, rooted in vertiginous hierarchies of economic wealth and social power, increasingly saturate every sphere of society, economy, culture, polity, and self. As a

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    result, social power has shifted from its more direct form and authority and, as Paul Verhaeghe has observed, “ceases to be invested in identifiable figures. Instead, it is wielded by bureaucratic powers in anonymous organizations.”3 The reification of consciousness is now the primary problem to confront since it consists of the convergence of the internal and external, to the refraction of external norms that are rooted not in organic or traditional/conventional forms of normativity and intentionality but rather fabricated by the techno-economic pulsations that shape modern global life. As a result, the assertion of a critical-autonomous self will have to be rebuilt by exploding the underlying norms of consciousness and reason that have resulted from the deformation of Enlightenment reason that has occurred over the long course of modernity. As I see it, the transformation of individuality and the erosion of moral personhood can be best grasped by understanding the ways that modern forms of technical, instrumental rationality have been harnessed by the expansion of capitalist economic life and its logics of mass production and consumption. To retrieve a critical form of autonomy from the perils of mass society, we need to understand the mechanisms that have been able to transform the self. My thesis is that this transformation has at its center the decoupling of our collective forms of social reason from concerns with human value. Put more concretely, this means that a transformation of our socioeconomic world via forms of mass coordination, bureaucratic management, and the hyperconcentration of wealth in private hands has had the effect of embedding our social rationality in quantified and “value-neutral” modes of reasoning. This has come at the expense of forms of reason that take into account qualitative human ends and value, but it also has meant a change in the ways that individuals are socialized. In effect, it entails the eclipse of autonomous powers of reflection that are able to take into consideration the general interest of the community as a whole. The theory of cybernetic society not only describes the institutional and cultural forms of life characteristic of technologically imbued administrative market society; it also describes a kind of rationality that pervades such society. This form of rationality is characterized by analytic modes of thinking, formal rationality devoid of ethical values, and instrumental-coordinative structures of reason rooted in imperatives for control and organization. These features of

  our steely encasement the predominant form of social reason have weakened the classical Enlightenment view of autonomy as spontaneous and responsive to reasons in practical affairs and of the individual as possessing the powers for moral reflection and ethical reasoning. The tendency now, one that has no doubt been growing since the dawn of the administered society, is for the logics of our institutions to form a cohesive web of norms, practices, and concepts that have the capacity to secure certain forms of basic socialization that render inert a skepticism of, no less than a critical orientation toward, the prevailing reality. I call this tendency the subsumption of the self and see it as a central mechanism responsible for the weakening of critical autonomy in the modern self. The withering of the ego characteristic of industrial society now takes on a higher register as the withered self searches to compensate for the experience of alienation by recreating primary bonds where the self feels its identity and values will be recognized. The result is not a civic, democratic self capable of critique and the confrontation of social power but a weakened self in need of symbolic forms of recognition to attain a brittle sense of integrity in a world of alienation. This is both a cognitive weakening of social agency and a psychological withering of critical individuality. The mechanisms behind this stripping of the self of these rational capacities are therefore the central focus of the present study. The series of crises that pervade the present—the decay of democracy, the rise of authoritarian populisms, environmental destruction, oligarchic inequality, and so on—needs to be seen as matched by a crisis of the individual and individual conscience. The withering of critical autonomy in the face of the patterned world of technical-administrative capitalist society, of the cybernetic society, is characterized by a cultural embeddedness of instrumental and extractive logics that has had the effect of reifying our collective and individual consciousness. To address this crisis of critical consciousness, I believe we need to look at the reification of consciousness—the particular ways that this world of techno-administration has been able to grip and organize the powers of subjective reflection—as the primary object for any critical theory of society. In what follows, I want to explore the social forces responsible for this deformation of the self. I want to suggest that the transformation of our collective forms of life, and the kind of rationality that it embodies, is a prime mover of the eclipse of autonomy and the demise of democratic thinking in modern society.

The Rise of Cybernetic Society   

Autonomy and the Enlightenment’s Janus Face As a first step in this argument, I think it is important to examine the ways that this change in the self is both a social and historical phenomenon. Key to both is an understanding of how the structure of human reason changed over the course of the modern period into our own time. What I would like to suggest first is that what we understand as the Enlightenment needs to be viewed in a more nuanced light. Particularly, the thesis here is that the emergence of analytic and mechanistic models of rationality was in tension with a more humanistic form of Enlightenment that saw reason as tied to practical affairs and to human ends and purposes. The Enlightenment sought a transition from a world based on conventional and communal values rooted in tradition to a system of ethics based on the formal powers of reason. The real key to this story is that another kind of social rationality, or ethical reason, failed to materialize. The liberation from substantive forms of morality and value-rationality did not have to give way to the formalism of technical and instrumental reason. Instead, it could have been replaced by a richer form of social reason, a kind of concrete ethical life that had in view a free and just form of human sociality. The essence of what I am calling here the cybernetic society is therefore the product of a certain kind of social rationality: a form of human reason that has been shaped by the historical patterns of power and politics since the apex of the Enlightenment. Specifically, I think we can identify, broadly construed, two distinct strands of the Enlightenment movement. The first is the application of inductive, empirical, and value-neutral powers of rationalization and quantification to the world. The second can be understood as a revolution in values that promoted principles of justice, egalitarianism, and political secularism. During the nineteenth century, the search to secure scientific knowledge entailed a gradual need to separate fact and value; and, with this separation, the path opened up for the expansion of instrumental reason and the withering of the ethical and political capacities of modern societies to steer these forces toward conceptions of the “good.” Indeed, a concept like the “good” itself fell victim to utilitarian and formal approaches to ethics; its original metaphysical substance dissolved in the steely frameworks of proceduralism and aggregated utility functions.

  our steely encasement The revolution in reason that occurred between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries was therefore decisive. Against the intellectual hegemony and institutional authority of the church, secular reason began to attack some of the basic structural features of philosophical thought rooted in the classical world and the Middle Ages. Early modern thinkers began to question the basic frameworks of knowledge that had been inherited from the classical world and had become encrusted medieval dogma. This began in the Renaissance with its emphasis on humanism rather than mechanism. As Stephen Toulmin has suggested: “Instead of focusing exclusively on the early 17th century, here we may therefore ask if the modern world and modern culture did not have two distinct origins, rather than one single origin, the first (literary or humanistic phase) being a century before the second.”4 It was only through a counter-Renaissance that this humanist strand of modernity began to be crowded out by mechanistic theories of nature, the human, and society.5 Mechanism replaced humanism as the search for a more cohesive framework for understanding nature grew with the breakdown of medieval theological covering doctrines.6 A shift was initiated away from the philosophical search for the “Good” (albeit in terms of the relation between God and man) toward an instrumental attitude toward nature for the production of material good and the enrichment of quality of life.7 To grasp nature as mechanism was not merely a metaphor; it was a new way of thinking the relation between humans and nature but also between human beings themselves and the very nature of what human welfare and progress actually meant. In time, as is well known, the idea of the world as machine or mechanism became the prevailing metaphor of the early Enlightenment. The world of nature, as well as the world of man and practical affairs, was now cognizable via a universal way of seeing the world—a way of thinking that relied on analytic models and quantifiable units of analysis, what Alfred Crosby has termed pantometry: the ability to measure all things and, as a result, possess a kind of universal method for knowledge. As Crosby describes it: “In practical terms, the new approach was simply this: reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualize it on paper, or at least in your mind, be it the fluctuation of wool prices at the Champagne fairs or the course of Mars through the heavens, and divide it, either in fact or

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    in imagination, into equal quanta. Then you can measure it, that is, count the quanta.”8 This constituted a distinctly new form of rationality, one that would serve numerous technical purposes. But when thinkers viewed this new rationality in tandem with the humanistic strain of the early modern period in the Enlightenment, a conflict began to emerge. For once it became clear that you can understand the world rationally on its own terms, via forms of quantification and the analytic breaking down of what initially appears as complex and impenetrable objects of experience, then human values became marginalized and seen as outmoded ways of conceiving human reality. In addition, values are seen as constraints on material progress: the new utilitarian theory of ethics exemplified the application of analytic quantification to the concept of human value. One of the core problems identified by Enlightenment thinkers was the barrier that theological doctrines had placed on the direct analysis of nature. The meshing of the human projection of order and meaning on the universe, as well as on the human community, was nothing more than a construct, one that had to be broken down if access to verifiable truth-claims could be secured. The point I am getting at by charting this trajectory of thought is that we can see with the dawn of the modern world a problematic tension in its form of rationality. The Janus face of Enlightenment is the very tension that exists between the ethical-humanistic and technical-instrumental strands of rationality that it nourished. The core idea here is the purging of value from the instrumental and analytic powers of reason and the gradual withering of the ethical and humanistic dimension. This was a gradual process, to be sure, but it laid a kind of groundwork for later social developments, particularly the emergence of capitalism and the kind of industrial market society to which it gave rise. The transformation that was occurring at the social level was no less crucial. For the questioning of nature as cosmos—that is, as a coherent form of meaning-embedded order—was also collapsing. What Charles Taylor has described as a “great disembedding” was also gradually taking place, where individuals began to conceive of their identities, their very selves, as detached from an overarching system of coherent meaning. “This involved,” Taylor argues, “the growth and entrenchment of a new self-understanding of our social existence, one which gave an unprecedented primacy to the individual.”9

  our steely encasement As a result, the self was now cast into a search for meaning, not only in terms of self-identity but in terms of collective forms of meaning, as well. A new paradigm of social self-understanding was also being born. Here again, we see the vitality of the analytic-mechanistic form of rationality asserting itself. As the medieval cosmotheological order continued to disintegrate, the need for a secular form of order replaced the sacredtranscendental order. Now, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes could assert a new theory of man and society: a theory rooted in the analytic-mechanistic mode of thinking. As Hobbes had sought to make clear, man was an homme machine rather than an Aristotelian ζῷων πολιτικόν (political animal)—a being constituted by mechanism rather than the organicism of Greco-Roman thought. The teleological-organic paradigm of politics that had its foundations in classical (particularly Aristotelian) political theory was now giving way to the idea that human meaning was to be found not in terms of any kind of substantive human flourishing dependent on a common good. Instead, Hobbes argued that no common good—indeed, no substantive idea of a common good—could be articulated. We had to think of our common interest as a formal-contractual framework that protected the individual’s search for private interest without impinging on the interests of others. Not only was man a machine, but society was now taking on the semblance of a mechanism, as well. The move away from teleological-organic rational frameworks toward the analytical-mechanistic framework was not sudden, nor was it decisive, until certain material transformations in society were accomplished. For now, we can isolate several features of this new conception of reason. Four shifts away from the teleological-organic framework are particularly salient. These include a shift from (1) organism to mechanism, (2) spontaneity to organization, (3) holistic or dialectical thinking to analytic reasoning, and (4) teleology to complexity and emergence. Each of these shifts was decisive, not only for forging a new relation with nature but also for proposing a new means of conceiving social reality and the rational, legitimate purposes and ends of society. The overturning of classical models of philosophical knowledge meant seeing nature in mechanistic terms, and this meant seeing nature not as an organic whole but rather as constituted by smaller particular entities that lacked any sense of overall purpose. Teleology was seen as a transcendent design, something

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    imparted by a grand designer—a view that became increasingly anachronistic. Instead, knowledge of natural facts would require shearing off any form of meaning or purpose to natural objects, whether they be stones, rivers, animals, or clouds. For this reason, the teleological-organic model had to be dispensed with. In addition, the move to the mechanistic paradigm also meant that spontaneity needed to be subordinated to organization. For Hobbes, liberty was itself a problem: it was a feature of nature, not of reason. Hence, individuals had to be subordinated to some authority for any pattern of sociality to emerge. Understanding the world required order. Chaos was the absence of order and was hence immune to any kind of cognitive understanding. But even more, Hobbes was ahead of his time in seeing that the modern state be conceived as a machine, as a new technology of power.10 This new paradigm would take time to develop into its fullest expression. Indeed, what it would require was a transformation not only of the state but of the economy and individuality as well.

The Archetype of the Machine and the Instrumentally Patterned World The four shifts that I discussed above are important because they formed the necessary backdrop for another dimension of social change beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My thesis thus far has been that Western rationality has comprised essentially two broad strands—the first a rational-humanistic strand that emphasized questions of human meaning and value that could be addressed without any theological constraints or barriers and the second, a technical-instrumental strand that sought valid human knowledge via the expulsion of human value from the identification of facts. The emergence of industrial society results from the application of modern scientific techniques, values, and attitudes about nature, but it also heralds a new form of social integration that has only continued to develop into our own time—a form of social integration that has had serious impact on the development of self-consciousness and the concept of the individual. It is here, I am suggesting, that we see the seeds being sown for the decay of autonomy in modern culture.

  our steely encasement The first real shift toward the cybernetic mode of socialization that I am after does not derive from philosophical schools of thought per se but rather from the invention of the machine in tandem with the socioeconomic context that spawned it. In many ways, the consonance between the advent of the machine and the formal-instrumental rationality of Enlightenment scientism produced a new context for human development where the objective needs of social systems could more easily impinge on the development of the subject. This was quite distinct from the classical or medieval worlds where whatever technological developments that emerged were blocked from totalizing society because of the lack of this alternative ontology of human society. As Lewis Mumford aptly put the matter: “mechanization and regimentation are not new phenomena in history: what is new is the fact that these functions have been projected and embodied in organized forms which dominate every aspect of our existence.”11 Since Hobbes and Descartes, this mechanistic model of mind, man, and society would become the soil for a more pervasive transformation of human sociality and individuality by the mechanisms of organization and power. But only when mechanization moves from mere metaphor to the actual organization of social reality can a distinctive shift in culture and consciousness emerge. The fusion of social and technical forms of mechanism really takes shape with the capitalist organization of industrial production toward the end of the eighteenth century. The emergence of large-scale machinery in the form of industrial plant production effects a major shift away from more traditional and small-scale forms of social integration and introduces the modern division of labor, as well as the regimentation of time, space, and social practices that essentially define the basis of the cybernetic society. Prior to this, the machine was generally a means for facilitating the work of the individual or group and was generally seen in terms of an extension of human physical capacities. But the move to the industrial plant, to the machine as a socially constituted form of organization and activity, breaks with this older category of technē. The emergence of industrial technology is a paradigmatic change affecting all other aspects of social and individual life. As Karl Polanyi points out: “It was not the coming of the machine as such, but the invention of elaborate and therefore specific machinery and plant that completely changed the

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    relationship of the merchant to production. Although the new productive organization was introduced by the merchant—a fact that determined the whole course of the transformation—the use of elaborate machinery and plant involved the development of the factory system and therewith a decisive shift in the relative importance of commerce and industry in favor of the latter.”12 The machine now becomes a form of social organization; it loses its personal character as a tool and now becomes “productive organization”; society is now embedded in the machinelike matrix of human relations and the organization of their activities and work. Indeed, it ceases to be merely an object and now embeds human social life within it, entwining itself with collective social practices, norms, and habits. The expansiveness of the industrial machine therefore required new forms of financing, which, in turn, required the increased commodification of nature and society in order to secure the enhanced capacities of mass production and the needs of mass consumption. As Polanyi points out: “The extension of the market mechanism to the elements of industry—labor, land, and money—was the inevitable consequence of the introduction of the factory system in a commercial society. The elements of industry had to be on sale.”13 As a result, Polanyi argues, concerning the implications of the machine age: “Its fabulous material success was due to the willing, indeed the enthusiastic, subordination of man to the needs of the machine.”14 The rise of industrialism in the eighteenth century therefore effected a shift from domestic production to factory production. A rise in efficiency and productivity was real even as there was a palpable loss in the independence of the worker as wage labor became the standard for nonskilled individuals. A salient aspect of the industrially based machine system was the need for discipline and a new patterning of time and space.15 As Marx pointed out in a letter to Engels in 1863: “The clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes; the whole theory of production and regular motion was developed through it.”16 Marx was one of the first to see, in a critical sense, the ways that the machine—specifically, in his instance, the clock—was not simply being applied in a regulative sense to human life but was becoming constitutive of a new way of life, a new form of sociality and, just as important, a new kind of social rationality and consciousness as well. Central for my purposes here is that the emergence

  our steely encasement of this new social formation of industrial plant production entailed a new social logic that would draw heavily on the technical powers of Enlightened rationality—technical powers in the form of increased application of the analytic-mechanical mode of reasoning I explored above. The new imperatives for industrial production meant new and dramatic forms of socialization as the nature of labor was transformed. The key idea here is that the logics of labor and production management become over time a dominating logic that only penetrates deeper into previously differentiated spheres of society and culture to the point that, in the neoliberal phase of capitalism, it becomes the single organizing logic of all aspects of social and individual development. This idea places increased emphasis on the notion that the machine, in this sense, should not be narrowly construed as merely economic in nature. The idea that the machine as an organizational framework for the harnessing of human cooperative power is a much older phenomenon. Lewis Mumford calls this the “megamachine,” a power complex that required a certain kind of monopolization of knowledge and power to make it work. The crucial need here was for a system of power, “an elaborate structure for giving orders, carrying them out, and following them through.”17 Mumford gets closer to the essence of this phenomenon by referring to it as an “invisible structure” that could only be imposed on the community because of the accumulation of political power over others. “Only kings,” he notes, “aided by the discipline of astronomical science and supported by the sanctions of religion had the capability of assembling and directing the megamachine. This was the invisible structure composed of living, but rigid, human parts, each assigned to his special office, role, and task, to make possible the immense work-output and grand designs of this great collective organization.”18 But what can all this mean for the fate of the individual? Georg Simmel, writing in the early twentieth century, formulated the outlines of such a description of society as a “culture which outgrows all personal life”: “Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality, so to speak,

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    cannot maintain itself under its impact. . . . They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.”19 Simmel’s description emphasizes the alienating effects of the urbanized megamachine, registering not only the extent of scale but of a mode of life qualitatively different from that of the early industrial period. Whereas bourgeois privacy in the early phases of industrial society cultivated an individuality that was reciprocally public in nature, Simmel’s description shows that the dynamics and logic of the megamachine have outstripped the individual’s competence to understand it, let alone steer it. As a result, the self turns inward, shifting away from an integrated public life, instead seeking refuge from mass society: “On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities. This results in the individual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core.”20 Simmel’s thesis of what he termed the “crisis of culture” was that the powers of modern society were outstripping the individual’s capacity to comprehend the whole. As such, as the “hypertrophy” of technologically complex society increased, so, too, did the “atrophy” of the subject’s individual cognitive and moral-evaluative powers. To be sure, the bourgeois world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had indeed given an enlarged sphere to the development of the individual. The breakdown of organic forms of community was giving rise to a more voluntaristic form of meso-urban social life. A secular public sphere was developing as a field of activity where practical affairs could be guided by public reason.21 But it is precisely this kind of autonomous self that has been gradually withering, specifically throughout the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. The impersonal forces of the technical, mass society that Simmel points to have crowded out the personal; they have gradually foreclosed authentic forms of meaning and affect as the mass-produced commodification of culture and the rigid patterns imposed by economic “necessity” increasingly strip the self of its uniqueness. This degradation of the autonomy of the self is inversely related to the creation and intensification of autonomous machines and systems that come to regulate social and individual life.22 Key to this is the ever-deeper saturation of a certain kind of technical-instrumental reason that has become constitutive of the

  our steely encasement institutional and administrative life of modern subjects. The cybernetic society therefore must be seen as more than the communicative model of information exchange to capture a new form of administrative governance, a new kind of highly integrated, patterned form of behavior and consciousness that was capable of securing compliance in highly complex technical society. As Norbert Wiener, one of the founders of cybernetics, put the matter in 1954: When I give an order to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from that which arises when I give an order to a person. In other words, as far as my consciousness goes, I am aware of the order that has gone out and of the signal of compliance that has come back. To me, personally, the fact that the signal in its intermediate stages has gone through a machine rather than through a person is irrelevant and does not in any case greatly change my relation to the signal. . . . It is the purpose of Cybernetics to develop a language and techniques that will enable us indeed to attack the problem of control and communication in general, but also to find the proper repertory of ideas and techniques to classify their particular manifestations under certain concepts.23

Social power now becomes a function of compliance—and this compliance is more expansive and more introjected into the individual than previous modes of submitting to power. Now, in the cybernetic model, compliance is a kind of coded means by which an individual component of a system performed the requisite task allotted to it. It entails a kind of rationalized submission to the broader purposes of the totality, of the system as a whole. Wiener’s conflation of the person and the machine is no exaggeration: the development of modern techniques of power, production, and consumption now become tracks for the development of the subject’s cognitive, evaluative, cathectic, and libidinal layers of self. The highly patterned, machinelike construction of administered institutional life socializes even the most recalcitrant among us into its fields of operation. The result of this has been an acute erosion of the capacity for critical judgment. The intense cybernetic patterning of social life is accompanied by an intensification of the reification of consciousness—not only its cognitive and epistemic capacities but its moral-evaluative powers as well. As Mumford, reflecting on the implications of the “megamachine,” was able to see in the 1960s: “With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.”24 The key idea that Mumford points to is the thesis that there has been a gradual elaboration of a kind of human organization that has the capacity to fold the individual into itself, to synthesize parts into a logically bound whole. The idea of a logically bound whole means that individuals form mechanically interdependent parts of a larger social scheme that is organized according to special forms of power—forms that rely on the integration of those individuals into specific roles and functions, along with the attendant norms and practices that constitute those roles and functions. These therefore require peripheral institutions that will shape and sustain the normative frameworks requisite for the ends and purposes of those that steer and control the social scheme. The emergence and proliferation of industrial capitalism, particularly in its later bureaucratic and administrative phases, is the apotheosis of this tendency of the megamachine. But it is also precisely here that we can perceive the emergence of a new form of social reality that has the capacity to undo the cultural-humanistic achievements of Enlightenment reason. The key idea here is again one of command and control—of the dynamics of legitimate authority that seek the patterning and organization of the internal structures of the self to the outer dynamics and patterns of the social machine. Indeed, what was made manifest via the process of industrialism, on the one hand, and the social-psychological regimentation of the self requisite for that kind of society, on the other, is a kind of ordering control that was initially envisioned by the CartesianHobbesian world picture where mechanism dominates organism. Indeed, Hobbes can be seen as the precursor of the cybernetic society, of that kind of social patterning that allows for the technical formation of self and world. Carl Schmitt points this out in his discussion of Hobbes’s Leviathan: “It may even be regarded as the first product of the age of technology, the first modern mechanism in a grand style, as a machina machinarium in Hugo Fischer’s appropriate formulation. With that state was created not only an essential intellectual or sociological precondition

  our steely encasement for the technical-industrial age that followed but also the typical, even the prototypical, work of the new technological era—the development of the state itself.”25 But if we return to the theme of cybernetics, we can see that these pre-twentieth-century developments prefigure a more pervasive shift in social organization and the horizon of the individual in modern culture. As Wiener had emphasized in the early 1950s, the basic premise of cybernetics was the issue of control and command but through the exchange of information. The goal here was the articulation of a kind of system of interdependent parts that were oriented toward some concrete goal and purpose. But the essence of the power or authority relation in such systems was not coercion or force (as it would have been under the machine analogy) but, rather, the logical compliance to the instructions communicated via the system itself. The cybernetic model was therefore quite different: emerging out of the military research programs during World War II, it meant perfecting systems in terms of their efficiency to serve ends and goals that hierarchical command structures could use as instruments, as weapons. It was not, however, the machine as such that was the directive paradigm for cybernetics, but, as Philip Mirowski has pointed out, the theory of thermodynamics, or “technologies to restrain entropy and chaos through feedback and later . . . transmuted into theories of self-organization, where entropy would itself under certain circumstances give rise to ‘higher’ levels of order.”26 Now, the cybernetic model of systems would replace the older mechanistic paradigm since it was viewed as a more efficient, selfregulating, self-learning, homeostatic process. Mechanism was now turning into a technological form of organism.27 Unlike Foucault’s theory of discipline as power entwined with Enlightenment reason, compliance as power entails the absorption of norms and practices that come to steer the self via internalization and the exclusion of rational-humanistic value to counter them or serve as a normative grounding for an alternative, critical reason. For Foucault, Enlightenment reason was the source of more efficient forms of power, but as I see it, cybernetic society is not an extension of the Enlightenment but its deformation: reason is compressed by the demands of compliance and control and stripped of any kind of democratic or ethical ends.

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    Cybernetics was becoming the pattern for social institutions that would require securing efficiency and control and gradually the cybernetic integration of computer systems was becoming a paradigm for humans as well as machines. Mirowski explains: “Cybernetics began as a science of a certain class of machines but rapidly and inadvertently became the vehicle for a unified science of people and things. There had been previous attempts to pattern theories of people and society on the natural sciences, but what cybernetics encouraged was the blurring of all such distinctions, treating mind as essentially no different from generic machines.”28 The new idea here is what Andrew Pickering describes as the “world of goaloriented feedback systems with learning,”29 a new kind of patterning of self-adaptive systems. Whereas the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paradigm of the machine was one where the parts of the machine were dependent on and related to each other through external force, the new cybernetic model of machine was based not on external force but on command and control of information and an interdependence of its parts. The cybernetic system is self-learning and utilizes complexity; as a system, it is based not on physical power but on the control of information, and the key idea is the nuanced amplification of control. Increased logics of efficiency come to pervade all spheres of institutional life, and the logic of the social totality becomes saturated with a new form of social rationality. Key to its purpose is the management of complexity and large-scale system decision-making.30 In this sense, it is a paradigm for the kind of logics to which contemporary, post-neoliberal social institutions adhere. But what needs to be added to this picture is an account of the nature and dynamics of social power. A key concern is the way that efficiency is maximized via the control of information. Wiener emphasizes that the term cybernetics is derived from the Greek word for “to pilot” or “to steer” (κυβερνάω) and from the Latin verb “to govern” (gubernare). The Greeks used it in discussing nautical navigation, and it was the role of the captain to navigate and direct the ship. This kind of power is more efficient than coercion, and it requires more than rational consent, as in authority. Rather, it is a kind of power that is constituted by the reshaping of norms and practices in such a global and cohesive way throughout society that the self is embedded within it. For Wiener, the origins of cybernetic theory evolved from the need for rockets and aircraft outfitted with

  our steely encasement self-steering servo-mechanisms that were being developed during World War II. It was meant to describe a self-regulating, self-steering system that did not require direct control or power. When taken over into the realm of the social, this means that cybernetic forms of power adhere to the normative and practical spheres of human action. The capacity of social institutions to be able to have individuals internalize the requisite norms and practices for the operation of large-scale coordinated economic activities constitutes the origin of the cybernetic society. This entails a thicker, more institutionally mediated, reality than current theories of social power and domination are able to capture. Now, power is exercised via systems—that is, through the rationalized norms and practices that are taken up by individuals within hierarchically organized relational structures according to the ends and purposes of superordinates. The key idea here lies in the fact that as economic systems become more complex and attain greater global reach, the management of production and consumption must be managed by increasingly rationalized norms. More to the point, this entails more complex forms of social integration that have these goals of economic efficiency and ends as definitive of collective social ends and purposes. As John Kenneth Galbraith presciently observed from the vantage point of the late 1960s: The danger to liberty lies in the subordination of belief to the needs of the industrial system. . . . If we continue to believe that the goals of the industrial system— the expansion of output, the companion increase in consumption, technological advance, the public images that sustain it—are coordinate with life, then all of our lives will be in the service of these goals. What is consistent with these ends we shall have or be allowed; all else will be off limits. Our wants will be managed in accordance with the needs of the industrial system; the policies of the state will be subject to similar influence; education will be adapted to industrial need; the disciplines required by the industrial system, will be the conventional morality of the community. All other goals will be made to seem precious, unimportant or antisocial. We will be bound to the ends of the industrial system.31

Galbraith was able to see the emergence of a more encompassing administered reality rooted in the complex interests of economic elites who were managing a system that was no longer merely economic but genuinely social in the complete sense. Culture, psychology, education, expectations,

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    social policy, and so on all had to be managed to ensure that the complex interdependencies of work, production, and consumption were sustained. The means for this kind of complex coordination far outpace the mechanistic model of industrial society birthed during the nineteenth century. What was increasingly required was the application of instrumental forms of reason that placed technē over all other forms of human cognition and praxis. The cybernetic society is therefore only possible once technical means of control and command have become routinized and rational authority has become reified within consciousness of the individual as the routinization of technical forms of control and administrative operationality has saturated socializing institutions. This is the key thesis that I want to glean from this theory of social change. The reason should be obvious: given the extraordinary socialization pressures placed on the individual by the logics of integration into such a social and cultural context, the space for autonomous, morally reflective individuality withers.32 The contradictions of such a system that is crafted for efficiency of control for the purposes of maximum surplus extraction requires a high degree of heteronomy, not merely in terms of the stratified forms of structural power that it endears but in terms of the forms of social rationality that constitute it. The individual is therefore socialized according to a formal rationality that requires external, heteronomous steering. Indeed, Jacques Ellul saw this occurring in what he called the “automatism of technical choice”: “When everything has been measured and calculated mathematically so that the method which has been decided upon is satisfactory from the rational point of view, and when, from the practical point of view, the method is manifestly the most efficient of all those hitherto employed or those in competition with it, then the technical movement becomes self-directing, I call the process of automatism.”33 Technological logics become fused to broader economic imperatives but also to a new way of thinking about social rationality.34 The shift in the logics of coordinating modern institutions rooted in the expansion of surplus extraction therefore has a strong influence on the value

  our steely encasement orientations of individuals. It entails a change from an older form of authority based in coercion and force to a thoroughly modern one grounded in legitimacy and rationalized authority.

Rationalized Authority and the Transformation of Values What resulted from this shift in social organization from industrial to cybernetic forms of social reality has been a change in the ways that individuals normatively relate to their world. A core implication of the thesis I have been developing is that older ways of understanding the concept of heteronomy need to be updated. Now, the thick socialization of subjects into frameworks of highly rationalized forms of life entails a kind of reification that displaces older conceptions of heteronomy. The second nature of these technicized norms and institutions now becomes the basic meaning context limiting alternative value systems. This occurs because of the ways that economic logics have been able to serve as a kind of unifying frame of rationalization for all other institutional spheres. Weber saw this as perhaps the most salient feature of modernity: the loss of value from a world encased by rationalization and technicization. The idea was that power was evolving via the rationalization of hierarchical social forms. Bureaucratic institutional forms evinced a kind of congealed power not rooted in charisma or in traditional forms of belief but rather in the internal logics that constituted those institutions themselves. The justification for following the commands of your superior in any organizational context was that this was the norm of said institution. For Weber, this was the outcome of centuries of Entzauberung, of the progression of societal rationalization that was displacing value from the sphere of individual reflection and choice to the organizational nexus of organized authority. The result was a degradation of ethics, a withering of the individual’s power to judge, to reflect, to act in any way external to those organized ensembles of norms and practices of modern institutional life. Weber’s ideal model for the autonomous subject was in a certain sense a last gasp of the Kantian idea of autonomy blended with the spiritual underpinnings of Protestant conscience. Persönlichkeit was the term used to describe this kind of ethical individuality, where the self was able

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    to generate moral values spontaneously. Weber’s ideal of an “authentic modernity” was one where the individual possessed noumenal freedom, or the reflective agency to be able to choose his or her own ends and meaning in a world that was increasingly becoming ethically bankrupt.35 This ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) placed a heavy burden on the self, for now individuals had to act in a way in which they saw their actions as consequential for society as a whole.36 Hence, Kant’s categorical imperative was amplified into a higher register. Unlike Marx, who saw collective action as the only means for social transformation, Weber viewed the last refuge for ethical choice and change in the individual: in conscience, conviction, and the ethical sense of duty rooted in a noumenal sphere of values hovering over the technical-material mechanics of modernity. The result was an inherent contradiction between the realm of values and the realm of social reality, as well as an inherent tension between the individual and the logics of the social world. But it seems clear that Weber saw the solution of individual ethical conviction as an increasingly unlikely option for modern life. After all, the individual was itself at risk. This is because Weber also saw the modern world being transformed into the image of the machine, into an instrumentalized world where the powers of the individual were becoming saturated by institutional logics and norms. As a result, the individual would be swallowed into the viscosity of social dynamics and institutional rationality. It was clear that the rationalization of society meant the death of the ethical individual. In a speech given to the Verein für Sozialpolitik in Vienna in 1909, he diagnosed the problem in no uncertain terms: “No machinery in the world works as precisely as this human machine. . . . Everyone who integrates himself becomes a cog in the machine. And even though the idea that someday the world might be full of nothing but professors is frightening . . . the idea that the world would be filled with nothing but little cogs is even more frightening, that is, with people who cling to a small position and strive for a bigger one.”37 Although he employs the metaphor of the machine, something has changed in this description of modernity.38 Now, the “little cogs” are not merely alienated parts of a coercive whole; they “cling to a small position and strive for a bigger one”—effectively, these are parts of a whole that now think according to its design—they are part of a self-regulating mechanism.

  our steely encasement It was now becoming clear that modern, rationalized institutions were not merely impersonal forms of power; they were also crucibles of self-formation that sought to render the system as valid and legitimate to the individual who, in turn, would actively participate in its reproduction. It was now clear to Weber that any genuine form of ethical individuality was being eclipsed by the all-encompassing logics of rationalized domination. It is important to stress that Weber, like Marx, saw these rationalized institutions as expressions of hierarchically organized social power, as the elaborate mechanisms and instrument of the interests and directing powers of a class. Marx describes this in volume 1 of Capital: The co-operation of wage laborers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them. Their unification into one single productive body, and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions, lies outside their competence. These things are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings them together and maintains them in that situation. Hence, the interconnection between their various labors confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose.39

Marx’s insight here can be fused with Weber’s diagnosis of the fate of modern individuality. Marx sees that essential to capitalism as a modern social formation is the efficient cause of capital to shape and organize labor, not only as an activity but also in concrete organizational terms “as the powerful will of a being outside them.” Marx further notes the importance of larger-scale production, of a more scalar form of hierarchical control later in the third volume of Capital when discussing the “wages of superintendence” or the need for a class of managers that oversee and coordinate wage laborers in more complex processes of production: “The labor of superintendence and management will naturally be required whenever the direct process of production assumes the form of a combined social process, and does not rest on the isolated labor of independent producers.”40 For Weber, this would not be a sufficient account of what constitutes these modern social forms. What is needed for this kind of coordination and control is a power over the personality of subjects, a capacity to shape the will and orient it toward the functional imperatives of the organization itself. This kind of power is distinctively modern because it relies on the complicity of its members. For Weber, authority and domination were

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    one and the same: they are the expressions of a new kind of social power that can only become activated via a process of submission to “legitimate,” “rational” norms and rules.41 But this “legitimacy” has no external criterion for its validity: it justifies itself through the goal of the successful working of the institution itself; all other criteria for judgment are expunged. For this kind of power to be actuated, the individual must be remade—must be fitted to the machinery, so to speak. As he says in Economy and Society: “Bureaucracy is the means of transforming social action into rationally organized action. Therefore, as an instrument of rationally organizing authority relations, bureaucracy was and is a power instrument of the first order for one who controls the bureaucratic apparatus.”42 Authority and social domination now were not only rationalized but were the efficient cause for the rationalization of the self. The problem of the Enlightenment tension between technical and humanistic reason now comes fully into view. Weber sees the transformation of Enlightenment reason and humanistic values being colonized by technical-instrumental logics and its impact on the social pressures on the individual. Rationalized and instrumental organizational hierarchies no longer possess a transcendent justification or system of values that can serve to legitimize them. Scalar authority relies on the socialization of norms and value orientations that are internal to the system itself; otherwise, the stability and amplification of such a system could not be achieved. The increase of technical modes of organization can only be expanded once the nature of subjective reflection and consciousness has been reshaped. One essentially had to become alienated from other ways of thinking, knowing, and acting. Domination effectively implied an alienation of the subject from his or her own ethical conscience—Persönlichkeit was devolving into conformity and reification.43 At the core of all of this is a major shift in culture. We can refer to this as a “displacement of value” in that the forms of substantive ethics and value that were common to human society before the emergence of modernity are eradicated by a “value-neutral” orientation of technicalinstrumental reason. This value-neutrality becomes the governing logic of modern social institutions and, via processes of routinization, of the individual as well.44 What results is what Weber termed “objectively correct rationality” (objektive Richtigkeitsrationalität), a form of rationality that

  our steely encasement makes no gestures toward values but has as its criteria of correctness the proper functioning of the institution itself, irrespective of its relative ends or purposes. It is therefore crucial that values be reshaped and reformed so that the efficiency of technical logics is secured. For if the realm of value is left untouched, it is always a potential threat to the intricately constructed world of instrumentality and domination.45 Above all, synthesizing Marx and Weber, we should keep in view that there is a central genetic logic to these rationalized institutions: that of the expansion and stabilization of surplus value and the defense of accumulated wealth.46 But zooming in on this picture once again to where Weber saw the crux of the matter, in the ethical fate of the individual, we see that these macropatterns of social logics must be taken up by individuals themselves; there must be a transformation of the individual if these rationalized hierarchies are to be effective and activated. Here, a crucial shift has taken place: from the mechanized model of the “megamachine” that had its origins in the Enlightenment, toward the cybernetic society, where the individual’s very self has been largely subsumed by the strong socialization pressures of the rationalized institutions that encase her or him. The logic of these systems becomes the background rationality of each individual’s own subjectivity. For Weber, the argument seems to be that once a culture begins to utilize this value-free, instrumental form of rationality, its members will turn themselves, as well as others, into instruments and objects of coercion.47 This is where the transformation of values becomes an important part of our understanding of modernity and any genuine form of social critique and social transformation. Indeed, what we have seen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a new project of transforming all values into values that are compatible with the dominant logics of accumulation and consumption. We can now add another layer to our understanding of the cybernetic society—namely, that of the integration of administrative, instrumental logics of control into the realm of culture and value. What makes this form of society distinct is the high degree of tightness of fit of our institutional lives coupled with the dense concentration of material power and decision-making capacity. This not only results in a higher coefficient of social power for elites; it also indicates a new form of domination given the crucial role that legitimacy plays in any system of

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    rational domination. Marx saw the wage laborer and slave as occupying different spaces on the same continuum of domination. He saw rightly that the essence of modern capitalist society was hierarchical and rooted in the interests and power of those who controlled capital. “Now, the wage-laborer, like the slave,” Marx writes, “must have a master, who shall put him to work and rule him. And assuming this relation of master and servant to exist, it is quite proper to compel the wage-laborer to produce his own wages and also the wages of superintendence.”48 But Weber shows that this is not precisely the case—that superordinates need not “compel” or “put to work” individuals in the ways that Marx had seen. Rather, the key now was the inner transformation of the self, the creation and routinization of certain value orientations that come to shape what Husserl referred to as the “meaning-fundament” of the individual’s consciousness, not merely a deadening alienation stemming from the division of labor but an alienation from his or her own capacity to articulate and cognize the values that he or she absorbs. Power and domination in the cybernetic society are no longer rooted in the machine but rather in the contours of the self and the cultural forms of life that constitute the background meaning and value context of the individual. Since the cybernetic society evinces a high level of integration among political, economic, technological, and cultural spheres, the changes that occur within the individual are now to be seen as primary in importance.49 Administrative capitalism has evolved into a highly unified social system where the subsumption of the self and its maintenance within a system of controlled expectations and desires is crucial to the system’s legitimacy and, as Weber would have noticed, for rational domination to take place. Capital becomes the dominating logic of the social totality, suppressing (albeit imperfectly) the pathologies of its own creation, as well as any alternative value systems that challenge or interfere with its efficiency. “Progressive” political movements no longer seriously challenge the system, let alone have a serious alternative vision to inspire change. At the same time, neoauthoritarianism is a reaction consistent with the inability of many to deal with the rising insecurity of inequality and cultural shifts. This thesis goes starkly against Daniel Bell’s argument in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, which locates the fundamental contradiction of capitalism in the “disjuncture” between the economic-technological

  our steely encasement imperatives toward rational efficiency, on the one hand, and the cultural movement toward personal meaning and the development of the self, on the other. Bell’s position is worth exploring in more detail. As he sees it: Within this framework, one can discern the structural sources of tension in the society: between a social structure (primarily techno-economic) which is bureaucratic and hierarchical, and a polity which believes, formally, in equality and participation; between a social structure that is organized fundamentally in terms of roles and specialization, and a culture which is concerned with the enhancement and fulfillment of the self and “whole” person. In these contradictions, one perceives many of the latent social conflicts that have been expressed ideologically as alienation, depersonalization, the attack on authority, and the like. In these adversary relations, one sees the disjunction of realms.50

Bell’s emphasis is on a disjuncture between the hierarchical and technorational modes of economic life, a formal egalitarianism in the polity, and the exploration of self and existential meaning within the cultural domain. The disjuncture between these realms, Bell maintains, explains the social pathologies of late-capitalist or perhaps postindustrial societies. Effectively, there exists a fault line between the technocratic elites of the state, or capital, and the search for personal meaning and values within the culture. But there is something amiss in Bell’s diagnosis. Against the thesis of the disjuncture of realms, consider the extent to which the functional integration of economy, polity, and culture have merged rather than exist in tension with one another. The cybernetic society exists via a structural-functionalist mode of socialization. This means that, for it to be successful, the imperatives of capital will have to invade and transform the cultural as well as the political realm. Marx theorized this as a basic systemic imperative of capitalism: to subordinate all spheres of society to its logic, to remake itself into a totality. “This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.”51 This implies that the values and goals of capital must become the fundament for the value systems of these other social spheres as well. For this, we can look to Talcott Parsons to achieve some insight. For Parsons, modern societies were becoming increasingly stabilized by means

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    of the systemic integration of individuals through processes of internal adaptation to broader social goals. At the level of the subject, this occurs via “latent pattern maintenance,” or the extent to which the subject is socialized into maintaining support for the predominant social norms and institutions (what Parsons calls “normative pattern maintenance”).52 In light of this insight, we can say that the cybernetic society is distinct in the ways that it evinces both system and social integration—that is, the ways that institutions from different social spheres come under the dominance of the same underlying constitutive logics as well as the ways that individuals are socialized into these logics.53 Effectively, Bell holds to a model of modernity that fails to grasp its cybernetic imperatives but only because he was writing before the neoliberal resurgence that was to embark on the project of system integration: where schools, work and private life, the family, economy, polity, and culture would all come under the dominating logic of the commodity form, as well as the logics of technical mechanization and uniformity.54 The core idea here is that for the success of modern forms of economic growth, an increased securing of compliance to coordinating norms is required. Individuals are increasingly burdened with socialization logics that inhere in them within the dominant social logics shaping their practices as well as consciousness. This does not mean that the individual becomes some passive automaton. As the cohesiveness of these institutional imperatives continues to burden the self, so, too, does the impulse to rupture this cohesiveness. The self that has been burdened by the saturation of the norms of rationalized coordinative control is only led toward a psychic imbalance where efforts to escape its cybernetic pull take various forms. Indeed, this is nothing new. Lewis Mumford notes the existence of “curbs on the megamachine,” where institutions such as the Sabbath in ancient Judaism were a counterforce to the coordinating powers of political power: “the institution of the Sabbath was, in effect, a way of deliberately bringing the megamachine periodically to a standstill by cutting off its manpower. Once a week the small, intimate basic unit, the family and the Synagogue, took over; reasserting, in effect, the human components that the great power complex suppressed.”55 Bell, too, sees the emergence of an “antinomian attitude,” where the self seeks some kind of reaching beyond what is already given to it. But Bell notes that this has only merged with the

  our steely encasement hedonic impulses of capitalism, no longer posing any kind of threat to its systemic imperatives: “The counter-culture is a revolution in life-style which sanctions the acting-out of impulse, the exploration of fantasy, the search for polymorphic pleasure in the name of liberation from restraint. It proclaims itself ‘daring’ and in revolt against bourgeois society. But in fact, bourgeois culture vanished long ago. What the counter-culture has done is to extend the double tendencies of cultural modernism and capitalist marketing hedonism initiated sixty years ago.”56 We can now perhaps speak of an exhaustion of modern liberal ideas insofar as the theory of liberal society rests on a concept of the individual—the autonomous, rational, morally reflective individual capable of some degree of reflective endorsement—who stands outside the functional pressures of the techno-economic realm. But if this is not the case, if instead the functional forces of the techno-economic sphere are strong enough to absorb and socialize the individual, then the political and philosophical premises of liberalism wither. In this case, liberalism morphs into neoliberalism, on the one hand, and into a hollow political doctrine, on the other. The hedonism that Bell describes as coming from the technoeconomic sphere not only shifts the foundation of the self from asceticism to hedonism; it also creates a self that comes to see the legitimacy of the system as based on the satisfaction of hedonistic desires. As techno-economic rationality becomes ever more prevalent, dominating increasingly diverse spheres of life, the disjunction of realms becomes less an issue, and the collapse of the self into the value-patterns of those systemic imperatives becomes more evident. Indeed, the culture of modernism that Bell points to as evincing the cultural contradiction slowly erodes its potential to serve as a critical reservoir for the self. Bell seems to sense this toward the end of the opening essay of the book: “The modernism is exhausted, and no longer threatening. The hedonism apes its sterile japes. But the social order lacks either a culture that is a symbolic expression of any vitality or a moral impulse that is a motivational or binding force. What, then, can hold the society together?”57 The cybernetic society is in many ways a response to precisely this question, for it is what results from the concerted efforts of elites in control of productive forces in search of surplus to secure expanding tribute through more expanded circles of global productive-consumptive regimes. The final domain of

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    conquest by technical, administrative capitalist society—that of the self— is what is at the root of the cybernetic society and the dissolution of critical, autonomous individuality in modern societies.

A Theory of the Cybernetic Society As a response to the accumulation crises of the 1970s, neoliberalism was not only an economic and political project; it was a cultural project as well. To expand the extractive powers of financial capital, neoliberalism had to shift the cultural patterns of norms toward a new kind of legitimacy, where issues of social solidarity and social justice could be transformed. One place where this would begin was in the new culture of the corporation that took root in the late 1970s and 1980s. Smashing unions legally, culturally, and institutionally had to be matched with a new ethos of work. Solidarity with corporate values was one initial way to mesh social with system integration. As James O’Connor observed from the vantage point of the 1980s: “More than any other experiment, ‘corporate culture’ exemplified the new capitalist concept of social production and cooperation. The aim of ‘corporate culture’ was to mobilize worker cooperation as a productive force and to cash in on post-material, post-acquisitive values. It therefore appealed more to workers’ emotions and sentiments than to traditional rationalistic methods of operation. It used rituals and ceremonies to promote shared values with the purpose of subordinating individual interests to those of the corporation as a whole.”58 This change in the culture of work was paralleled by the infiltration of commodification into previously noncommodified forms of life. The need to ramp up accumulation and profit rates necessitated an expansion of commercialization of everyday life, as Wolfgang Streeck has argued: “It is important to bear in mind the sheer extent of the commercialization of social life that aimed to save capitalism from the specter of saturated markets after the watershed years. In effect, what firms learned in the 1970s was to put the individualization of both customers and products at the service of commercial expansion. . . . The 1970s and 1980s were also a time when traditional families and communities were rapidly losing authority, offering markets the opportunity to fill a fast-growing social vacuum.”59 What these changes in capitalist society meant was a further

  our steely encasement shift away from the industrial-mechanistic model of capitalism toward the cybernetic society. Neoliberalism effected this shift by unleashing the unrestrained powers of financial capital, which had to secure new forms of accumulation. Postindustrial social norms also meant an increasing exposure away from proletarian working culture and solidaristic norms toward a new individualism that was being socialized into a new regime of consumption norms that further reified the needs that the market constructed and that individuals came to internalize as basic to their drives and identities, creating an “object fetishism” that has added further fuel to the commodification of everyday life.60 At the same time, as the gradient of social hierarchies increased owing to the erosion of labor unions and the increased need for coordinating integrated global systems of production and consumption, workers became exposed to the norms and practices of elites as horizontal working relations became unequal. As Streeck notes: “Sociation by consumption, then, is monological rather than dialogical in nature, voluntary rather than obligatory, individual rather than collective.”61 This poses the need for a new form of social integration: the acceptance and absorption of new value patterns that will maintain legitimacy in such an accumulation regime. The individual must be fitted to the imperatives of the system. This is a result not of a postindustrial society but the industrialization of almost every sector of economic, social, and cultural life. Industrialization is here viewed as the mass production of patterned commodities and services that require administration and managed efficiency to extract surplus. But it also means that a new kind of responsiveness and desire for consumption becomes normalized within the self and the culture more broadly. As the market and commodities expand into more spheres of social and cultural life and reach more deeply into them, the self’s space for autonomy and spontaneity is constricted. At the same time, economic and working life was becoming defined by a submission of labor to disciplinary norms even as personal values were becoming circumscribed by consumption, material and postmaterial (e.g., services). Gone were the resistance of labor unions to the regimentation of work and alienation characteristic of the 1960s, as well as the revolt against alienation by the youth of the countercultural movements in the affluent society.

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    Postindustrial society was no longer concerned with the machine but with the construction of a cybernetic system: an integration of all relevant social institutions under accumulation logics and the withering of nonrelevant ones as well as the moral integration of subjects into the dominant practices and values that would secure and expand those logics. As capital was becoming increasingly flexible via financialization, it was also becoming increasingly rationalized and the undergirding logic of a system that was coming to embrace every sphere of social reality. Relying more and more on securing streams of rent revenue, it needed to secure norms and practices of consumption and private debt financing as wages bottomed out and inequality increased. Harsher and less rewarding work regimes also required a heightened psychic and social legitimacy that required deeper and more pervasive socialization measures. Management of information became central, along with the need to embed the individual psychologically into the web of norms that served to legitimize a society that was becoming almost entirely dominated by commodified markets and the attendant norms that would support them. A society that needed to secure accumulation of profits through the collection of debt, rent-seeking, and superfluous material consumption required that individuals accept the system as legitimate and its values as their own. All of this shattered the previous phase of welfare-state capitalism that was held together by a social contract that sought to curtail any excesses of labor and capital. But capital’s frustration with low profit rates led to the neoliberal movement of the 1980s and 1990s, remaking the economic and political framework of capitalism. But a return to low wages, long working hours, and more exploitative market relations did not herald a return of class conflict. Indeed, as inequality has surged, compliance to the system has remained largely intact. Whereas the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the idea of the self as a countercultural force, the cybernetic society has spawned a different kind of self: one that is no longer concerned with anything countersystemic but rather passively accepts the macrologics and culture it emits. The reason for this is what we can refer to as the capitalist cultural revolution that took place from the 1980s through to the present. This has consisted in a systematic penetration of the norms of capitalist commodification into the lifeworld of everyday life, from shifting norms of thrift to norms of consumption, to the popular image of the

  our steely encasement entrepreneur as radical and innovator. This cultural revolution has led to a retrenchment of capitalist logics into the values and norms of modern society and the blending of fantasy with the reality principle like nothing that has come before. These systems of control and mediated command therefore circumscribe the cybernetic society—a system of control and mediated command over highly integrated institutional spheres and subsystems within the society that shape the constitutive rules and practices that articulate the self. A key idea behind the theory of the cybernetic society is the merging of integration and control to form a new mode of domination rooted not in coercion but in the cultivation of legitimacy and consent. This is made more efficient by eroding the critical capacities of citizens. As Wolfgang Streeck soberly points out: “The market could be made immune from democratic correctives either through the neoliberal re-education of citizens or through the elimination of democracy on the model of 1970s Chile.”62 For capital to defend against redistributive mechanisms of the social-democratic institutions erected during the post–World War II period, the concentration of wealth was fused to the concentration of executive and directive powers of financial resources that were unfettered during the period of neoliberalism. This power had to alter noneconomic institutions to reverse and break down redistributive mechanisms rooted in social-democratic institutions. The state, as well as nonstate institutions, became subject to the crushing logics of finance capital, where tax-cutting measures place pressures on educational institutions and systems that come to be “rewarded” for reforms that put them in line with corporate need, even as curricula are reworked to secure “success” for students in a world increasingly defined by corporate goals. The creation and inculcation of normative patterns is therefore essential, and these have their origin in the patterned world of system integration achieved through the concentration of wealth and control over social investment decisions that have become cleansed of democratic controls. In many ways this was a new development by capitalist rationality, which pushed socialization mechanisms ever deeper into the self. As Dennis Wrong pointed out in the early 1960s, the extent to which individuals actually internalize norms via socialization was not as pervasive and total as the functionalist theorists of society of the time maintained. Wrong saw theories, such as those of Talcott Parsons, that emphasized social

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    conformity via the internalization of values and norms, to be one-sided. Specifically, Wrong suggested that this theory of the individual neglects the other half of the model of human nature presupposed by current theory: moral man, guided by his built-in superego and beckoning ego-ideal. . . . What of desire for material and sensual satisfactions? Can we really dispense with the venerable notion of material “interests” and invariably replace it with the blander, more integrative “social values”? And what of striving for power, not necessarily for its own sake—that may be rare and pathological—but as a means by which men are able to impose a normative definition of reality on others? That material interests, sexual drives, and the quest for power have often been overestimated as human motives is no reason to deny their reality. To do so is to suppress one term of the dialectic between conformity and rebellion, social norms and their violation, man and social order, as completely as the other term is suppressed by those who deny the reality of man’s “normative orientation” or reduce it to the effect of coercion, rational calculation, or mechanical conditioning.63

Wrong’s argument was well-posed for the 1960s. The pent-up frustrations and the reservoirs of psychic need and energy that had been sublimated by postwar economic and social life burst forth in the countercultural movements of the mid and late 1960s. But what Wrong missed was that the social system is also itself a learning mechanism: elites would come to see that desublimation could be captured and contained within a culture of hyperconsumption. What would be needed for a resurgent capitalist culture in the 1980s and beyond would be the penetration of norms into the psychic depths of the individual psyche; what was now required was the absorption of the self’s “normative orientation,” a feat accomplished by the new, more cohesive ways that economy, polity, and culture would integrate with one another in the decades following the 1960s. Indeed, the self as a whole was becoming the object of social power and control. Indeed, just as Bell could not have anticipated the way that neoliberalism would force the integration of institutional spheres into a coordinated apparatus bent on efficiency and the elimination of any appearance of social contradiction or conflict, Wrong’s thesis could not have anticipated the ways that the expansion of the commodification of culture as well as the new regimes and norms of work would reshape the self. At the basis of this integration of the social world is the intensification of two axes of social development. The first is the intensification

  our steely encasement of the scale of authority; the second is the intensification of the scope of technical rationalization within society. As the scope of each of these organizational axes intensifies, there is an ontological shift of the social. Scalar authority is the extent to which forms of social power are able to extend over the population in its most stable form. The ability of this kind of control must routinize itself within the social relations individuals have with one another in terms of hierarchical organizational forms. But in addition, the scope of authority takes on an even larger scale when it is able to (1) penetrate and shape the internal world of the self and (2) manage the systemic logics that govern multiple institutional spheres. The scope of scalar authority in feudal society was fairly small in comparison to industrial society in that landed elites had power over particular geographic domains and over set hierarchies (see fig. 1.1). But even these hierarchies, which were quite rigid, nevertheless had many forms of give and flexibility within them. These domains, although relatively small, were intensively under their domination, but they also had various complex gradations of power within them. With the emergence of industrial society, the scope and scale of authority expanded as wealth concentration expanded. With the private control over capital and the emergence of the wage system, more traditional forms of authority were gradually replaced with new normative regimes of subordination to a rationalized hierarchical and bureaucratic schema that was able to exert control in a more coordinated and more disciplined fashion. The emergence of the division of labor and rationalized forms of authority tied to the private control of capital, as opposed to the more organic form of labor and production under feudalism, entailed a more rigid form of domination not only over economic life but over political life, as well as the interests if capital and labor diverged. Only in the cybernetic society does this form of power bleed into the cultural dimension to such an extent that it becomes an internalized form of life. Access to the self is made possible via cultural transmission and the colonization of previously untouched spheres of psychic life such as sexuality, religious and aesthetic experience, and so on. This is achieved by the predominance of the commodity form, itself the ultimate expression of the capacity of capital to control long chains of global production processes, and the forms

The Rise of Cybernetic Society   

figur e 1.1. Historicity of the intensification of the axes of scalar authority and technical rationalization.

of desire required to subordinate the self to the norms of consumption and passive acceptance of the reified world that allows the stability of capital’s unequal dominance over social life. Now consider the second axis of the scope of technical rationalization. This is a crucial parallel current to that of the scope of scalar authority, indeed, even serving to enhance it. The shift from simple machines and organic forms of labor and energy under feudalism to the rise of the factory system under industrialism to the fine-grained forms of control possible under the cybernetic society—the scope of technical rationalization increases alongside the increasing gradient of social power that accompanies the enlarged scope of scalar authority. As with the progression of the efficiency of domination in the former case, the enlarged scope of technical rationalization entails the manipulation of the self as a central zone of control. A realm of psychic plasticity that remained crudely out of touch in feudal and industrial society is now efficiently shaped and managed by a more tightly enmeshed institutional structure that is able to coordinate the educational, economic, political, and cultural spheres of life to such an extent that they all come under the dominance of the systemic logic of capital. Whereas feudalism had the cohesiveness of religion,

  our steely encasement the industrial world saw the throwing off of these weights on subjectivity. The birth of autonomy and critical personhood was able to begin its development. But in cybernetic society this process has been reversed: the self now becomes embedded within the systemic logics of institutional and cultural spheres saturated by the imperatives of efficiency, extraction, uniformity, and commodification. It is no longer the mechanism that provides the pattern for this form of social integration and coordination; rather, it is that of the organism— of the conflict-free integration of economy, polity, culture, and psyche. Conflict is no longer social, as it was under early industrialism, nor is it mainly psychological, as it was under the pressures of the Fordist society of the 1940s through the 1980s, where neuroses held sway over the self. Rather, in a culture that no longer has contradictory values and strivings, the self becomes subsumed by the values of the market, of the commodity itself.64 Mass consumption is dialectically related to the kinds of regulated work regimes needed to fulfill it. Even in the supposedly flexible “gig economy,” the regime of constant labor and constant service is paramount. This model of labor and consumption has itself ascended because cybernetic society has been able to evacuate all other spheres of value and meaning; it has been able to foreclose those kinds of meaning and value that are not consonant with accumulation and consumption.65 Pathologies of the self now take preoedipal form in terms of narcissism, relational issues, the withered ego, and a one-dimensionality resulting from efforts to imbricate the self into the seamless operations of the commodity form and the forms of life that have been erected to service it. Given this basic outline, I think we can separate out three distinct, yet interdependent, levels of integration that form the basic conditions for understanding the unraveling of critical autonomy and selfhood in modern culture. First, there is system integration, or the logics of interdependence between the core institutions of the society. Essentially at this level, what were once differentiated logics for different institutional spheres of social life—economy, polity, culture, and so on—become integrated along the lines of a singular logic dominated by economic and financial concerns. Next, there is social integration, denoting the inculcation of the value patterns that form the normative sphere within which individuals navigate their lives and that have deontic powers over their sense of

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    legitimacy. Finally, there is psychological integration, or the ordering of the internal cognitive, evaluative, cathectic, and libidinal dimensions of the self according to the prevailing institutional logics and norms. The more successfully, the more tightly, these levels of integration are able to work together and in tandem, the more constricted is the sphere of the self and the thinner the space of critical autonomy becomes. The cybernetic society is the product of the rationalized integration of these three spheres and the neutralization of cultural forms and value systems that expose contradictions within the system as a whole. The cybernetic society is an amalgam of the Marxian and Weberian insights into the nature of modern social systems. Marx’s insight that capital constitutes an ever-expanding logic that becomes integral to other, noneconomic spheres of social life is crucial. The logic here is rooted in an incessant need for accumulation and the expansion of surplus via the narrowing of variable capital and other mechanisms of precapitalist rentseeking and extraction logics.66 Control of capital also entails executive and directive powers over social labor and social wealth, increasing the hierarchical nature of social relations, constituting what David Lockwood refers to as a “core institutional order.”67 From Weber, we can see that the rationalization of social institutions entails the expansion of domination logics as authority becomes rationalized and routinized with the personality. Authority of this kind, when fused to the core institutional order of capital, achieves cybernetic integration as the institutional sphere becomes interlocked, the moral sphere becomes resonant with the institutional order, and the psychological sphere becomes reified by the rationalized heteronomy of the value patterns emanating from both.68 Given the original meaning of cybernetics, that of “piloting” or “steering” of systems, the merging of system logics, value logics, and psychological logics forms a new context for understanding moral cognition, as well as the fate of the individual in modern society. The diminution of the individual, the debasement of autonomy as a critical status of the self, is essentially due to the enhanced steering, or cybernetic, capacities of modern society— steering capacities that make the individual a self-regulating component of system imperatives, rendering the self essentially heteronomous, even grinding down the psychic capacities requisite for any meaningful form of autonomy.

  our steely encasement But let me return to the features of cybernetic society to clarify this. In terms of system integration, we must recognize that it consists of (1) social resource concentration expressed through the oligarchic ownership structures of financial and productive capital and social wealth. Add to this (2) the isomorphism of social spheres, where the oligarchic control of financial resources grants elites the power to reshape the normative structures of different institutional subsystems so that they are governed by and grant support to the accumulation logics of the core institutional order. Once this is achieved, it is possible for (3) the coordination of social spheres to be achieved, where the interdependence of system logics coheres around the accumulation imperatives of the core institutional order. The steering capacities of the system are therefore magnified as financial capital is able to stave off democratic and redistributive constraints. The system is not “autopoietic,” as in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory; it is, rather, cybernetic in that steering capacity for system integration is largely concentrated in the class that possesses control over any resource for social dominance (i.e., of capital).69 It is an integrated kind of power that links the interests and projects of a class of elites with a coordinated structure of the institutional sphere with the personality systems of individuals. It is as complete a system of functional domination as has yet been achieved in capitalist society. The level of system integration, however, also depends on social integration. The inculcation of moral patterns that socially integrated institutional systems and subsystems make ambient in the community are also entrenched in socialization processes. Cybernetic society requires that rationalized norms and practices be stable in order for institutional logics to work smoothly and guarantee accumulation processes. But whereas prior to the cybernetic integration of social spheres contradictions emerged among the logics of differentiated social spheres—say, among economy, polity, and culture—today, what were previously social contradictions get introjected into the self as the individual experiences conflicts and repressed desires that are displaced by the requirements of social system imperatives. The core problem is that system integration and social integration do not imply civic integration: individuals can see the systemic and normative world they live in as legitimate and rational, whereas they are marginalized in terms of their full social rights.70

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    The only way to maintain this kind of inequality is to disable critical-reflective capacities of social agents or, at least, exclude these values and practices from the processes of social and psychological integration. Social integration therefore entails the erasure of different value patterns that can cause social or institutional frictions, such as trends in education that may encourage alternative social aspirations or values that encourage a lack of conformity to the predominant system logics. Elites have this power because of the increasing de-democratization of the economic sphere, which in turn unleashes the power of economic interests into noneconomic spheres such as the polity and culture. This grants them an amplified and more extended form of power than in previous phases of capitalism. I refer to this kind of power as constitutive domination because it grants elites the capacity to shape norms and practices that are constitutive of the self, of the psychological and cognitive powers of the individual.71 What I am calling the subsumption of the self, therefore, refers to the ways that the inculcation of these system logics and norms colonizes the collective-intentional structures of social cognition, thereby securing institutional patterns. But as I have been arguing, the eclipse of autonomy needs to be seen in the context of this increasingly integrated social reality—a new kind of social system that will require us to rethink and reinvent the concept of autonomy and the concept of value as well.

The Displacement of Value and the Fate of Autonomy A central problem that I have traced here is the deformation of the self as a critical-practical agent. As I see it, this can be understood as the consequence of the cybernetic society’s capacity to displace value— that is, to be able to absorb normative concepts and ethical systems into its own imperatives and to marginalize, if not outright eliminate, those that oppose or cause friction for cybernetic logics. The Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous, rational self, the self-legislating individual, is eclipsed by these tendencies within the administered society. This means that the powers of reason, once viewed as the property of the individual, have now become recoded by the external rationality of social systems. As Max Horkheimer pointed out: “The individual once conceived of reason

  our steely encasement exclusively as an instrument of the self. Now he experiences the reverse of this self-deification. The machine has dropped the driver; it is racing blindly into space.”72 Once the self has become the object rather than the subject of social reason, autonomous individuality and critical reason dissolve and the withered, weakened ego is left in their place. But as I have labored to show, the cybernetic society is not only a reified nexus of instrumental social systems; it is also, and perhaps most essentially, directed by class power; it is, in its most basic sense, the architecture of and for an extractive, surplus-accumulating elite. Horkheimer’s view was that instrumental reason had somehow come to control all of modern society, inherent in the structure and trajectory of modern (instrumental) reason. But I think it is more persuasive to see cybernetic society as the result of mutually reinforcing logics of hierarchical forms of power rooted in the logic of the commodity form and the enlarged scope of scalar authority over the technical, administrative, cultural, and integrative functions of modernity that result from it. This has deleterious effects on our Enlightenment ideas about autonomy. So, too, with contemporary theories of intersubjectivity and pragmatism: these do not take seriously the ways that the cybernetic society possesses constitutive power over individuals. By this I mean the capacity of elites to control the socializing logics of institutions that are routinized and internalized by subjects. The problem of what I call constitutive domination therefore becomes one of the core features of the cybernetic society—a feature of social power that plays a significant role in the twilight of the autonomous, democratic, civic self. The displacement of value is therefore at the heart of the thesis I want to explore in the chapters that follow. It refers to the ways that subjective moral reflection is constrained and redirected by social integration or the absorption of value systems and patterns that are fundamentally heteronomous in that their core purpose is to serve the functions of system integration. As a result, the cognitive and moral powers of the self degenerate; the ego withers as a result of its socialization into a system that emphasizes not only values of compliance but also values of success and goals that are imbricated into the goals of the system itself. Before the emergence of the cybernetic society, it was still possible to talk about competing spheres of social integration and value that were essentially

The Rise of Cybernetic Society    untouched by the instrumental and chrematistic logics of modern capitalist society. Individuality is not an empirical state that one finds oneself in; it is an ethical status one achieves via forms of self-consciousness of the kinds of relational frames one occupies. Autonomy, as a particular achievement of individuality, is a kind of self-knowing that requires an adherence to critical values that are rooted not in our independence from others but in our interdependence with others. It is a new system of values and requires a new understanding of ethical life grounded in our ontological status as social beings. But once alternative frames of rationality and value are able to pervert this understanding, then we are caught in the heteronomous value patterns generated by power systems. In the following chapters, I will explore in more nuanced detail the mechanisms of this kind of power and its effects on the critical powers of subjects before returning to this question of an alternative theory of autonomy and critical agency that can stand up to the pressures of the cybernetic society. To approach this phenomenon, we have to first inquire into what happens when the individual is socialized into a system characterized by control as opposed to coercion. In short, we must rethink the mechanisms and processes of social domination that constitute the modern world and the contemporary self.

chapter 2

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self

At the center of my account of the decline of the individual in modern society is a particular theory about the way that social domination operates in modern societies. Basic to the phenomenon of social domination is the narrowing of the scope of activity and thought of the individual. In this respect, social domination—particularly in modern societies that are increasingly constituted by systematized logics of behavior—must take into consideration the nature of the manipulation of the self, of the psychic structures and dynamics of the individual. As David Hume pointed out in 1768: “Nothing appears more surprizing [sic] to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.”1 I think Hume’s insight is worth exploring in more detail, particularly in how it relates to the ideas about compliance and control I discussed in the previous chapter. Hume was able to see that the kind of submission granted by subjects to their authorities is an “implicit submission,” a submission given not out of force but rather grounded in habit, custom, and generally accepted conventions. If this is correct, it points toward a more robust conception of domination that can help us to understand the entrenched nature of social hierarchy and the compliance to authority that pervade modern societies.

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     Domination in cybernetic society is the control and direction of the individual by large-scale systems and the logics that structure them. Domination is about control and direction by an other for the purpose of some unequal benefit; it implies that the motivation behind the control exercised is some kind of surplus benefit by the dominator. In this sense, modern forms of domination are not all that different from premodern expressions. What is new is the mechanism of socialization, the internalization of external, heteronomous norms by complex social systems that come to saturate the self. What is new is the extent and reach of the legitimacy and rationalization of the norms, values, and practices that constitute domination, of the extractive capacity of some to benefit by controlling the activities of others. This means that we must understand in a robust sense what Hume meant by “implicit submission,” or the ways that the very structure of the self is shaped for compliance to the various overlapping systems of control that pervade modern society. To understand this modern, cybernetic form of domination therefore requires an entrée into a deeper, more critical understanding of the self and the demise of autonomy in our culture. The search for a “general theory” of domination has led recent philosophers and political theorists to look to the history of political thought for an intriguing way to think about the nature of modern liberty. The theory that has come to prominence in recent work has been a conception of domination taken from the republican political tradition, which sees domination as the state of living in dependence and under the arbitrary power of any other agent.2 This approach to domination lacks any capacity to deal with the nature of domination in modern, cybernetic society. In opposition to this view, I would like to propose a theory of domination based on the insight that social domination in modern societies is embedded in the logics of hierarchical social relations that constitute modern institutions, as well as corresponding forms of subjectivity and agency. According to this alternative view, domination is a matter of instilling those value systems that will orient the agency of subjects toward broader social goals that benefit elites, ends that subjects are socialized not to contest and to which they grant their consent. These value systems therefore shape more coordinated sets of social behaviors, beliefs, and actions that can allow larger, more rationalized social institutions as a whole to

  our steely encasement function. The ability to orient value systems over time can only come from the sustained efforts of hierarchical elites who possess the material resources capable of creating institutions that in turn shape broader patterns of legitimate power and authority. The functionalist account of domination therefore brings together the realities of unequal power and control over material resources with the value systems and cognitive patterns of individuals. On another level, the issue I would like to address concerns the ways in which domination is a property not of individual agency, of one agent’s will simply acting on another’s, but rather a functional social structure that requires the shaping of certain legitimizing values within a culture that in turn allow for the more general control of an individual or group toward the predefined goals and purposes of hierarchically organized elites. Domination results, I maintain, from the internalization of certain values and norms that go unquestioned, securing the place of individuals within hierarchical relations of power. But the key concept here is that these values that come to be internalized by actors are embedded in the logics of institutions and that they coordinate our actions toward broader goals and interests that do not serve common or public ends. I suggest that the implication of this thesis is that to move against domination means to move against the fabric of norms and values that allow hierarchical institutions to act as they do. Domination therefore requires that individuals come to accept and to see as legitimate the forms of authority that are placed over them. It is not enough that individuals simply follow certain patterns of behavior; they come to absorb these patterns into their cognitive and evaluative states of mind.3 Modern forms of domination therefore are not properly understood as “arbitrary interference” or as the “capacity for arbitrary interference,” as morally repugnant as such relations of subordination and control may in fact be. As I will show, the arbitrary interference account advocated by neorepublicans is unable to account for the stabilized, systemic, and routinized forms of domination that characterize modern societies. Rather, the more prevalent, more consistent type of domination that occurs is that which enables certain forms of collective action and social coordination to take place within a hierarchically organized social structure (the economy, polity, family, or whatever). What I call

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     here a functionalist theory of domination seeks to understand this phenomenon and to show that domination in fact is deeply embedded in the institutional logics and the subjective value orientations that allow those institutions to function. According to the functionalist account, we are dominated not by the arbitrary power of agents but by the norms and values that come to legitimize the power of others and the institutional aims and goals that pervade hierarchical social organizations. As such, it is one of the core mechanisms that can shed insight into the phenomenon of the subsumption of the self, or the ways that modern subjectivity is shaped by the kinds of social power unique to the cybernetic society. Social domination, as opposed to violence, threats, coercion, and so on, is characterized by rationalized institutions where individuals accept the relational power structures that prevent them from obtaining broader forms of self-determination, most of the time without their realization of that fact. In this sense, modern domination occurs when individuals see their dependence on hierarchical relations as legitimate, when they see the authority that is exercised over them as legitimate, and when they internalize the value orientations necessary for their determination by external powers and interests. Although it is true that even premodern societies are characterized by this as well, I contend that modern institutions are specifically secured by the maintenance of collective value systems that shape the cognitive categories of agents. Whereas domination in premodern societies was regulated more regularly by threats of violence, they also possessed features of what I will call here a functionalist understanding of domination: collective beliefs, highly doxic forms of shared norms and tradition, and so on, all characterized premodern forms of power and domination. But my claim here is that modern forms of domination secure hierarchies of power through the shaping of individual agency in a more intimate way. In this sense, modern domination also exhibits a kind of dependency that is either accepted by individuals or hidden beneath broader conventions of behavior and legitimacy. As a consequence, the arbitrary power thesis of domination is inadequate to understand modern forms of social domination and is instead trapped in the historical forms of social life of premodern institutions and power relations and a defective understanding of what counts as “social domination,” in particular in modern, functionally differentiated societies.

  our steely encasement

Domination as Arbitrary Interference In summarizing the basic structure of the neorepublican theory of domination, we can say that domination is essentially defined as being vulnerable to, or being the victim of, the arbitrary interference in an agent’s wishes or preferences by another agent. A person has arbitrary power over you when you are subject to their wishes, their whim, their actions, without their taking into consideration your own interests or preferences. Philip Pettit argues that three conditions qualify for a sufficient account of domination: (1) an agent has the capacity to interfere, (2) on an arbitrary basis, (3) in the choices that you are able to make.4 Domination is allowed to occur when there are no constraints on the dominating agent to act on you, to interfere in your choices and preferences. You are within a relation of domination, then, when another agent has this kind of control over you, and there are no external procedural or institutional constraints to prevent that arbitrary interference. Put another way, it is when you are left at the whim of some other agent who can do as she or he wishes with or to you. The basic premise that guides the neorepublican notion of freedom as nondomination is therefore that you are protected—by laws and procedures—from the ability of others to have power at will over you.5 Interference is not simply preventing you from doing something. Pettit claims that it includes bodily coercion, the coercion of your will (as in the threat of punishment), and manipulation, which is “usually covert and may take the form of agenda-fixing, the deceptive or non-rational shaping of people’s beliefs or desires, or the rigging of the consequences of people’s actions.”6 Pettit goes on to argue that domination is an issue of “common knowledge,” meaning that “it will be a matter of common knowledge among the people involved, and among any others who are party to their relationship—any others in the society who are aware of what is going on—that the three base conditions are fulfilled in the relevant degree,” and that it “will tend to register in some way on the common consciousness.”7 Pettit and others claim that this concept of domination is not simply a normative but also a descriptive account of domination—that it is a theory of domination as a social fact. Therefore, I would like to call into question the descriptive account of domination and then assess the

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     normative consequences of what I consider a more accurate and compelling account of social domination. The arbitrary interference account of domination forces us to accept an understanding of the phenomenon that is far too narrow to account for the types of unequal power relations and their consequences that predominate in modern societies. By assuming the intrinsic rationality of agents (i.e., that domination can only occur when you know someone is interfering with your preferences), this theory fails to capture the ways in which domination can be either coercive in nature or rationalized and accepted as legitimate. Rather, what I think is needed is to differentiate, as did Weber, between the use or threat of force (physical or otherwise) as a means of getting someone to do what you want them to do and the phenomenon of “legitimate” authority or domination where one comes to accept the values and legitimacy of a social relation that is in the interest of another and, more important, that exists for the purpose of extracting some benefit from them.8 To borrow a distinction made by Robert Merton, in the first instance, we are dealing with manifest forms of social domination, better understood in Weberian terms as “power” (Macht), whereas in the case of modern, rational, legitimate forms of domination, we are dealing with latent forms of domination where individuals are largely or sometimes totally unaware that the relations they participate in constitute domination (i.e., sustain asymmetrical relations of power that are not in the interest of the subordinate).9 In my view, this differentiation opens up a problem for the neorepublican concept of domination and suggests the entry point to a more robust empirical account of social domination. A central problem with the arbitrary interference account is that it commits us to an understanding of domination that views social power as hinging on the will of a person or group against another’s preferences, with everyone knowing that this is a case of common knowledge. The arbitrary condition therefore means that I am, in some way, forced to accept the will of another agent. If I accept it on my own accord, then domination does not occur. As one partisan of the arbitrary theory of domination argues: “liberty as non-domination, being a negative conception of freedom, cannot represent a person as free as long as his choices are governed by the will of another agent.” So far, so good. But then we see the obverse of this thesis: “Of course, if the agent voluntarily submits to

  our steely encasement this domination, he remains free.”10 It seems strange to be able to submit to domination voluntarily and remain free, but it is precisely this kind of contradiction to which the neorepublican theory of domination as arbitrary interference gives rise. Domination is only present when another agent acts against my wishes and my interests or preferences and instead imposes his or her own preferences on me. But if I assent to those wishes, if I grant them legitimacy, if I perceive them as in my own interests as well (whether or not this is really the case) simply does not matter. Pettit might respond that this is not true, that his point is that the robustness of domination as arbitrary interference is that the dominator can act arbitrarily, interfering at any time with my interests and wishes; he has the capacity to do so whether or not he exercises it. But codified laws or institutional norms and practices can be nonarbitrary yet still dominate an individual.11 The narrowness of the concept of arbitrary interference is such that those forms of domination that are outside the classical “master-slave” paradigm are simply not captured. The arbitrary interference account argues that domination cannot be the result of an idea, belief, or social system but must be performed by an agent. “A commonly held belief,” writes one advocate of this thesis, “whether true or false, cannot itself dominate anyone, because a belief is not a social agent.”12 I think this is an incorrect view of the matter. Beliefs, values, and principles are deeply constitutive of domination and should be seen as the independent variable producing the authority relationship itself. Even more, I maintain that in obeying the structures of authority and the commands that issue from them, modern subjects are in fact under the domination of those norms and values that come to orient their actions toward compliance in hierarchical institutions. Since these values are not arbitrary but shaped by specific institutional needs, we should see these value orientations that any culture comes to accept and adopt as primary in the way domination comes to express itself. Indeed, in coercion and force, I need not rely on beliefs and values to subordinate others, since it is my monopoly on the means of violence that sustains the relation of subordination. But in modern forms of domination and authority, it is the set of beliefs and values that undergird the relations of subordination that gives them coherence and consistency and allows that particular form of domination to be realized. Indeed, an agent performs

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     the act of domination, but it is not the person or agent that is necessary and sufficient for domination to occur. Furthermore, it is not clear that one is not dominated by the values and norms that orient one’s actions and beliefs toward the acceptance of subordination. Let me explain both of these points. To clarify my critique, I will distinguish between the subject, object, and source of domination.13 The subject (agent A) delivers a command to the object (agent B). But the source of the domination—that is, the reason that the object (agent B) complies with the command—can be found either in the subject or in an external value or idea that somehow acts on the object’s conscience, affecting and orienting his or her actions. The source is the thing that binds the object to the command, compelling him or her to perform it. It can be the threat of force that the subject wields— in which case the subject is also the source of domination, and we should refer to this as coercive domination or force14 —or it can be the fact that the agent listens to her boss because she has been taught “that is what subordinates are supposed to do: listen to their bosses.” In this latter case, the subject is not the source of the domination; the source becomes the norm or value that orients the object’s conscience and activity to obey bosses, irrespective of who they may be. What is important is that the source of the domination is in fact where the real essence of the authority relation is located. In the case of modern domination, I indeed come to be compliant to the commands of others (my teacher, my boss, or whomever), but the source of the compliance is the value orientation I have internalized within my conscience to predispose me to obey that authority—but not simply because of some mechanistic repetition of practices that predispose me to that authority but rather because I come to see it as valid. It is not their arbitrary power that dominates me; it is the way that roles within functional structures are efficiently produced and maintained within any hierarchical structure that comes to be the locus point of domination. Domination, in this sense, is the ability for control, for sustaining an inequality of power that does not benefit the subordinate; but it need not be a conscious intention on the part of the person who gains: it can be rationalized to the extent that superordinates come to see it as beneficial to interact with the subordinate in a power relationship.15 In this sense, rational rules, nonarbitrary interests, impersonal systems of relations, and so on, become constitutive

  our steely encasement of social domination: they effectively are the things that hold and maintain that unequal power relation. Domination, on this view, is not a property of agency or of actions but rather of a structural-functional relation. Or take as another example when charismatic forms of domination are in play. A cult leader may possess domination over his congregants who see him as divine or in some way emanating charismatic authority. In this case, the subject of domination (the cult leader) is also the source of the domination in that the object (the congregant) believes that this specific person is deserving of that power over her. However, a functionalist understanding of social domination separates the subject from the source in that it is not the person or the subject to whom I owe obedience but rather a norm of my office, or my place in the hierarchy, or whatever sustains the subordination.16 In this instance, if it were possible to change the value system of norms that give coherence to such hierarchical systems, they would no longer have dominion over their members. In the face of such a transformation of value systems, those who benefit from the hierarchy may resort to coercion or violence, but this would be because the authority relations that are held in place by the domination of those institutions and values no longer have force.17 In this latter case, the source of domination becomes the active ingredient for domination, and this violates the condition that domination be defined exclusively as arbitrary interference. For, there is no reason to assume that the objects of modern domination (a) have alternative preferences that are being interfered with (i.e., they are probably conditioned to believe on some level that their boss or superior or whoever is meant to tell them what to do, and so on); and (b) it is not arbitrary in that the subject and the source of domination are separate. Consider the premise that domination is something that occurs with the common knowledge of everyone. Pettit claims that domination must be of common knowledge, that it is known by all agents involved to be domination. But this seems an unnecessarily limiting assumption. Domination is not necessarily about the relationship between agents; it should also be expanded to encompass the fact that we submit to certain conventions and beliefs about the legitimacy of those conventions, that the goals and aims of the institutions that educate us, for which we work, and which organize much of our lives, are not necessarily goals that we ought to see as legitimate; indeed, it may well be that these goals and aims are not in

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     our objective interest (i.e., an interest that is commonly shared as opposed to an interest that is for another), in which case domination would be a property of the institutions that form and shape the values that make individuals see such a world as legitimate and thus agree to participate in it. Shaping the wills and belief systems of individuals is a crucial element of modern domination and, if I am correct, shows us a crucial weakness of this approach, moving us toward a richer, more accurate account of domination and power in modern societies. As a result, social domination should be seen as a property not of agents themselves but of the forms of legitimacy that are attached to the relations of power in any institutional arrangement.18 This phenomenon exemplifies what Georg Simmel terms “upward gradation,” where individuals effectively confer from the bottom up the relations of subordination that affect their lives, and, I will argue in the next section, it is a crucial element to understanding domination in modern societies.19 The arbitrary interference account of domination is therefore plagued by the problem of agency that underwrites its conception of both domination and freedom. Structural accounts of domination also seek to move beyond this understanding of domination, but they, too, seem to me to fail to capture an essential element of domination—that of the capacity of institutions within hierarchically ordered societies to inculcate the value systems and orientations necessary for the compliance of subjects to authority relations. These structural accounts recognize institutional frameworks as active in denying the freedoms or capabilities of others. As Cecile Laborde argues, “In line with sociological accounts of domination such as those of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault, we should direct our focus towards systemic power structures instead [of] exclusively to the interpersonal relationships of domination that they authorize.”20 Structures therefore come to impose limitations on others, and one way they can do this is when “they are subjected to social, yet impersonal forms of power, like the power of deeply entrenched constitutional arrangements, or unquestioned principles, or norms that have been sacralized or naturalized or otherwise universalized.”21 The structures of power relations operate systematically and, as a result, cover a broader, more subtle range of domination than the arbitrary interference account. But these structural approaches do not cover the mechanisms that produce

  our steely encasement compliance to domination and the ways that structures of domination can come to shape subjective agency. In the next section, I will address this as a central concern of the functionalist conception of domination, one that places emphasis on the dialectic of structure and agency, as well as on the mechanisms and value systems that sustain domination relations. Central to the limitation of the arbitrary interference account of domination is the inability to see the ways that individuals come to accept as legitimate the authority of others rather than comply with it because of fear or because of coercion. This is not to say that coercive power relations do not exist in modern societies; they clearly do, but these do not qualify as exhaustive of domination in the modern world. Modern domination is not simply a matter of having power over someone or being dependent on them. It is more about the ways in which subjects provide the necessary legitimacy to the power structures that pervade their world. Domination should still be conceived as the ability of others to direct your practices and actions22 but in a much different way: such domination is secured by making specific value systems ambient in our institutions and socialization processes such that individuals come to accept such direction. To reduce domination to the relationship of personal or social agents alone is simply to misunderstand the complex nature of domination: power can only be wielded by those whom I allow to wield it over me.23 To some real extent, domination requires the subject to grant that power, to participate willingly in it, to see it as legitimate and correct, as a matter of “the way the world is.” Even if it is not valued enthusiastically or endorsed, there needs to be some sense in which the domination relation is seen as valid, that the rule ought to be followed for some accepted reason other than the fear of coercion or violence. This understanding of domination explodes the narrow theory of arbitrary interference and becomes embedded in the institutions, personality structures, and value systems that make society (especially modern societies) and the remarkable interdependence of its institutions possible, not to mention the remarkable compliance of individuals to their logics and prerogatives.24 In this sense, the isolation of domination to the sphere of action where “social power is not externally constrained by effective rules, procedures, or goals that are common knowledge to all persons or groups concerned”25 simply gets us nowhere because it fails to consider the

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     thicker forms of socialization that are necessary for upward gradations of power to be institutionalized. More specifically, norms and rules can simply concretize relations of domination by routinizing them and making them objective and systemic. Domination cannot be limited to those instances where there are no rules or procedures to constrain it since, as I am suggesting, modern domination is premised on the internalization of certain values and norms that predispose people to accept specific forms of authority, many times unknowingly, against their own interests. Domination therefore comes to be seen not as the mere ability of an agent to interfere with another; it becomes the more complex problem of internalizing certain values that come to shape the ways that power is applied and accepted. It is a real attribute of modern societies that hierarchical forms of life are sustained with the tacit cooperation of those at the bottom of those institutions and organizations. Domination clearly needs a deeper, more thorough analysis than provided by those that advocate the arbitrary interference account.

A Functionalist Account of Domination If the agent-centered version of domination espoused by neorepublican thinkers fails to capture the real mechanisms of social domination, it is mainly because these theories are based on analytic and game-theoretic premises and arguments. A functionalist conception of domination differs in that it sees social power and the control of individuals as defined by the fact that agents within hierarchical social structures occupy predefined roles that require individuals to acquire and internalize specific forms of values to orient their subjective inclinations to fit those institutional roles. In this sense, domination is not simply the imposition of an agent’s will on another; it is conceived as the collective thought systems that grant those institutions and institutional roles validity. And this validity in turn is the source of the authority that those institutions have over us. This means that the logics of institutions precede the individuals that occupy them and that for individuals to succeed in any sense within those institutions, they must adopt the legitimacy of their workings, as well as the roles that are assigned.26 At the same time, the institutions require this adoption of values and subject formation in order for them to be sustained.

  our steely encasement As Arthur Stinchcombe has argued, the essence of any functionalist explanation is “one in which the consequences of some behavior or social arrangement are essential elements of the causes of that behavior.”27 On this view, any act of domination is not simply the result of a unidirectional causal process where agent A has power over agent B. Rather, it means that for B to be obedient to any series of commands within institution φ requires that B has lent some degree of subjective legitimacy to the norms and practices embedded in φ. Therefore, in order for B to obey the commands or imperatives of anyone within φ, B has to be socialized into seeing those commands as legitimate and valid (i.e., not worthy of questioning or justifying). Modern domination can be understood functionally, on this account, because obedience is formed by an internalized set of values that come to orient the beliefs and personal orientations and to pattern the behavior and cognition of individuals, and these values are in fact adapted, over time, to fit the efficient imperatives of φ. But also, and more important, the norms of φ come to be autonomous from a specific set of actors, acting independently, but for the explicit benefit of a subset of the community. The Systemic Nature of Domination It is important to elaborate on what a functional relation is and how domination should be conceived as systemic and not arbitrary. John Searle has pointed to two features of any assignment of function. First, if the function of X is to Y, then both X and Y are parts of a system, and this system is “in part defined by purposes, goals, and values generally.” Second, if the function of X is to Y, then we can say that X is “supposed to cause or otherwise result in Y.”28 According to this understanding of functional arguments, there is an inescapable normative component to the ways that different actions or social ideas fit together. The normative component is derived from the fact that without them, there would be no way for social institutions to cohere and work at all. Individuals come to assign functions to different things, and they assign them statuses along with those functions.29 Hence, we come to assign status functions to things that they do not possess intrinsically. So, a tribal chief is assigned the function of making decisions, and this status of “chief” is not something he possesses intrinsically but rather as a result of a collective process of assigning that

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     status function to him. The chief possesses the power that he does as a result of the status that his subjects intentionally grant him. Without this, the chief would have to resort to violence or some other means of having power over his community. Domination is systemic, in this sense, because it comes to require specific forms of subjective agency and specific kinds of values, and it shares purposes for any kind of unequal power within a community to be either created or sustained. Domination is systemic in this sense because any form of material inequality or inequality of power between individuals will be unstable without a systemic interrelation of values that come to form subjects in the very ways necessary for unequal power relations to be maintained. Even more, the stability of institutions relies not on the arbitrary interference of one group of agents over another but rather on the system of norms that come to permeate the subjective orientations and cognitive patterns of individuals.30 Domination cannot be conceived as a simple causal chain of A over B on this view. Rather, it is a systemic, functional set of relations that hinge on the values and norms that allow for the validity of various institutional logics. Although it is true that any act of social domination requires an inequality of power and resources, it also requires, for it to be stable over time and for it to be able to recreate itself, the inculcation of certain values and beliefs to orient the actions of individuals. This does not mean that individuals always endorse or even adopt the values of the dominated; it simply means that they come to accept the rules, institutional norms, and values of the system to enough of an extent to make them valid and efficacious in terms of sustaining authority relations. What is crucial here is that we see that the systemic nature of domination rests on the idea that certain norms and habits become internalized so that physical coercion and violence are no longer necessary to sustain any hierarchical system of social relations. The nature of domination consists of the fact that a web of norms and values becomes the source of domination, the means by which individuals come to accept the orientations of practices and norms that benefit the interests of the most powerful within the social hierarchy. Lacking this, the material inequalities would lose their efficacy and legitimacy.31 As I suggested above, the functionalist account of domination sees the domination relationship as constituted by these value systems and not

  our steely encasement by the power that agents possess to interfere in another’s preferences and choices. The type of relationship that can be called domination therefore requires that both actors operate under a legitimizing norm or value, or set of norms and values, that secure and legitimize that relationship. A functionalist account of domination therefore refers to the ways that the various institutions within society can promote the existence and acceptance of hierarchical forms of authority that are not in the interest of its members but, rather, are organized for the interests of those at the top of that hierarchy. The functionalist element of this account highlights the ways that the “observed consequences [of standardized practices or items] . . . make for the adaptation of adjustment of a given system.”32 Individuals are adapted by the value systems they absorb through processes of socialization to the imperatives of specific interests. When these interests are those of a minority of the community, it is a system of domination since the purpose behind those values, norms, and practices is to somehow retain an inequality of power and resources. The functionalist account of domination therefore looks for the elements of domination not in the relation between agents (something characteristic of premodern forms of domination) but in the systemic ways that individuals come to accept systems of authority as legitimate and worthy of their obedience. Contrary to the arbitrary interference view, it is not the arbitrary authority of any agent that defines modern domination; rather, it is routinized and rationalized norms and conventions that come to be embedded in our institutions that forms subjects through socialization, inclining them to adopt the values that facilitate their legitimacy of these hierarchies. “The strongest is never strong enough to be master all of the time,” writes Rousseau, “unless he transforms his force into right and obedience into duty.”33 To become systemic, it must socialize all agents into a system of norms and values that orient their beliefs and practices toward specific goals. As I suggested above, domination needs to be located in the source rather than in the subject of any power relationship. Given this insight, a central dimension of domination is the compliance with any authority or command without submitting the nature of that authority or command to the scrutiny of one’s own reasoning, instead granting it almost immediate acceptance and legitimacy.34 As Ludwig Stein succinctly puts it about authority: it is the “untested acceptance

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     of another’s judgment.”35 Central to this phenomenon is the distinction between arbitrary interference and the ingrained value orientations that predispose individuals toward compliance and obedience. The element of domination therefore becomes the disabling of any individual’s ability to scrutinize, according to one’s own reasoning, whether or not a command ought to be obeyed. The disabling of this autonomous form of reasoning about obedience to commands is central to a systemic socialization that inculcates specific values and norms. Domination therefore does not originate in the agent performing domination (indeed, as I see it, both the subject and object in any authority relation are performing domination) but in those values and norms (“conventions,” or moers in Rousseau’s parlance) that we absorb as part of the process of socialization. From an institutional perspective, these values and norms evolve, and are put into place over time, in order to secure the broadest possible compliance to particular institutional goals. In premodern societies, this could take the form of specific rituals and customs, associated, say, with religion, that would secure patterns of activity of large groups of individuals. When the values and norms of that religious system changed or broke down, the authority relations within the hierarchy would also disintegrate. Similarly, in modern societies that have come to rationalize their institutions of economic production (the main goal of modern social institutions) and the forms of hierarchy necessary for that functioning, there emerge those values and norms that legitimize the practices within those hierarchical structures. Without those norms, there would be no way to secure authority relations outside of coercion and violence. The phenomenon of modern domination therefore pivots on the nature of those value systems and their ability to orient subjective actions.36 But this is not enough for domination to be in effect. Simply having values and norms that coordinate action is not sufficient for domination. Stopping at a stop sign, for instance, or driving on the right side of the road, or obeying laws that forbid you from talking on a cell phone while driving, and so on, do not qualify as domination. They may have authority in the sense that the agent accepts those commands from another agent, but they do not serve the interests of any other individual. This is because they are not commanded by or in the interests of an elite

  our steely encasement group within a hierarchical system but are rather laws that uphold the public interest rather than any private interests. Domination in this sense requires that these values and norms be constructed in such a way that they promote the interests of an elite subgroup within the community over the whole. This could be an economic class; a specific racial, gender, or other ascriptive group; or whatever. Norms of obedience to those commands, rules, norms, or practices that promote the interests of a superior subgroup within any hierarchy are therefore a central condition of any stable system of domination. More important, domination in a modern sense is premised on the capacity of norm-governed institutions to shape subjective power of evaluation, cognition, and forms of “second nature.” Modern domination is anchored in, finds its source in, the web of values and norms that make institutions cohere. But more to the point, modern domination differs from the arbitrary interference thesis in that it is able to secure that power of control through the routinization of certain structures and adaptation mechanisms. These processes of socialization mold the value orientations of individuals, thereby legitimizing the authority relations of hierarchical groups. But what is central on this account is that those value orientations are external to the individual’s own autonomous reasoning process. Acquired through specific kinds of socialization, these value systems therefore come to be the basis of domination in modern societies, quashing forms of questioning, resistance, and dissent from the broadly accepted norms within any hierarchically organized institution or group.37 In this sense, modern domination is something to which we are subject by the logics of institutions themselves; the institutional logics take on their own independent existence as a social fact and become independent of the specific wills of particular agents. Rather than being a largely top-down phenomenon, domination needs to be seen from the reverse point of view: from the ways that those that occupy the lower rungs of any social order or hierarchy come to justify it and their place within it,38 even when this is not in their own objective interests, by which I mean those interests that are for the common benefit as opposed to the benefit of elites or some other subgroup of the community. The functionalist account of domination therefore places emphasis on the socialization processes and their effects on the individual’s ability to adapt to the institutional arrangements within which she lives her

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     life. This is because she requires that I recognize that authority, accept it, and, if it is to be sustained in any sensible way, to see it as legitimate and as in some sense correct, even if I may not like it. This is because I come to submit myself to the convention itself, to an “impersonal, objective principle”39 that comes to orient my ideas and practices in the world, specifically to whom I owe obedience and from whom I ought to accept commands, and why.40 Domination, in my sense, is only active and in play when and if individuals succumb to these broad patterns of legitimacy to institutions that cannot be shown to contribute to the general interest of the society to which one belongs. But this becomes a difficult thing to achieve on one’s own since one of the central elements of modern domination is that the various institutions of my society will attempt to individuate me, to socialize me, into a given system of power and obedience to which I will feel inclined to find legitimate (whether in fact I actively endorse this system or not). Authority, in this sense, is the extent to which certain commands will be carried out by subordinates.41 In modern societies, this is achieved through the shaping of values that orient individuals toward a compliance with and acceptance of their own subordination. This is because the systems of social integration that at one time could be seen as naked, arbitrary power become routinized in the process of rationalization. The more that these institutions become successful in modern societies, the more that they are able to domesticate the personality of subjects to the goals and aims of the system as a whole. To be sure, this system benefits particular individuals, specific agents within society as a whole; if I am dominated because I have come to follow rules, procedures, and values that give unequal or undue power to others over me, and I see these rules, procedures, and values as worthy of my allegiance and obedience, then we are working with a very different phenomenon than described by neorepublican thinkers. Routinization To specify the functionalist account, I need to outline the processes of routinization, rationalization, and internalization as the basic mechanisms whereby institutions come to function and how domination is intertwined with these logics of institutional coherence. In this sense, the

  our steely encasement arbitrariness of domination is reduced or, in some instances, eliminated. Domination no longer depends on the will of any individual but relies on a whole complex of other institutions, norms, and other actors, who themselves may be dominated by the same system of norms. This seeks to capture an element of modern forms of domination and its effects on the broader culture seen as a pattern of value orientations that individuals come to absorb and that come to shape and inform their own autonomous wills. Institutional norms give coherence and shape to institutions but also to subjective actions and value systems. Routinization refers to the way in which power relations become stable over time by inhering not in persons but in laws and rules that are rationalized and organized. The routinization of power means that subjects come to see patterns of authority and come to expect certain responses, rewards, and/or punishments when certain acts are performed. Rationalization is the process whereby these rules, laws, norms, and so on come to be seen as legitimate by individuals socialized into any given institution. It also means that they come to learn what status functions are to be seen as valid and as worthy of their allegiance or to some extent to be legitimate. Internalization refers to the ways in which individuals come to absorb these externally structured norms and values. This absorption of subjective value orientations shapes the structure of normative ideas that constitute any individual’s understanding of the world and his or her place within it. Now, the deeper layers of social relations beyond what we merely observe as a concrete empirical action require that we see domination as not only a structural concept but also, and more importantly, in functional terms as well. The structural dimension of institutions, on the one hand, emphasizes the limits on behavior, as well as the ways individuals are compelled to act under those constraints. The functional dimension, on the other hand, emphasizes the processes that inculcate individuals into the different logics of institutions, the norms, beliefs, and values that the institution requires for you to be accepted into it, work within it, and for that institution itself to actually function, it requires just those values, norms, beliefs, and so on. The centrality of this point is that these values and norms only take on real significance when they are routinized. Weber introduced the concept of routinization (Veralltäglichung) to solve the problem of how patterns of social action and subjective belief and

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     legitimacy can be sustained once the charismatic stage of authority had begun to break down.42 He argued that the only way social structures of power could be sustained was if that power were routinized into the norms and beliefs of individuals.43 Routinization is able to secure power relations because it is able to show individuals that certain forms of power, certain actions, certain ways of seeing the world, and so on are acceptable and others are not; it is able to form patterns of value orientations that will make individuals evaluate and cognize their world in specific ways.44 Rationalization In the modern sense, routinization is the process whereby repeated expectations and responses come to shape the way individuals perceive and grasp their world. But this also requires that these routinized practices be rational in some basic sense. For a practice to be rational, it must in some way be regular, patterned, and predictable. It does not mean that these practices serve the common interest of society or withstand some kind of rational moral scrutiny or demands for justification, only that they make some predictable sense to the subjects internalizing them. When they lack rationality as a basic feature, then the norm, practice, command, institution, or whatever will cease to be valid or legitimate and tend not to be internalized. That they are regular, repeated, governed by some set of rules and procedures that make them legitimate, and coordinate broader forms of actions that people come to see as “correct” is an essential element of modern domination. This is because these conventions are grounded not in rational expectations but rather come, over time and because of the processes of socialization, also grounded in the value systems of individuals, thereby orienting their actions and grounding their legitimate sense of the world. It may seem that routinization is itself a form of rationalization. But this need not be the case. Rationalization occurs as a result of the ways that the logic of any given domination relation is made isomorphic with the system logics within which the relation is embedded. This grants the domination relation a kind of second nature, a givenness that hides the force of the power asymmetry that constitutes it. In this sense, we may come to justify the tyrannical boss or competitive work culture by seeing these things as “rational” or even “necessary” given the environments

  our steely encasement within which these institutions operate. The key idea of rationalization is to distinguish it from what is rational since rationalization is the coding of a norm, practice, or whole institution that the individual comes to accept as basic to his or her world. Rationalization is effectively the extension of the external system logic into the subjective, cognitive structures of consciousness of the individual. Unlike theories of domination and oppression rooted in the analytic approach, a functionalist theory of domination sees that the norms and logics of domination must have a transformative effect on consciousness to the extent that they become reified within the subject. They must, in short, be internalized by the subject for them to become effective or to become constitutive of domination relations. Internalization It should be obvious that the routinization and rationalization processes would be useless unless they are properly internalized into the personality and value system of the individual. This is a crucial element in modern domination as theorized by Weber and missed by the neorepublican and structuralist accounts of domination. Internalization is not simply the encoding of norms and practices into the everyday activities of individuals; rather, it refers to the shaping of the conscience, of the cognitive, evaluative, epistemic, and cathectic layers of the subject, binding him to the legitimacy of institutional norms. As Erich Fromm notes on this problem, an “authoritarian conscience” emerges when “the laws and sanctions of external authority become part of oneself, as it were, and instead of feeling responsible to something outside itself, one feels responsible to something inside, to one’s conscience.”45 Lacking this, we would have an ineffective system of hierarchical power relations since they would not command the obedience of others in any stable, enduring sense. The problem with the structural account is that it sees the formation of subjects as simply the “learning of these concepts and norms,” something that “is not necessarily the same as believing in and propositionally avowing the rightness” of those practices and norms.46 The functionalist account of domination therefore sees that the submission to commands and to norms and practices that serve to sustain asymmetrical power relations and interests are in fact internalized into the conscience of subjects. They are not being interfered with arbitrarily; they are, quite to the contrary, being

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     shaped to view the interests of hierarchical relations as valid, as acceptable, and as justified.

Personality Adaptation and the Nature of Agency In his basic definition of the nature of domination (Herrschaft), Weber says that it is “the situation in which the command (Befehl) of the ruler or rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or more others (the ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way that their conduct to a socially relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake.”47 As I have been suggesting, the latter part of this definition is central to any understanding of modern domination: the very idea that the command of an other becomes the maxim of the conduct of the dominated. This suggests a role for values and value orientations in affecting personality adaptation.48 Values, in this sense, are “modes of normative orientation of action in a social system” that allow individuals to code their world, guiding their actions.49 Values are the foundation within which institutions are able to function since institutions are stabilized patterns of value systems. But even more, at the subjective level, values are “evaluative beliefs that synthesize affective and cognitive elements to orient people to the world in which they live.”50 In this sense, domination becomes possible to the extent that individuals come to comply with the various normative patterns that socializing institutions deploy, and this is something that is particularly likely in societies with hierarchical institutions. Modern forms of domination therefore become embedded in a broader system of social norms and conventions. If the internalization process is successful, then these values become principles of conscience, and they are crucial in understanding the systemic nature of domination. It is not simply that an agent is able actively to shape your preferences; it is, in a more pernicious sense, that you live in a society that requires you to see its systems as legitimate, as valid, as correct, as “second nature,” that is, if you have been properly socialized into and by the social institutions that make up any social system. This constitutes the very act of domination—of the orientation of the values that you come to adopt and that orient your actions and the ways that you legitimize the kind of

  our steely encasement social relations in your world. It is, to borrow a phrase from Simmel, the “psychological crystallization of an actual social power.”51 In this sense, the cognitive patterns of the individual come to be routinized by the institutional logics that constitute the rules and norms of institutions. Modern domination comes into existence when we leave the realm of coercive authority and construct a culture of compliance to the institutions that sustain or amplify hierarchical power relations that in some way extract benefits from subordinates even as those subordinates grant the validity and power to those that dominate them. This is not simply an issue of having power over someone; it requires a certain kind of social structure and function for it to be effected. Other theorists of power have pointed to the centrality of dominant values, beliefs, and rituals as central to the reproduction of power systems and social relations of power.52 But these are seen as epiphenomena to the actual nature of power relations. The real key to the story is, as I mentioned above, the embeddedness of norms and practices into institutions that come to be internalized by individuals. It is here that domination coheres as a social and political phenomenon.

The Critique of Domination in Modern Societies If the theory of domination as arbitrary interference is insufficient for an account of modern forms of domination and social power because it misplaces the object of legitimation—that is, not on personal agents but on systemic processes and rules that secure the cohesion of the institution—then we are forced to ask what domination actually is and why it is a valuable category of power. As I mentioned above, we can observe domination when we are forced into value systems that legitimize institutions that do not promote or serve the general interest of the society to which I belong but instead only an elite subset of that society. Take the example, posited by Jeffrey Isaac, of the teacher and the student. On Isaac’s structural view of power, the teacher has “power over” (he also refers to this kind of power as “domination or subordination”) the student owing to the structural relation that they have toward one another. In this case, the structural relation of an inequality of power qualifies as an act of domination. In Pettit’s view, however, this would not be sufficient for the existence of domination unless the teacher were able to wield arbitrary power

Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self     over the student—that is, if he possessed the capacity to act on those students, against their own interests, without any rules preventing him from doing so. But according to the functionalist view of domination, both of these are insufficient to account for domination. I would say that domination in a modern sense is active, using this example, when the structure and the function of the teacher-student relation is embedded in the broader patterns of values that exist in that institution and, in addition, if it can be shown they reinforce power relations that sustain hierarchical relations that are not in the general interest of all concerned. Domination requires more than simply that someone has power over you; what is also needed is the fact that power is granted from below, that it is seen as valid and legitimate, and that it serve the interests of an elite subgroup of the community. This leads us to very different political conclusions than the arbitrary interference account that neorepublicans have put forth. If the functionalist account of social domination is convincing, then we are led to conclude that the very structure of society itself, the specific features of the social order, requires alteration. It is not enough to claim, as Pettit does, that we have the ability to constrain the capacity of arbitrary interference of others into our lives since, as I have been suggesting, the very forms of power that predominate in the bulk of society consists in forms of power that subjects are socialized to see as legitimate. The very logics of institutions that are organized or in some way influenced by hierarchical forms of power will come to shape the value systems that individuals come to absorb, affecting their rational agency. If we simply see domination as an interagent phenomenon requiring only new laws, institutions, and procedures that will limit or to some extent negate the power of dominating agents, then we need only to extend new laws to offer protection from domination; it would not be necessary to change the very structure of society itself. This seems to me naive. The functionalist understanding of domination brings together the dual problems of material and resource inequality that are the foundation of social hierarchies with the symbolic and subjective dimensions of values and action that give power relations their stability. Social domination is therefore a deeper, more subtle phenomenon than either the arbitrary interference or the structuralist accounts allow. Coming to terms with the ways that the inequalities of material resources

  our steely encasement can come to shape larger forms of domination and unfreedom, and the ways that the stubborn rootedness of these inequalities is perpetuated through the shaping of subjective consciousness, seems to me to be the most crucial path toward understanding and overcoming domination. Of course, such a political project still requires a sense of critical reason. What is necessary now is to show how the internalization of norms and values that constitute social domination also constitute a kind of passive agency. More to the point, how this modern form of power creates and sustains a kind of noncritical acceptance of these norms. Reification as a pathology of modern individuality will therefore result from these cybernetic structures of power. It is to this problem of modern subjectivity that I will now turn.

chapter 3

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis

Reification is at the center of my thesis about the deformation of the modern self. Building on the systemic nature of social dominance charted in the last chapter, I would like to explore the social-ontological and collective-intentional features of social domination. In so doing, I will seek to link the phenomena of collective intentionality, domination, and reification. More specifically, I want to advance the understanding of domination as a specific kind of power and control—a kind that operates via the reshaping of consciousness to the extent that it masks the fundamentally heteronomous nature of the conceptual field of the individual, as well as the very ontology, the essential reality, of the social world itself. My basic thesis is that the concept of social domination requires an understanding of consciousness and the cognition of social agents such that they constitute any relation of domination. This entails a kind of routinization of constitutive rules and norms to the extent that they actively create and sustain unequal forms of social power that benefit superordinates within a hierarchically organized system of power relations. Reification, in this sense, is not simply a matter of making human traits “thing-like”; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a kind of naturalization of certain forms of collective intentionality that serve unequal power relations. In this sense, domination requires that we also understand a reconstructed concept of reification—a condition of agency and cognition operating under

  our steely encasement the collective-intentional rules that serve to hide from cognitive view the actual nature of domination relations. In my account, domination is a particular kind of social power that enables an agent to extract some kind of power or surplus benefit from another agent or group of agents. In this sense, domination is not simply a coercive force or relation but rather a social relation where subordinates and superordinates actively participate in the relation owing to the ways that constitutive rules are routinized into social norms and into the collective intentionality of subjects. When domination relations have achieved this level of routinization and rationalization, subjects will come to accept as valid such relations because those domination relations are rooted in the cognitive and evaluative capacities of their agency. As a result, they accept as legitimate and basic the collective-intentional rules that have been formed by unequal relations of power, and individuals thereby come to accept them as valid, as part of a basic sense of their world. Reification now can be conceived not only as a pathology of consciousness, as the expression of a particular set of constitutive rules and form of collective intentionality, but also as a producer of a particular kind of social reality, a set of social facts effected by these collective-intentional states and constitutive rules that serve to sustain the domination relations within the community. The reification of status functions and constitutive rules that promote domination relations is therefore a key aspect to understanding the ways such relations can endure and be sustained. Reification also gives us a key insight into the specifically modern character of social power. This does not mean that all forms of reification are expressions of domination, but it does imply that domination becomes increasingly stabilized and deeply rooted once collective-intentional stances have been reified. Even more, this reification of consciousness as the proliferation of specific collective-intentional rule-sets conceals alternative forms of social reality that can be judged to be more in the objective interests of the members of that community. Although the social ontology literature is not lacking in its discussion of social power as a topic of interest, it does not make domination or reification an issue of concern. My basic task in what follows is to show that the concept of reification can, in a sense, be reconstructed through the descriptive vocabulary of collective intentionality and, as a result, can

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    be understood in a more coherent way as a phenomenon and pathology of consciousness and cognition. But even more, I want to suggest that the concept of reification can be seen as a means to understand the relationship between modern forms of domination and the shape of intentional consciousness and agency. It is a pathology of consciousness and rational cognition, to be sure, but it can be seen also as the link between the forms of social domination made possible by unequal control of material-social resources, on the one hand, and the kind of collective intentionality that such domination requires—through the specific norms, practices, values, and so on—to create and sustain those very domination relations, on the other. In this sense, reification can be understood as a specific kind of pathology of consciousness wherein the material power relations and interests of any social order, to be successful and stable over time, must be able to shape and orient the collective intentionality of the members of that community so that the existent power relations are seen as basic, “natural,” or at least valid in some fundamental sense. In my reconstruction, the concept of reification takes into account the ways that consciousness fails to perceive how deontic powers, constitutive rules, norms, social facts, and so on are created in order to shape and orient action, consciousness, practices, and the very purposes of the community itself. In this sense, reification is a defective form of consciousness not only because it fails to perceive the domination relations that constitute society but also because it is shaped by the collective-intentional states and constitutive rule-sets that circumscribe those domination relations, an active dimension where individuals participate in collective plans of action, intention, and meaning that support and create those same domination relations. This is important insofar as it connects the mainstream social ontology literature with the critical theory literature and, as a result, offers us a more compelling path forward to map the ways that a critical social ontology can be constructed along the lines of understanding how the purposes and ends of legitimate social relations are shaped and for what ends they are pursued. In this sense, my thesis will be that domination relations achieve legitimacy via the phenomenon of reification. This in turn can be conceived as the internalized acceptance of constitutive rule-sets that thereby produce a collective-intentional framework to sustain domination relations.

  our steely encasement

Social Power and Social Ontology As a matter of preliminaries, Searle’s account of social ontology as collective intentionality and constitutive rules means that we possess the cognitive capacity to posit specific functions and statuses to people, objects, and practices such that we collectively accept those statuses as “real” in an ontological sense. Thus, playing a game of poker requires that all those involved follow certain rules of the game, assign value to the physical cards being used, and so on. The game of poker is this set of rules and the behavior of rule-following that poker entails; it has a distinctive status and warrant because of these rules. The social field is essentially, for Searle, the result of collective forms of intentionality that produce social facts: “Collective intentionality exists both in the form of cooperative behavior and in consciously shared attitudes such as shared desires, beliefs, and intentions. Whenever two or more agents share a belief, desire, intention or other intentional state, and wherever they are aware of so sharing, the agents in question have collective intentionality.” Searle then argues that this collective process of being able to share thoughts and intentions means that we can collectively assign functions to objects. Assignment of functions means that we have the ability to “count certain things as having a status that they do not have intrinsically and then to grant, with that status, a set of functions, which can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance of the status and the corresponding function, that creates the very possibility of institutional facts. Thus, the basic formula “X counts as Y in C” means that any object is assigned a given function within any given context. We consider an individual a teacher, a president, or a police officer within given social contexts, and we grant them certain powers or deny them certain powers depending on that context. A teacher may have authority over me within a classroom but not in my living room. It is when the assignment of function becomes routinized and regularized by a group of people that it becomes a “constitutive rule,” one of a series of norms that “not only regulate, they also create the very possibility of, or define, new forms of behavior.”1 This requires a slightly more complex operation of consciousness. It is not enough simply to assign a function to a person or thing. Searle maintains that to create institutional facts, we also must have the capacity

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    to create what he calls “deontic powers”; that is, we must be able to assign powers to others and to certain relations such that members of a group collectively possess certain dispositions in relation to them, such as obligations, desires, and so on. He then delineates this operational rule: “We (or I) make it the case by declaration that a Y status function exists in C and in so doing we (or I) create a relation R between Y and a certain person or persons, S, such that in virtue of SRY, S has the power to perform acts (of type) A.”2 This formula creates a deontic power because now, if this rule is accepted by the members of any group, each will think, act, and cognize the world according to the content of this rule.3 It essentially assigns not only a function to a person or thing; it also assigns a set of specified duties and obligations to different members and relations, granting them specific powers within certain contexts. Therefore, this rule becomes more simply stated as “We collectively recognize or accept (There exists Y in C, and because SRY (S has power (S does A))).” Deontic power therefore results once these declarations of status function have been accepted and are recognized by any social group. As a result, each member of such a group will possess certain predispositions in certain contexts; they will accordingly adopt certain attitudes, certain obligations, desires, and so on that orient their thoughts and actions. As these deontic powers cluster around certain practices over time, as they become organized, routinized and internalized in a systematic way, they form what Searle refers to as “Background power”: “a set of presuppositions, attitudes, dispositions, capacities, and practices of any community that set normative constraints on the members of that community in such a way that violations of those constraints are subject to the negative imposition of sanctions by any member of the community.”4 What is significant here is the way that the declaration of status functions becomes ingrained to achieve deontic power and, in turn, shape the intentional states of agents that specify social facts and social reality.5 In this sense, the ways that we assign authority to others, allow them to pull us over for speeding, arrange our work schedule, and so on, all depend on the extent that we have internalized and assume as basic their respective statuses as police officers or as bosses. Searle’s account of constitutive rules suggests that the creation of social power requires a collective acceptance of the basic constitutive rules that form our collective

  our steely encasement intentionality. The concept of “deontic power” therefore can only come about once we see that there is an irreducibly cognitive basis for the construction and sustenance of social facts. Lacking this capacity to shape deontic powers, there is no way to maintain social power, since it is only by securing power relationships among members of any group that social institutions can achieve some sense of objective validity or any causal powers.

Social Power and Domination The concept of power that Searle advocates is convincing, but it fails to move beyond a basic and generically descriptive understanding of social power. In essence, he proceeds from a basically Weberian account of power. For Weber, power is to be seen as a specific relation between two agents, A and B, where A has power over B if A has the capacity to get B to do something B would not otherwise do.6 Searle’s account of power relies on this conception, with the important addition that this act of power must be intentionally produced. If, however, we expand this idea into the specific category of power I am considering, that of domination, then we must add that it is a kind of intentional power wielded with some end or purpose in mind, specifically the purpose of enhancing some benefit. This implies that A not only is able to get B to do something that B would not otherwise do, but that A gets B to do something that is specifically not in the interest of B but is in the interest of A. Take Spinoza’s basic definition of slavery when he maintains that “if the purpose of the action is not to the advantage of the doer but of him who commands, then the doer is a slave, and does not serve his own interest.”7 Now we are working with a more specific understanding of power, which is the capacity to control the action of another for one’s own benefit. This kind of power—domination—is therefore distinct from a more general understanding of social power, since the latter can be used for the common ends, purposes, and interests of the community as a whole, not only for the benefit of the one who wields power. Therefore, we have a concept of power that differs from the one pointed to by Searle and derived from Weber. Domination is captured in its simplest form by the formula A  B  A+, where A+ signifies an enhanced, surplus benefit (+)

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    to A as a result of the control it exerts over B. Recall that for Searle, social power is when A gets B to do something that B would not otherwise seek to do; it is simply A  B  φ, where φ signifies an act or practice or whatever that A wishes B to perform. For Searle, then, the “core notion of power is that A has power over S with respect to action B if and only if A can intentionally get S to do what A wants regarding B, whether S wants to do it or not.”8 But, as I have been trying to show, this is necessary but not sufficient for domination since there is nothing in the definition to isolate an inequality of power and an inequality of benefit, both of which are required to capture the condition of slavery or domination, as per Spinoza’s, as well as our own intuitive, understanding of the term. A teacher might get a student to φ—say, to do his homework, or to open her book to a specific page, or whatever—but this is not necessarily an expression of domination, even though it is an expression of power in Searle’s basic sense. It is only when φ-ing leads to A+, or a condition of surplus benefit for A, that there is a domination relationship in play. This surplus benefit need not be only a material benefit; it can be psychological or emotional, economic or material. Dominance is a kind of power that places the dominus in a hierarchically superordinate position to the servus in order for that servus to supply some surplus benefit to the dominus. The real question that concerns me here, however, is the extent to which such power relations are mutually constituted or are exerted through force over subordinates. Domination is therefore a condition where (1) a social relation is hierarchically structured between superordinate (dominus) and subordinate (servus); and (2) the purpose of this hierarchy is the extraction of some benefit or the securing of some benefit from the subordinate. To this I would like to add the following condition to show how social ontological debates can illuminate the problem of domination: (3) superordinates have the power to shape and create not only the concrete institutional forms of life for the community but to also be able to shape the collective-intentional and constitutive rule-sets of the members of the hierarchical group as a whole. What this means is that a domination relation is one that must not only be hierarchical and extractive in some sense; it must also, in order to achieve efficiency, be rationalized into the norms and institutional logics of the community itself. Here is where

  our steely encasement collective intentionality can be seen to play an important role. For such a rationalized, routinized, and internalized form of domination to achieve rational efficiency, the status functions and roles within the domination relationships must permeate the shared collective intentionality of the group as a whole. Sociologically, this can be a painful process, as when new institutions begin to emerge within society, new economic and technological realities effect new social relationships, and so on. These kinds of social transition will only be effective if new forms of collective intentionality and constitutive rules are able to achieve deontic power among the community. This would seem to lead us to a theory of domination not unlike that of Philip Pettit and his followers, who maintain that domination is the capacity of an agent to interfere on an arbitrary basis in the actions and choices that you wish to make.9 But this is not the case. Domination cannot simply be my capacity to interfere with choices you would like to make. This would render the vast majority of dominations out of scope, since domination can and most of the time does occur not through some conscious interference in your choices but is veiled beneath rationalized and ostensibly valid norms that the dominated often help create. The key deficit in Pettit’s account of domination therefore lies in his inability to see that domination also requires, in its efficient, more prevalent cases, the acceptance on the part of each agent that acts within the collectiveintentional nexus of beliefs, norms, and meanings that create deontic and institutional powers and social facts. Indeed, more than simply constitutive rules, these institutional powers also possess what Frank Hindriks has called “status rules” or “rules that concern the enabling and constraining roles of institutions.”10 In this sense, status rules are those rules that are embodied within institutional logics and that radiate rules to be internalized by those who are to participate in those institutions: “As such, they reveal the way in which institutions affect the parameters of social interaction.”11 If we take Searle’s and Hindriks’s respective ideas about the nature of constitutive and status rules, then we can see that the rationalization of domination relationships can lead to an internalization—by which I mean the implicit acceptance of legitimacy—of those relations, thereby hiding the dominating character of those relations from cognitive view.

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    The source of the power is ultimately all of us—or at least all of us who consent to and go along with the general social facts and constitutive rules of the community to which we belong. Hence, Searle writes: “Who exactly is exercising power over whom exactly? The answer I am suggesting is that in these cases anybody can exercise power over anybody. If you are a member of the society, and as such you know that you share the norms of that society, then you are in a position to exercise power because of your capacity for imposing informal sanctions against those who violate the norms, in the knowledge that your sanctions will be supported by others.”12 Domination relies on the same kind of constitutive and status rules that generate forms of deontic power, but there is something more: it is a kind of power that is not simply against your or my will—it may be, but it does not have to be. What really counts is that the deontic status and powers of the social facts of the society or group are oriented toward the benefit of some of that group at the expense of others. The power that exists does not serve us all but ultimately benefits the superordinates within any hierarchy. We can see that for domination to be active, there must be a kind of internalization of certain norms and rules of action and thought within the subject. The idea here is that domination is not an interference in one’s choices but a deeper phenomenon of transforming one’s intentionality in order to sustain hierarchical relations of control. Indeed, if we take the thesis of collective intentionality into account, domination and reification can be seen to mutually constitute one another. Specifically, consider the fact that forms of power are internalized by subjects and that these internalized concepts, ideas, norms, values, and so on can constitute the consciousness and conscience of that subject. Erich Fromm calls this “authoritarian conscience”: “In the formation of conscience . . . authorities such as the parents, the church, the state, public opinion are either consciously or unconsciously accepted as ethical and moral legislators whose laws and sanctions one adopts, thus internalizing them.” But, he continues, this further implies that “the laws and sanctions of external authority become part of oneself, as it were, and instead of feeling responsible to something outside oneself, one feels responsible to something inside, to one’s conscience.”13 Hence, for B to accept the commands of A, B believes that-p is valid and in some sense right or that-p conforms to the basic

  our steely encasement constitutive rule-set that B has internalized granting that-p validity. This is recursive to the basic constitutive rules that assign the deontic powers to different individuals, practices, purposes, and so on. It implies that the subject has internalized a specific set of constitutive rules and a particular kind of collective intentionality. As such, A need not give specific commands to B; it becomes more precise to argue that both A and B operate under the collective-intentional rule-sets that they have been socialized to accept and that govern their agency and their basic intentionality. This process of internalization is where much of the action is located. When the subject’s cognition maps the constitutive rule-following of others in the community through the process of socialization, the rules can be said to be internalized. This occurs as a result of routinization, and what are being routinized are the constitutive rules that shape the intentionality of the subject. If the mechanism of internalization is not efficient, then subjects will fail to be in sync with the requisite constitutive rules; they will fail to internalize them properly in the sense that they do not become anchored in the intentional structures of consciousness that assign meaning and bases for action. Social power will therefore become crude, descending into coercion rather than efficient forms of rational power. Indeed, the more routinized these constitutive rules become, the more efficient power and authority will become as well.14 Domination relations can also be more easily accepted as part of the given reality since they become a kind of “second nature”; the constitutive rules of such relations become part of the basic nexus of social facts constituting any given social reality. In this sense, reification is a cognitive pathology that affects the collective intentionality of social groups and secures certain forms of domination relations and social facts that make forms of social power “second nature” and accepted as the basic contours of the community as a whole by its members. This is because what are being internalized through the process of routinization are certain constitutive rules of intentional consciousness. Subjects come to create and recreate the prevailing institutional structures through their practices and beliefs because underlying them are constitutive rules of consciousness that shape their cognitive and evaluative powers. They become, in the most basic sense, reified. Internalization is aided by the processes of recognition of norms and rule-following that occur via the socialization process more generally. The

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    relation of recognition in cementing power relations should not be underestimated. Although some within the critical theory tradition insist on its inherently emancipatory potential, once constitutive rules become part of the fabric of social facts and institutional norms and are then internalized by subjects, they are easily replicated and produce a legitimacy to the given social reality.15 Collective intentionality requires collective forms of acceptance, and this level of penetration of constitutive rules into subjective consciousness literally creates the foundations for institutional forms and social facts.16 More important, however, it grants an implicit, passive legitimacy to the norms and social reality that we inhabit, thereby reifying the power relations and domination relations of our society. The deontic power that adheres to the norms, values, practices, persons, and relations within the existent reality come to be viewed as second nature, as part of the unreflected aspects of social reality. It can also penetrate into the active cognitive and intentional structures of the subject, colonizing rationality and the content of thought itself and thereby taking a more active form than simply passive consciousness. Hence, we can glimpse at a fruitful moment the intersection of reification of consciousness, on the one hand, and the internalization, recognition, and acceptance of norms and the prevailing social reality, on the other. Recognition becomes a crucial mechanism through which the subject comes to internalize and absorb the constitutive rules and norms that domination relations require. What becomes apparent is that the norms that become internalized by the subject formulate a basic, indeed even axiomatic, intentional structure— or a fundamental, indeed reified, set of constitutive rules—which forms the basis of the subject’s consciousness, as well as his or her cognitive and evaluative capacities. This results in an incapacity to call those constitutive rules into question since they form a basic, deontic framework within which consciousness operates. It is therefore essential that we see domination as possessing both the material problem of uneven resource control and its link to shape institutional forms of life and constitutive rules. Social power, when successful, creates its own social reality in accordance with itself. Social power now has an ontological character in that it consists not only of the capacity to control and deploy social and natural resources but, more importantly, to change the nature of social reality itself. This is the superstructural expression

  our steely encasement of material-economic power. It is essential that any form of unequal resource control be accompanied by constitutive rules that sustain and legitimize it. Indeed, the increasing unequal control over resources within the community can entail an increased control over other institutions as well—education, culture, law, and so on—and thereby effect changes in the fabric of constitutive rules. This helps us see the relation between resource power and deontic power, as well as between the socioeconomic domain of resource control, on the one hand, and the cognitive-subjective domain, on the other, since the security of material or resource power (or powers over resources, such as ownership rights) requires that there exist norms that individuals within the society follow, norms they have internalized at the level of their collective intentionality to grant the institutions of economic and resource control any kind of causal powers. This is because for a norm to have a causal power, it must be able to organize individuals into groups with their own causal properties; the norms that are shared by the group, their collective intentionality, produce the powers of those norms.17 Capital, in this sense, is not simply a relation of material control; it must also be a congealed set of norms embedded in the collective intentionality of any group. It is, at its base, a social fact, not a material one.

Self-Constitution and Normative Entanglement To say that collective intentionality or webs of norms create the social facts that are of concern is a descriptive and not a critical account of what reification is and how it functions. The reason for this is that understanding how norms shape social practices entails understanding how a specific kind of social reality is created and sustained. In this way, we can see that reification, when approached via a theory of norms, is a pathology, not merely of our epistemic capacities but of the very world-constituting powers of our cooperative sociality. This normative approach to reification allows us to see it operate on two distinct levels: (1) by shaping and controlling our practices, and (2) by colonizing our cognitive-reflexive categories for apprehending the social reality constituted by those practices. Reification is therefore a more complex process of alienating consciousness from the actual sociopractical features of our own activities but also the

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    objective world itself: both the concrete artifacts of the cooperative practices that our collective intentionality makes possible and the subjectivecognitive capacities to rationally comprehend that ontology. With this in view, my next thesis is that when we speak of reification, we are talking about a specific way that norms are internalized and “naturalized” within the consciousness of social agents. Crucial here is the idea that reification is not simply a matter of making certain practices and norms a matter of “habit,” or whatever, but rather how norms and practices that express a relation of domination as discussed above are made second nature to the subject. Viewed in this way, reification must be able to be deeply constitutive of the normative structures of consciousness and heteronomously implant the intentional rule-sets responsible for building cooperative practices within the subject’s consciousness. Normative entanglement is the term I use to represent this phenomenon, and it occurs when norms are successfully socialized via the process of routinization and internalization that I discussed in the previous chapter. It also occurs, however, as the social development and socialization of the subject is undergoing social learning to the extent that the institutionalized and routinized norms of institutions become “entangled” with the subject’s development. Norms are the building blocks of social practices, and social practices are the socially coordinated forms of activity that embody social structures and, in a more global way, social reality itself. Norms are internalized by subjects and can form a kind of background condition for a series of practices. This can happen in all sorts of contexts, as Sally Haslanger has observed: “Once socialized, even our own behavior in accordance with norms comes ‘naturally’—we develop a ‘second nature’—and the role of culture is concealed. As a result, from the perspective [of] those engaged in a practice, it is not always clear the extent to which patterns in behavior are the result of natural impulses or social norms.”18 This certainly counts as a basic description of the internalization of norms that form many social practices. But reification is something more, as I have been indicating, in that it specifically is a kind of normative internalization and “naturalization” of norms that conceal relations of domination from view by endowing them with internal validity: they are not simply norms and practices that we take as “second nature,” as Haslanger observes, but they

  our steely encasement conceal from view, distort even, the actual nature of social phenomena. What is key to the impact of reification is that it is a patterned control of the collective intentionality that shapes group activity toward relations, practices, and purposes that are the essential features of our social reality. For thinkers such as Lukács, reification was the result of the ways that the commodity form shaped in consciousness the nature of labor and human praxis. The commodity was able to hide from view the actual practical and exploitative nature of the commodity form, thereby gradually normalizing capitalism as a social reality. From a historical vantage point, this process has only deepened; the cybernetic society is a reified totality. In this sense, reification is a kind of social learning procedure where the norms of the technical, administered world are able to infiltrate the learning processes of individuals as they are socialized.19 A key thesis here is that the internalization of norms shaped by a social world patterned by the commodity form takes place at younger ages of socialization and is more entwined with the processes of social learning than in previous historical periods. The end result of this is a resonance between the internal, intentional structures of consciousness and the institutionalized external world. The thesis of normative entanglement operates via this process of social learning. Shared forms of intentionality are how norms become social practices, how social reality is articulated and constructed. This occurs early in childhood, as children develop the capacity for normative self-governance or for internalizing norms picked up from their experiences with other agents. In the development of the child’s absorption of norms, we see that the child is able to reproduce within his or her own consciousness the idea that a third person is evaluating his or her ideas and decisions. As Michael Tomasello points out: “The general process is thus that the young child imagines how some social interactant is comprehending or evaluating her, and then she uses this to socially self-regulate. Scaling up the sociality involved, children from about three years of age . . . socially self-regulate on the basis of cultural structures—such as prototypically, conventional and moral norms—that are based in cognitive processes of collective intentionality, what we may call normative self-governance.”20 This means that the internalization of norms is not something akin to a social script or some set of discrete rules. Rather, it indicates that at an early age children’s very capacity for sociality is shaped

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    by the normative structures they imbibe from their interactions with others. These norms constitute their very sense of the social world, the basis for their social cognition. Tomasello’s argument is an important building block for the thesis of reification that I am working out here. One reason is it touches on the very essence of what human sociality is: not limited to communication or recognition or some other insufficient theoretical reductionism but as meaningful participation within groups. Tomasello describes this in a more nuanced way: The individuals who could participate meaningfully in this process were those who behaved cooperatively by subordinating themselves to “good” reasons: my personal preference does not matter, but I will agree and go along with whatever decision is supported by the most and best reasons, using criteria on which we all agree. By engaging in this process individuals’ thinking became organized in a much wider and more reason-based “web of beliefs,” structured by the group’s normative standards of rationality. . . . Living in a modern human cultural group meant, above everything else, conforming. One had to conform to coordinate with others in conventional cultural practices.21

The process that Tomasello describes can achieve critical potency as a theory of reification once we contextualize it within a system of power relations rooted in norms and practices rooted in capitalist production and consumption processes. Modern capitalist societies are characterized by their large-scale organization of social coordination for production and consumption. If Searle’s idea that our collective intentionality not only coordinates concrete practices—such as playing a piano trio or a card game—but also confers deontic status on objects and collective practices, then reification can be seen as a conformity to the internalized norms that orient our collective practices and grant them deontic weight and authority. They are not simply regulative rules of external social norms, but, as Tomasello points out, picking up on the theories of Vygotsky, “in the process, children inherit, as it were, ways of categorizing, thinking, and rationalizing the world.”22 These are not a result of “individual learning and hypothesis-testing. Rather, they are the result of humans’ ability to create and internalize social practices.”23 The thesis of normative entanglement can now be understood with more nuance. Essentially, it is what happens when the social field within

  our steely encasement which individuals are socialized has become so saturated with norms emanating from the logic of the commodity form that they entangle themselves with the plasticity of the child’s development. As a consequence, the norms that serve to pattern exploitative forms of social coordination, as well as other norms and practices that support systemic imperatives, become naturalized as they are given deontic weight and embedded in the normative structures of reflection and social coordination. They shape and orient the “cultural common ground” (or the basic background norms that children adopt, beginning at age three) that serves as the organizational pattern for the motivational basis of social coordination.24 As a result of their power to shape collective norms, elites are able to shape the normative basis for social cooperation, as well as the structures of relations that such cooperation takes, the legitimate ends and purposes for which social cooperation is effected, and the second-order categories of reflexive consciousness that any subject uses to reflect on her or his social reality. As the norms that govern the shapes of our cooperative practices become increasingly patterned and rooted in systemic logics shaped by power relations and become the basic building blocks for sociality, the dominant social forms achieve a kind of second nature, and the reification of consciousness becomes deeply rooted in the structures that govern our sociality. Lacking exposure to differentiated forms of sociation and alternative norms for cooperating and acting, a one-dimensionality of consciousness sets in as the prevailing institutions and social logics become accepted as basic and as “natural.” Indeed, as many feminist theorists have tirelessly pointed out, the irreducibly relational structure of the developing self shapes our own self- and other-conceptions about norms concerning gender, sexuality, and their respective hierarchies.25 Familial relations construct within the developing subject internalized norms and ideas patterned on the power relations of the family structure. But for normative entanglement to become an aspect of reification, something more is needed. The internalization of norms and practices that uphold power relations is necessary but ultimately insufficient for a theory of reification because for the latter to emerge, there can be effectively no system-generated or system-tolerated perspective that one can take from other spheres of social experience and their respective collectiveintentional norms and practices that will shatter the naturalization of those

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    power relations. Thus, in modern society, although patriarchy still exists, and more “traditional,” power-laden family structures are still prevalent, our society offers other familial forms, and even nonfamilial forms, of living that will reveal traditional familial forms as pathological. I may still choose to live in such a family, but that choice would not come as a result of reification, for this would require a more globally cohesive network of norms and practices. Reification emerges as a pathology of individual consciousness, as well as the ontology of our social being, once we lose track of the fact that our own world-constituting powers as a member of a collective, hypersocial, cooperative species have been shaped for hierarchical and exploitative interests and ends. Reification is the necessary condition for a system of control to displace a social system of discipline or coercion; it is the very means by which the cybernetic society comes into existence.

Reification, Collective Intentionality, and Social Domination Now we are in a position to put together the various pieces I have explored thus far into a more general theory. If we view domination as distinct from power, it nevertheless still holds that the deontic nature of power that Searle describes also holds for both general forms of power and relations where domination is in play. This means that for domination relations to be stable, accepted, and recognized in some sense as valid by their participants, the collective intentionality of those participants has to be shaped in such a way for them to endorse the norms and practices that instantiate those domination relations. So we can see that there is a particular form of consciousness, a particular kind of intentionality, that accompanies the material forms of power any society may manifest. This is not simply an effect of domination, of social power more generally; it is also constitutive of that domination. It is in this sense that the concept of reification can be reconstructed along the lines of a form of a collective-intentional set of constitutive rules that assign statuses and functions to social relations, social roles, social practices, and so on, that in turn grant domination relations and other forms of power their legitimacy, resilience, social acceptance, and legitimacy. Reification can now be understood as a specific

  our steely encasement kind of pathology of consciousness that conceals from view other forms of social cooperation and social relations that might be in the objective interests of those participants, a pathology of second-order levels of consciousness and its capacities of self-reflection.26 This is what Lukács was after in many ways when he employed the term: he was searching for a way to comprehend the blockages, the limitations to critical consciousness that would allow individuals to see their objective place within the social totality. This means that Lukács’s conception of reification is more than simply a matter of commodity fetishism. Rather, it seems more fruitful to view it as a theory about the nature of rationalized forms of authority that cloud the real origins of social power and conceal domination from view. This is because reification is caused by the prevalence of the commodity form, but the epistemic pathology must be seen in philosophical terms. The term Verdinglichung is best rendered as “to-become-thing-like.” This is important when seen within the context of German Idealism, as Lukács knew all too well. A “thing” (Ding) is, in Kantian philosophy, the epistemic status of an object that has not yet become a valid object for cognition.27 The Ding in this sense is an object but one without any cognitive status; it is essentially invisible to the rational grasp of the subject. The Ding becomes a Gegenstand when it becomes a distinct object of consciousness for the subject and, finally, an Objekt when it is grasped by the subject’s powers of rational cognition. There is therefore a series of statuses that any object of consciousness can possess, and the term reification (Verdinglichung) indicates a kind of reduction of the cognitive status of the object-domain from something understood to something that no longer has epistemic status for the subject.28 Hence, reification is best understood, as Berger and Luckmann put it, “as an extreme process of objectivation, whereby the objectivated world loses its comprehensibility as a human enterprise and becomes fixated as a non-human, non-humanizable, inert facticity.”29 But how can this come about? The basic thesis here is that social power be understood as the capacity to shape the collective-intentional states that social actors internalize and utilize as their own means to comprehend and create their social world. The essence of the story becomes that reification is a particular form in how social power and social

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    domination can be maintained and how power relations can be cultivated and sustained through the declaration and internalization of constitutive and status rules, thereby creating a specific form of social reality. This is why Lukács, for instance, maintains that knowledge (Erkenntnis) is the primary means to explode the prevailing power relations and the reality it maintains. Indeed, although not aware of the descriptive language that Searle employs, Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness, seems to be aware of the kind of power I have been describing in Searle’s terms: “For the coercive measures taken by society in individual cases are often hard and brutally materialistic, but the strength of every society is in the last resort a spiritual power (geistige Macht). And from this we can only be liberated by knowledge (Erkenntnis). This knowledge cannot be of the abstract kind that remains in one’s head. . . . It must be knowledge that has become flesh of one’s flesh and blood of one’s blood; to use Marx’s phrase, it must be ‘practical critical activity.’”30 The insight here echoes what Searle’s account of power also describes: that the nature of social power is essentially cognitive and mental (“spiritual” or geistige is a Hegelian term for the collective concepts that individuals utilize in constructing objective knowledge). In other words, the “spiritual” (geistige) element here can also be understood in collectiveintentional terms: power over others, as Lukács construes it, is one where the ideological frames of knowledge and the basis for the validity and legitimacy of institutions (in his case, of capitalist institutions) shape the collective intentionality of that group; it formulates and then makes ambient specific kinds of constitutive rules that are governed by the logic of capitalist forms of production, consumption, and so forth, but that are also internalized by subjects within the rule-governed institutional environment. Hence, the intentionalist and mentalist frames of domination are related to the structural realities of the society. It is not enough for intentional states to produce power alone; they must accompany some structural reality that can be rationalized, routinized, and internalized. The outcome of this process is a reification of consciousness—an incapacity to call into question the deontic powers that congeal around them and make them part of one’s habitus. For Lukács, this means that we must look at the problem of reification as a specific deformation of cognition and consciousness but also as

   our steely encasement a specific form of life and practice.31 It is a problem not only of reflection but also of the ways that we shape and orient our practical activity. In this sense, what is central here is the way that thought and action can be linked, and Searle’s conception of collective intentionality can help square this circle. The practices into which the subject is socialized carry with them specific cognitive rules, particular forms of collective intentionality that become routinized and internalized, and this is not only a set of cultural norms but also a specific kind of objectivated, congealed rationalism that is embodied in the mechanistic and quantified features of capitalist life. But behind this remains a set of rules that shape and orient consciousness itself and maintain the specific nexus of social facts that maintain relations of power and dominance. As such, these very norms, rules, intentional mental states, and their associated practices become background assumptions shared by the members of the community as a whole, no longer a discrete object (Objekt) of cognition and, therefore, no longer an object of critique. Reification now becomes a process whereby any individual lacks the capacity to conceptualize rationally the social forms of life in which she or he participates.32 By this, I mean that there is an inability to see the link between the norms and values that underwrite one’s social reality and the domination relations that pervade it. Power to shape collective intentionality is therefore a specific kind of power, a specific kind of domination (when used to protect unequal, exploitative forms of social organization, relations, and institutions). This kind of power is one where social actors have been able to make ambient within the community declarations of function and status such that certain kinds of interests can be achieved or at least secured. In this sense, institutions are articulated, new institutional rules elaborated, and cultural forms of life reworked in order to make ambient within the society new forms of status function and, once successfully internalized by a significant number of subjects, to become norms that guide action and create new social facts.33 But these new social facts are now a function of the elites that control the very institutions that generate and routinize the status functions and constitutive rules that subjects internalize. Reification is therefore not only a defect of cognition; it is also constitutive of the social dominance of elites over subordinates. Hence, power over resources, or inequalities of resource control, can—and will—lead to control and

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    influence over institutions and to influence over the constitutive rules and collective intentionality of the members of that community. Reification is now something we can see as a consequence of this model of social power: it is the pathology of consciousness that cannot call into question or bring to critical consciousness the domination relations inherent within this circuit of the production of norms and consciousness. This is because of the formula that Searle points to as a “status function by declaration.” The key here is that reification is the result of a specific way that constitutive rules orient consciousness. Since domination, as I described it above, requires that a hierarchically structured inequality is in play, one that also extracts benefits from the subordinate to the superordinate levels of the hierarchy, the constitutive rule-set that must take shape to sustain such hierarchical forms of power either must serve to orient the intentionality of subjects toward seeing the hierarchical relations as legitimate or must be internalized in such a way that these relations become invisible, reified, and no longer objects of contestation. This is the deontic power that Searle claims status functions possess by declaration. But more important, following the exactness constraint, we can see that for elites to have a stable form of authority over members of any group, they must translate their power from one that is imposed on the members of that group externally to one that is collectively accepted and therefore endorsed by the members of that group internally.34 Even though this takes place, however, the rules, norms, and so on that the group comes to accept as its own still have been generated by those who wish to benefit from those rules, even though they may not be able to see this.35 I may accept that I should pay a tuition increase because everyone else accepts it as the way things are, but this does not mean it is necessarily a rule that is in my interest or in any sense beneficial for me, even though I may accept it as “the way it is” and therefore as legitimate. Reification works in precisely this way: it not only conceals from view the mechanisms of power, but it also, and more importantly, hides better arrangements that could benefit the group as a whole. The basic point here is that whereas externally authorized authority over a group is conceived as dominance, internal authority is looked on as internal to the group itself. The key that reification holds to the puzzle of modern forms of social domination and power is that it is the mechanism that allows externally

  our steely encasement authorized power to become internally authorized power. It transforms, in Rousseau’s famous phrase, “power into right and obligation into duty.” This can help us address the intentionality constraint and the exactness constraint and how they relate to the concept of reification, since it is not simply a single agent or a group of agents that exert this power but is itself a property of hierarchically arranged groups. Indeed, the key here is that we see this in dynamic or historical terms: that power is at first exerted externally but can only become stable and efficient once it is accepted over time by the totality of the community. Power and dominance become mutually created by superordinates and subordinates alike, and this can only occur through the reification of these power relations—their objectivation, internalization, and naturalization through the collective-intentional and constitutive rule-sets that govern and constitute the institutions and norms of that community. Consider Lukács’s thesis about the relation between reified consciousness and the production of commodities under capitalism. He cites Marx’s use of the example of the production of cotton: “Does a worker in a cotton factory produce merely cotton textiles? No, he produces capital. He produces values which serve afresh to command his labor and by means of it to create new values.”36 Now, this reveals an implicit social-ontological account of the kind of domination I am describing. Marx is arguing that there is an inherently ontological status to capital, that it is a material relation only insofar as the objective practices of the group (of society as a whole) are directed and organized in specific ways according to its rules, and this can only happen once they share a collective intentionality that shapes those practices, ideas, norms, beliefs, and so on—that is, once they have absorbed the objectivated rules of capital via socialization. Hence, in a descriptive sense, reification is the creation of social reality through the shaping of collective intentionality, but it is a normative category insofar as it shapes a reality that is imbued by relations of domination, or particularist ends and purposes, as opposed to relations that encourage collectively legitimate ends and purposes. Reification therefore acts in two ways at once: it makes implicitly valid and legitimate the constitutive and status rules that are heteronomously internalized by the subject and that orient her or his intentional mental states. But it also conceals the very idea that social facts are created by us, that the world we inhabit is essentially a

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    human world and can be manipulated and shaped according to higher, perhaps more ethically compelling, purposes than at present. It creates a false social ontology to repress and submerge the more rational socioontological potentialities of human sociality. But how does this relate back to the conceptual vocabulary that Searle outlines in his theory of “deontic power”? If we take Searle’s basic account of a constitutive rule as the assignment of function, or “X counts as Y in C,” then we can understand domination as possible once members of a community begin to accept and internalize as part of their basic mental states and as intentional states underwriting their actions those assignments of function and constitutive rules that benefit not that agent but another member or subgroup of that community as a whole. A new set of social facts can be seen to be created once this new constitutive rule, or set of constitutive rules, becomes more basic to the collective intentionality of that group as a whole. Reification can therefore be seen as the result of this kind of dominating power—a kind of power we can call constitutive power. This power consists of the ways that collective-intentional states of mind, the ways that the assignment of meaning for any community, are shaped in order to legitimize the prevailing form of social inequality and domination relations.37 For Lukács, this occurred because of a routinization of the ways that the labor process and the commodity form were able to dominate consciousness through routinized practices, norms, and values. It was, to put it another way, the result of the ways that powerful forms of socioeconomic imperatives for production and consumption shape the subjectivity of the subject and, in the end, the social reality of those subjects.

Social Ontology: Descriptive vs. Critical We can now see that the concept of reification, when reconstructed along the lines of the collective intentionality approach, leads us to two different approaches to social ontology. I will call them descriptive and critical, respectively. The first, as exemplified by Searle, is an account of how power works and how social facts are constructed via mental states. His account tells us nothing normative about which kinds of social facts we can consider good or desirable and which are pathological. But the

  our steely encasement second approach, Lukács’s theory of reification, maintains an essentially critical orientation in that he holds out for us the idea that reification is a pathology of consciousness insofar as it conceals a more just form of social reality. Searle would not make such a claim, since he is concerned more with describing the mechanisms—in terms of language, speechacts, and consciousness—that circumscribe social action and the generation of social facts. But the critical conception of social ontology has in view the thesis that only by understanding the totality of human social life and its potential aims and goals can reification be overcome. Social ontology is not only cognitive; for Lukács, it also has an objective dimension based on social-relational practices and how those relations and practices are organized and for what ends. Reification is not only a pathology of epistemology; it directly shapes our practices and, as a result, our social reality, as well. Returning to Spinoza for a moment, we can see the distinction arise between the slave and the free person: “A slave is one who has to obey his master’s commands which look only to the interests of him who commands. . . . A subject is one who, by command of the sovereign power, acts for the common good, and therefore for his own good also.”38 Lukács, like Rousseau and Marx before him, has something similar, though distinct, in view, for he is working within a structure of thought that holds that we can judge the different kinds of social reality based on the way that the social totality is organized to realize the ontological potentialities inherent in human social (i.e., group-based, cooperative) practice. For him, reification results from a rationalized set of values and norms that distorts consciousness through the medium of exchange value and the cash nexus to code all sociohuman activities and products through the lens of exchange. But as I have argued, it is also much more than this. We can see that Lukács’s thesis contains the nucleus of a richer concept wherein forms of collective intentionality coordinate new forms of legitimate power and domination, in particular—under capitalism—the legitimacy of an economic system that embeds its logic of exploitation and commodification into social reality itself. Lukács also argues that once this reification of consciousness has been overcome, we will cease to see social facts as “objects” and instead will see them as constituted by “social relations” and by human praxis.39 We will, in this sense, cease to see them as reified objects that simply exist

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    and instead will see them as constituted by relations of labor and by relations of power that we are implicit in recreating and sustaining. The critical-ontological moment occurs once we see that Lukács is advocating the thesis that nonreified thought (i.e., critical reasoning) is in play whenever we see that any social fact is, in fact, not a distinct thing, object, or entity in and of itself but is itself constituted by a social relation or, more specifically, is the product of a social relation or series of social relations. Social reality is not simply a construction of the constitutive rule-sets that Searle’s linguistic-based theory of social ontology describes. Rather, the constitutive rules and collective-intentional states shape and legitimize certain forms of practical activities that we then see as basic and “natural” to our world. The key for Lukács is that social ontology is not simply a cognitive-constructivist process but also a sociopraxiological process in the world in that it denotes the ways we organize our social relations, our cooperative efforts, and our inherently social-relational powers as a community. Hence, social reality can be seen as achieving different forms based on the ways we orient and shape our cooperative, interdependent, practical activity.40 As such, any society that produces ends or goods that are nonbeneficial to itself as a whole does damage to its constituent members. The problem with capitalism, put simply, is that it organizes the ensemble of the totality of social relations for ends and purposes that benefit a particular group within the community (i.e., those who own capital). It entails seeing that there is a difference between the meaning of any thing and the substance of what any thing actually is.41 We are able to see that beneath the endless array of commodities, products, goods, and so on, there really exists social relations of production—and we can now see that this brings us into the realm of a critical social ontology, since we are now forced to ask what are the proper, the good, the nonpathological forms of social relations that ought to be instantiated but are instead being distorted and limited by capitalist social formations. More crucially, reification hides from critical consciousness the notion that human action, human labor, and human practices and products are in fact essentially cooperative insofar as they require intersection of plans and subplans for social reality to be produced and reproduced.42 A critical social ontology therefore has in view the notion that the world must be reappropriated by those who produce and constitute it.

  our steely encasement Reification is therefore only a part of a larger critical social-ontological project, but it is a crucial part in that it is a pathology of the epistemic and cognitive domain of consciousness that helps sustain a pathological social reality and repress a critical stance toward it. Through reification, subjects see the collective-intentional frames that they operate within as “second nature,” and therefore alternative ways of living and organizing our social relations become frustrated. Lukács’s cognitive approach to the problem of capitalist society therefore entails a capacity to posit an alternative form of social facts, an alternative understanding of the purposes and ends of the community and its practices to the prevailing, existent reality. This means that Lukács’s understanding of reification possesses at its core an inherently normative and critical dimension. What emerges from this distinction is therefore that even though Searle’s and Lukács’s respective approaches can be seen to converge on the explanatory mechanisms of consciousness that describe certain kinds of power and the production of social facts, they diverge in that Lukács points us toward a deeper— indeed, more compelling—normative dimension to social ontology, one that cannot be explored here with any sophistication. Nevertheless, I believe I have been able to show how a critical social ontology can make use of the theory of collective intentionality elaborated by Searle and the theory of reification explored by Lukács. In its most basic form, the problem of rationalized social power and domination requires, to some basic extent, the capacity to shape and control the constitutive rule-sets that subjects internalize and that they come to accept as valid rules for positing status functions in the world. In this sense, reification is precisely that pathology of consciousness that results from the objectivation of those constitutive rule-sets and the kinds of status functions that will cement, or in some basic way sustain, the hierarchically extractive forms of power that domination seeks to secure. But we must also take this insight further and see not only how reification of consciousness shapes the ways that any group constructs its social reality in cognitive terms but also how it shapes the concrete, sociorelational, and sociopraxiological forms of activity that members of such a group endorse and see as valid. Viewed in such a way, reification has far-reaching consequences for the ways that we conceive of the nature of social power, domination, and

The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis    social ontology. We cannot simply understand the freedom of members of any group in terms of them enjoying a state of nondomination conceived as “nonarbitrary interference,” since this view assumes that the rationality of such agents is not already tinged by the collective intentionality shaped by power relations.43 Similarly, we cannot look to an Idealist-inspired view from the theory of recognition or some synthesis between these two positions, since the same problem pervades the consciousness and intentional mental states of those members, not to mention the institutional rulesets that socialize them. Rather, it seems to me that it is only through understanding how reification constitutes a warping of the ways that we conceive of the legitimate, rational, and “correct” forms of social-relational practices, cooperation, and purposes and ends of such practices and cooperation that any form of critical confrontation with a given social reality can begin. Social domination’s richness as a critical concept becomes clear when we see that it both requires and creates the collective-intentional mental states and constitutive rule-sets of the institutions and the members of any group. It is a capacity not only to shape these rules; it does so with the express purpose of organizing social-cooperative practices for hierarchically beneficial ends rather than common ends. In this sense, a critical social ontology should be pursued not only for how it diagnoses the pathologies of modern society but also for how it can help illuminate a common interest for all social members and the enhancement of their mutual freedom. To get to that point, however, we need to be able to understand how autonomy has been displaced by heteronomy, how our internal reflective powers have been eroded by the processes of social domination that I have been describing. Only then will we be able to return to the question of how to construct a critical theory of autonomy.

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part ii

an anatomy of heteronomy

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chapter 4

Alienation From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy

Writing at the apex of the Industrial Revolution in 1890, Emile Durkheim reflected on the nature of the relation between the individual and the seeds of what would become the modern systems of cybernetic society: “If we live amorally for a good part of the day, how can we keep the springs of morality from going slack on us?”1 Durkheim expresses here an insight about the ways that modern forms of self-regulating life infiltrate the self. As the modern self becomes embedded in the external dynamics and processes of the technologically patterned world, one loses that Kierkegaardian quality of selfhood as a relation that relates to itself: put another way, one’s individuality is absorbed into the system, the self no longer an agent of its own ethical and volitional life but an extension of society. Social domination, as I have been arguing, is the crucial means of deforming the self’s powers as an autonomous, critical agency. Alienation is one of the central pathologies of this kind of social domination in that it severs the self’s capacity to relate to itself spontaneously and replaces it with external schemata for thought and praxis. The “springs of morality” therefore go slack. Industrial society first fostered this fundamental disconnection between self and world, between the human and nature. It cemented a disorientation of the self’s relation to others and to itself. But in cybernetic society, the self has been so thoroughly socialized into the fabric of norms

  an anatomy of heteronomy and commodities that the concept of alienation has itself morphed from a problem of consciousness into a problem of our relation to the capacity for judgment and self-awareness of alienation itself. Indeed, not unlike Kierkegaard or Sartre, we can say that to at least be conscious and aware of the extent to which our ethics, our commitments, our values are heteronomously rooted would itself constitute a step toward its overcoming. But today, alienation is more a feature of psychic and cognitive structure than a mere deformation of self-understanding. To be alienated in this sense is to lack any connection to our capacities for ethical evaluation, for conscience, for a capacity to identify the pathological nature of our world. Because of this, I do not think that we can dismiss alienation as a core problem of the modern self and modern culture. Rather, I suggest that we see alienation as the disintegration of autonomous forms of moral reasoning and the displacement of that faculty in the individual subject by broader value patterns that are produced by highly integrated forms of socialization and routinized structures of socialization. Alienation of this type, what I will call alienated moral consciousness, implies that we see the phenomenon of alienation less in terms of the classical understanding of the term as a loss of meaning, loneliness, normlessness, anomie, and so on and instead see that alienation constitutes the estrangement from a crucial faculty of the human mind: that capacity for rational moral judgment. By this I mean that we become alienated from the world as a result of the blurring between what I authentically may think and believe about the world, on the one hand, and what the world asks me to think and believe, on the other. Alienation is a failure of my capacity to divide myself against what the world asks me to believe and think, what values and norms it asks (or even compels) me to use as the basis for my understanding of self and world. We should not forget that the Enlightenment understanding of rational autonomy originated on the premise that individuals are capable of organizing their moral judgments in such a way so as not to be dependent on the judgments or ideas of others. This concept characterizes much of contemporary political theory and moral philosophy, especially those ideas that concentrate on the question of deliberative democracy and discourse ethics that seek to have rational or reasonable individuals dialogue on the moral questions that affect their lives.2 At the root of these

Alienation   approaches is a theory of moral cognition that emphasizes the capacity of individuals to make reasoned moral judgments for themselves. Alienation renders authentic judgments about the world impossible; it dissolves my own capacities for thinking and judging into the external world’s modes of thinking and judging. It is a fundamental defect and regression of the modern self as an autonomous, critical individual. Moral cognition, for its part, is the faculty employed by individuals to assess the forms of obligation, value, and legitimacy and to grant certain practices or institutions their validity. The distortion of moral cognition—in particular owing to the ways that patterns of moral reasoning are preformed by individuals—constitutes a removal of an individual from the rational forms of choice and action. As a result, what I shall call atrophied moral cognition refers to the ways that this capacity for making rational moral judgments for oneself becomes weakened as a result of the heavy reliance on unified, external value systems and norms that become so predominant within modern societies that individuals become alienated from their own powers of moral judgment. This constitutes an extreme case of alienation because of its ability to secure broader forms of compliance to institutional and social goals that are not in the interests of their participants. I see alienation as a pathology of moral cognition, a particular deformation of the capacities for moral judgment shaped by the kind of social relations that occur particularly under modern capitalist social relations, relations characterized by rationalized hierarchical social structures, routinized patterns of everyday life, and the need for secure forms of compliance to institutional authority. Alienation therefore means a weakened ability of the personality system’s capacity to judge, evaluate, and think through the world. In this sense, alienation not only affects the feelings of individuals; it also affects and determines their moral attitudes and evaluative capacities, as well as their epistemic powers. To put this another way, one’s subjectivity is alienated in this sense when it is unable to incorporate a wider field of social relations and instead comes to see the world in normative terms that are not one’s own, created or at least examined by him or her, but rather are internalized through processes of routinized socialization. The leads to a situation where one comes to rely less and less on her or his own cognitive powers to decipher and situate moral-evaluative forms of reasoning and instead conforms

  an anatomy of heteronomy to these internalized patterns of value orientation and moral evaluation. Such an individual ceases to be an autonomous subject—or at least to possess a capacity to move in an autonomous space of reasons—and instead takes on what Erich Fromm referred to as “automaton conformity.”3 The relation of this condition to the general theory of alienation should be obvious. As Richard Schacht has put the matter, the situation of alienation “is either one in which the individual experiences something as other or separated from him, or it is one in which the individual is alleged to exist in a condition of separation from something, of which he may be unaware.”4 In this respect, the condition of atrophied moral cognition fits into the general theory of alienation by seeing the moral agent as separated not from an objective thing but from a capacity: the capacity for autonomous moral reasoning. But it also means, by extension, that one becomes alienated from the forms of life that one inhabits, not simply as a matter of indifference (although this is one possible response) but also because the institutions and values of the society become intuitive to the individual who comes to see his or her world as self-justified and lacking any need for moral reflection.5 Persons suffering from atrophied moral cognition therefore also become alienated from the moral problems that pervade their world, becoming not only unable, many times, to think through their social world in a moral sense but also unable to identify and be aware of moral problems and phenomena. This captures the impulse of the classical idea of alienation—of the individual as separated from, distanciated from, or desensitized to the problems of moral or political importance in the broader culture, as well as within more intimate relations. By referring to this as a form of alienation, I therefore mean to link the problem of deformed moral reasoning on the part of the alienated subject to the problem of the massification of society, although not in the traditional way. Instead of seeing individual alienation as the result of technology, high levels of mobility, rationalization, and bureaucratization “encouraging a sense of powerlessness which leads the individual to be insensitive to, and uninformed about, an environment over which he believes he has little influence,”6 I argue that it leads to a sense of coordinated inclusion into forms of life that are highly unified, preformed, and prescripted. The moral codes and patterns of life that the alienated moral

Alienation   consciousness follows are not its own but the result of a highly rationalized and routinized social system that has domesticated individuals and groups by the permeating logic of institutional rationalization and the need for authority compliance. The implication for individuals in modern society is that their cognitive powers come to wither as a result of these forms of cultural and social life. Indeed, in contrast to those theories that see alienation as an estrangement from the central values of society,7 I want to suggest that alienation should be understood by the ways that it deprives individuals of rational moral autonomy, robbing them of the capacity to reflect critically on issues of moral and political salience. Therefore, in contrast to the basic theory of alienation that sees it as a distanciation from one’s work, from meaning in the world, and from a sense of powerlessness, I see alienation as a useful concept to understand the ways in which integrated forms of social domination are able to be legitimized and to penetrate the personality structure of individuals. The classic understanding of alienation stresses the notion of “separateness,” of the basic idea that one is estranged from the world, from oneself, and from social relations.8 This idea evolved with the growth of sociology and social theory as a discipline, along with the parallel development of mass industrial societies, and continues with the more contemporary understanding of alienation that sees it as a defective relation to oneself and to others, as an inability to make the world one’s own.9 Although this approach to alienation still has relevance, I want to suggest that a deeper and more politically relevant form of alienation occurs when individuals are unable to make moral judgments to the extent that the forms of life in which they participate come to be governed by a set of values and interests beyond their conscious awareness, let alone their control, or in which they can find meaning. Even more, this kind of alienation makes them participate in forms of social organization and institutions that are oriented not toward the objective interests of their participants but in the narrower interests of a minority of the political community. As more recent approaches to alienation have demonstrated, modern forms of alienation can be displaced by forms of distraction and hedonistic enjoyment and regression.10 But what I am suggesting here is that a primary type of alienation results from the malformation of the capacities for moral judgment and, thus, the almost complete loss of ethical autonomy.

  an anatomy of heteronomy

Alienation as Atrophied Moral Cognition Moral cognition is the faculty that allows us to evaluate the world we live in, to code it in moral, “right/wrong” terms, and it is the means by which we establish high-order forms of action such as obligations to family, friends, legal systems, and other institutions. In this sense, it is a wideranging faculty that is responsible for the way we organize the normative validity of the practices, institutions, belief systems, and so on that prevail in our world and within which we participate. Alienated moral cognition can therefore be seen as a process by which the prevailing structures and values that undergird capitalist society are absorbed and taken by individuals to be second nature. By referring to this state as atrophied moral cognition I mean to indicate the ways in which individuals lose their ability to judge for themselves, in any critical sense, the forms of life they see as legitimate and in which they engage and participate. The process of moral cognition is taken by some to be a rational or at least “reasonable” process where we learn to think through the world rationally, employing higher stages of reason to ground our moral worldviews.11 But if moral cognition is social in the sense that we derive our values and ways of normatively evaluating our world and actions from the socialization process itself, then it stands to reason that pathological social relations will create a tendency to shaping pathologies in moral cognition. More to the point, the insight from the classical theories of alienation that emphasize the problems of powerlessness, loneliness, estrangement from fulfillment in work, and so on can be seen to be translatable into the problem of moral cognition. I suggest that this happens within the sphere of values, “evaluative beliefs that synthesize affective and cognitive elements to orient people to the world in which they live.”12 In this respect, values come to be a special kind of concept-generating means of understanding one’s world. Values “merge affect and concept” and, as a result, come to be axiomatic in the creation of higher forms of moral reasoning and feeling.13 A person’s beliefs about the world derive from a basic value system that shapes the attitudes and concepts he or she will deploy in the world, as well as use to evaluate it and information about it. These values are basic in the sense that they are ingrained at an early age and come to be reinforced by certain forms of socialization, which then come to have a

Alienation   strong impact on the ways individuals think through their world. This basic value system therefore becomes a moral-conceptual space derived from sources outside the subject—teachers, peers, media, and so on—and becomes internalized by individuals, displacing their autonomous capacity for judgment. The moral concepts that people draw on to orient their activity in everyday life have beneath them an unconscious value system that gives them shape. But not all values are the same. Those that orient subjects to make them value personal and private life over public life, to cede their wishes to authority figures, to be directed by and passively conform to the rules and practices of institutions in their culture, and so on, lead to an atrophied moral cognition in that they deprive them of the crucial activity of having to decide and reflect on what the right thing to do actually is. The rationalized, routinized world of modern capitalist societies comes to permeate forms of socialization in just this way because of the need for modern logics and patterns of economic production and consumption to be secured among larger segments of the population. As a result, repeated and expected outcomes come to dominate everyday forms of life, resulting in the weakening of one’s own responsibility for making decisions about those practices and institutions. The basic value system of the individual comes to be increasingly congruent with others in society, so much so that they come to rely less and less on their own moral-cognitive faculties and instead become “alienated” not only from that faculty but from the moral problems they might confront in their world. To become alienated in this sense indicates an important way of understanding the lack of critical response to forms of “legitimate” authority and other problems that affect modern democracies. The problem of alienated moral cognition becomes clear in the inability of people to make independent judgments about issues of moral and political consequence; it implies that there is a grounding for opinion formation not in independent reasoning but rather in the problem of attitudinal congruence that comes to prevail in mass societies, whether as a whole or in terms of the microcommunities of identity to which one seeks inclusion. This means that individual reflection is a component of how rational values are constructed since without it, any individual is forced to accept the value system as it is, without any kind of evaluation of its deeper logic or its actual

  an anatomy of heteronomy consequences. It is, in Kantian terms, a state of heteronomy combined with a lack of awareness of this condition. The reality of alienation in this particular sense therefore becomes a problem of how an individual comes to devalue the world.14 Devaluation means that subjects come to cognize the world according to external value schemas that neither allow their participation nor require their activity. Even more, it means that the values that come to shape the grammar of moral-cognitive faculties is itself constraining on the ability for subjects to be able to utilize cognition as autonomous agents. Instead, individuals are forced to utilize schematized value frames that are applied to situations. As a result of the routinized nature of these interactions and situations, thinking through these events becomes less a matter of personal reasoning and increasingly a matter of automated frames of reference—moral scripts, as it were. Now, this means we need to ask about the core variable in this basic model: the nature of values. For my purposes, I see values as normative concepts that direct individual action and shape the personality structure of individuals. The more that values become the product of repetition, the less they are grounded in a conscious, rational awareness of their legitimacy. This means that alienated moral cognition is operating when the values an individual possesses are not the product of that individual’s own reflection but rather are dependent on external value schemas that are accepted as valid and are themselves generated for the coordination of institutional action.15 I am alienated, in other words, in this sense, when I am no longer able to ground the reasons for my actions, my beliefs, and my practices and commitments in my own autonomous reasoning but instead rely on an already preformed set of reasons, rationales, and values that make the closed system of my social world legitimate to me, knowable, predictable, and so on. Alienation, on this view, is a deeper account of the moral-cognitive and rational processes that are responsible for my autonomy. I am alienated because my actions may no longer be my own in the sense that they are no longer “autonomous” or “spontaneous” but are prefabricated and given to me by rationalized and routinized forms of socialization and for the purposes of fulfilling roles that serve the interests of others more powerful within any hierarchical social structure.16 The phenomenon of moral atrophy therefore allows the logics of institutions and their imperatives to “act through” individuals in specific ways, particularly by shaping

Alienation   the value orientations of individuals in order to orient their subjectivity toward the kind of institutional patterns of action desired. But this discussion is premised on the thesis that moral autonomy is essentially underdeveloped within modern subjects, that there is a way in which modern forms of socialization come to atrophy their powers of moral cognition. If this is the case, then it seems to move alienation away from the paradigm of loneliness, powerlessness, and anomic individualism that characterizes classical social theory and moves us toward the thesis that alienation is focused in the relative inability to possess moral reflection and moral reasoning to ground the commitments one possesses or, in certain contexts, to call into question and be willing to revise the values and practices that one’s social roles force on him or her. I want to consider this thesis as a more nuanced and more accurate understanding of alienation, specifically to confront the impoverishment of moral and political culture in modern democracies. At the heart of the cause of this kind of alienation is neither the complexity thesis that disempowers individuals nor the productivist paradigm that sees alienation as the product of modern commodity production. Rather, my thesis is that the source of this type of alienation is the internalization of regulative value patterns that have evolved to ensure the smooth operation of modern forms of capitalist-bureaucratic culture, specifically the domestication of working life and the acceptance of a culture and norms of commodity consumption.

The Internalization of External Value Patterns The essence of heteronomy is that one acts based on ideas or concepts that are not one’s own in a rational sense but originate in an external or internally nonrational source (such as the church, what one’s parents tell one, how emotions direct him or her, and so on). This was at the root of Rousseau’s insight that it is the forms of legitimacy in any society that are problematic rather than the actual concrete forms of power that that society manifests.17 The roots of moral alienation are found in the forms of socialization that modern societies tend to promote. For my purposes, the socialization processes I see as central are those that are responsible for the formation of evaluative capacities within the self, as well as those that deploy normative value patterns through interaction. The achievement

  an anatomy of heteronomy of autonomy is not a product of natural processes but of forms of socialization that develop the capacities of evaluation and judgment. It also relies on the kinds of values that are ambient in the culture one inhabits. Socialization processes that seek to force conformity to authority patterns or that undersocialize subjects, as in modern forms of suburban life, can have a deep impact on how agents come to rely on the shared values that they encounter on a daily basis to navigate their world. In this sense, the more instrumentalized, distant, or reified those relations become, the more moral atrophy can result. Moral autonomy therefore needs to be seen as an achievement of those intersubjective relations that encourage and indeed require the evaluation of moral principles or values by any agent in order for them to be taken as valid. Instead, when prefigured, prescripted, or instrumentalized social relations—whether in the family, school, work life, etc.—come to predominate, the agent comes to rely on those patterns of value to evaluate the world, thereby decreasing any autonomous moral competence. Moral atrophy constitutes a specific form of alienation because it fits within the general approach of alienation as a removal of one’s authentic self from its relations and the broader world of which it is a part. The theorists of alienation who saw it as a historical phenomenon did so because they saw its roots in modern forms of industrialized, rationalized forms of production that removed the artisanal modes of production, as well as the Gemeinschaftlich forms of social relations that were predominant before the modern period. But this phase of alienation can be seen to be supplanted or at least augmented by the pathology of moral atrophy. On this view, alienation becomes the elimination of the faculty of independent moral judgment to such an extent that it becomes difficult (1) to reconstruct that specific moral-cognitive style of thinking and (2) to confront the anxiety experienced by alienated subjects when challenging the value systems that constitute their lives. Moral atrophy therefore is a problem of cognition, but its root causes are the forms of social relations and forms of socialization that constitute modern forms of highly interdependent, functionalist institutional logics that require high degrees of value compliance to achieve even moderate levels of social and economic success. Values come to be homogenized by institutions that are highly rationalized and highly routinized—hence, Weber’s insight that the norms

Alienation   that govern society emerge “only in the rarest cases by autonomous agreement of all those participating in future action from whom . . . loyalty toward the norms is expected.”18 Here we see the origins of the forms of socialization factors that can give rise to alienated moral consciousness. At the heart of the issue is the problem of being unaware that the frameworks being employed are in fact generated outside the subject, by strong forms of socialization that are directed toward instrumental institutional goals. Subjects are formed with this kind of behavior in mind; the problem of alienation therefore refers, on this view, to the inability to call such a reality into question or to be able to apply or generate other moral judgments to a specific situation. When I come to see the things “simply as they are” or cease to inquire into the reasons why specific codes of right/wrong and so on are implicit and intuitive to my thinking, then we can begin to see the lineaments of the alienated moral consciousness. The fact that there exists an internal and external system of values means that there is, in theory, always the possibility of the subject calling into question the reservoir of values that count as social morality.19 In this sense, modern societies based on markets and capital accumulation must secure forms of compliance to the structural-functional systems that reproduce society, where individuals come to be socialized into larger corporate agents, effectively giving much of their agency over to those institutional bodies.20 There comes to predominate, then, the collapse of this subjective capacity to reflect on moral concepts into the social schemes of normative codes that inhere in the institutions that socialize us. But this comes about owing to (1) specific forms of socialization that then come to have an impact on (2) the kind of value systems that become stable throughout the predominant institutions within society, which then (3) shape the subjective value orientations of individual agents. These value orientations come to be so routinized and rationalized that the moralcognitive functions of the subject come to be alienated from one’s own individual, autonomous power to critique them and, in many cases, even be conscious of them in any serious sense of awareness. Modern societies are increasingly characterized by the interdependence of rationalized institutions that socialize their members with an also increasingly routinized and synchronized form of value patterns. As capitalism deepens its cultural influence within any society, it begins to adapt

  an anatomy of heteronomy different institutions to its interests. In this sense, a rationalized set of practices and values comes to predominate and to become commonplace in different institutions. This is the primary way that institutions—such as schooling, the family, the workplace, sports, and so on—come to shape individuals and adapt them to the value systems that they come to promote. It is only through regular routinization of these practices and values that individuals come to learn and absorb the value patterns that these institutions need to promote. This is because modern forms of corporate and market-oriented economic life require an over-identification with the norms that coordinate hierarchical systems of authority; but, even outside of these institutions, forms of consumption also require a conformity of personal, aesthetic, and other values and norms that promote elevated forms of consumption and preferences. Individuals therefore come to adopt those values or face the problem of deviance from those institutions and social relations. Therefore, they come to adopt those value orientations that they see around them and, most importantly, come to take them as a basic value system coding their world and their normative views. The more routinized and regular this becomes, the less individuals need to rely on their own decision-making powers and the less they are asked to question the morality of a specific act, practice, or idea. In the end, this produces a firm legitimacy for the institutions that make up society since more and more individuals come to be inculcated by this process of rationalization and routinization. It is nothing new, of course, to say that the values individuals possess and that orient their actions are derived from the institutions that socialize them. This is a basic characteristic of human socialization. But what makes it important and special in the case of alienated moral cognition and consciousness is the fact that functional forms of social integration—as opposed to stratified societies based on mechanical forms of solidarity—deprive agents of the only thing that makes them genuinely individual in the first place: their capacity for autonomous moral judgment and the awareness of this as an achievement of their individuality. The more that individuals come to see that they can expect certain outcomes over which they have no control, the less they will seek to learn about, to inquire into, and to even perceive as problematic the actions and events in their world.21 As this faculty within individuals decreases, they become

Alienation   increasingly alienated from their own capacities for judgment as well as the mechanisms and general goals of the society in which they live. Weber and Simmel were both correct, in this sense, in seeing that rationalization is a key variable in the separation of individuals from their culture, their social world. But what separates them is their apathy, their atrophied ability for morally judging, thinking through, epistemically grasping the world in which they live. The relation between alienated moral cognition and reification cannot be overstated. Lukács is clear that the phenomenon of reification is grounded in the nature of modern forms of work and the commodity process: “In consequence of the rationalization of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system.”22 This element of reification can be seen as moving into the domain of the moral-cognitive in a similar way. With the permeation of rationalized forms of life, routinization and the increasing hegemony of that form of life in more and more institutions of society and culture, the alienation process comes to break off from the domain of the work process alone and becomes characteristic of almost all forms of social interaction.23 Not only the work process, but also forms of friendship, schooling, leisure time—all come under the power of commodification, and, more important, the institutional logics that they require become passively accepted by social agents.24 Similarly, Lukács remarks further about the effects of rationalized work processes on the subject: “He finds it already pre-existing and selfsufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. . . . His activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.”25 If we take this insight a step further, we can see that this process that Lukács points to—one that he had taken from Simmel and Weber—leads to a broader phenomenon of deactivating the moral-cognitive processes of modern individuals, so much so that alienated moral consciousness becomes the very cement securing the legitimacy of modern forms of exploitation. No longer is alienation a matter

  an anatomy of heteronomy of powerlessness, meaninglessness, and so on. Now, it becomes a deeper, more sinister reality where individuals are no longer even aware of the extent to which their world poses moral, social, and existential problems for them. But exactly how do values shape forms of moral cognition?

Heteronomous Values and the Structure of Alienated Consciousness The internalization of value patterns from unified, systemic, and routinized forms of socialization is responsible for producing the groundwork for alienated moral cognition. When value systems come to be ingrained in individuals in this manner, they tend to stabilize the personality within the context of a rationalized and routinized social system. The result is that the practices, preferences, and normative ideas that guide one’s actions and the ways the world is coded and evaluated also come to be routinized and unified. The intersubjective element of this process is therefore found in the ways that others with whom we associate come to fortify the unification of a basic value system that we internalize and that comes to dominate consciousness in specific ways. As I argued above, values possess both an affective and a cognitive component. In other words they serve to shape the basic attitudes that we come to invest ourselves in, as well as the concepts that we employ to navigate our ideas about the world. In autonomous moral reasoning, individuals are able to approach both of these dimensions of values rationally—that is, to consider them as potentially pliable and to search for their grounding in reasons that are external and rational. They do not remain trapped by the basic values that they possess but instead can objectify them, reason through them. In alienated moral consciousness, by contrast, we find that this ability is either severely limited or nonexistent to any real degree. Alienated moral consciousness does not perceive that the values one possesses are in fact driving their understanding of the world, and they tend not to be able to rationally assess them or external forms of information that are asynchronous with them.26 To be more specific, the values that form the basic value system of the personality have three distinct components: cathectic, conceptual, and epistemic. Each of these plays a crucial role in the formation of atrophied

Alienation   moral cognition because of the intuitive nature of value systems and their role in structuring higher forms of moral reasoning and analysis. As I have argued, at the root of our moral-cognitive faculty is a basic value system characterized by the merging of affect and concept. What this means is that values are at the root of the moral intuitions that we possess, and they affect the epistemic ways that we think through the world, actively make sense of it, and receive information about it. Now, the ways that we develop these values has an important effect on the degree of alienation we have from our moral-cognitive powers and, hence, our moral-political world. As I see it, the three elements of values represent different stages of orientation. The cathectic dimension of values shapes our emotive investment in the object of value. It makes some people react with emotion when they hear about the legalization of same-sex marriage; it makes others consider arguments for and against it reasonably if not rationally. This is related to the conceptual dimension of values in that the concepts are what frame our world for us. We do not simply feel through the world; we say to ourselves, “Same-sex marriage is not right” or “is not natural” or, in other cases, “is perfectly fine with me since heterosexuals are able to be married,” and so on. These relate to the next, and higher, dimension of values, the epistemic. The epistemic is how we formulate arguments to defend what our values seem to be telling us, as well as how we perceive and interpret information that comes to us. In alienated forms of moral cognition, an individual’s epistemic capacities are unable to make rational sense of their moral intuitions. They are unable to come up with objectively rational criteria for why same-sex marriage should not be legal, why listening to your boss is the right thing to do, why students should go back to class instead of protesting higher tuition, and so on. They feel it, they think it; but ultimately, they are not aware of the reasons why, even though they cannot face the fact that they do not know why. This seems to point to several characteristics of these value dimensions that can help us parse when individuals are exhibiting alienated moral cognition and when they are not. I summarize these dimensions of values and their different types in figure 4.1. The cathectic dimension of any value can be either intuitive or grounded. When one is intuitively related to one’s investment in their values, she or he will react automatically, without reflecting on the value itself, many times to defend those

  an anatomy of heteronomy beliefs and attitudes that she or he sees as congruent with others in the community.27 The intuition comes to dominate the reaction, and there is no rational reflection on why one feels as he or she does or why one is reacting as he or she is. Grounded cathexis, however, allows the individual to hold the value orientation in objective relation to oneself. These individuals will be more prone to reason through and critically reflect on the way they feel about the world and, therefore, will be more open to adapt or revise their value or belief system in light of more reasoned values. This has a direct effect on the type of concepts that individuals use to frame and code their world. The concepts that people use can be either analytic or synthetic in the sense that they are made up of a partial understanding of the world or a more comprehensive, complex understanding.28 Those who possess concepts that tend toward the analytic are prone to seeing only partial elements of the world, whereas synthetic concepts are able to bring more elements of a phenomenon or reality to consciousness. A racist may believe that Blacks are poor because of a belief in their racial inferiority. But the concept of race, the concept of poverty, and the social processes that produce it are not graspable since his or her concepts move him or her toward seeing the world in a more fragmented, unrelated way.29 This is finally related to two different epistemic styles of thinking and receiving information: diffusive or integrative. Diffuse epistemic capacities are unable to bring information about the world together in ways that cohere and may, in fact, go against the value system that one possesses. Integrative epistemic capacities allow individuals to think in more complex ways, integrating different kinds of information and, most important, being willing to revise their normative ideas about the world in the light of new evidence. The cause of the divergence between the two types of moral cognition stems from the nature of the individual’s relation to her or his value system. As I have argued, the core element of values is that they are the grounding concepts that anchor the personality and orient its activity and thought processes. When moral cognition is alienated, the core variable in my model that explains it is the basic value system of the individual: the ways that the values we come to absorb (1) enable us to navigate highly rationalized and routinized forms of life and institutions and, in the process, weaken the creation of our own authentic value systems and

Alienation   Integrative Diffusive Epistemic

values

Conceptual

Synthetic Analytic

Cathectic Grounded Intuitive

figur e 4.1. The dimensions of values and their characteristics.

moral-cognitive processes and (2) create the resulting atrophy of moral cognition that leads to intuitive, analytic, and diffusive forms that make alienation a matter of separating us from (a) our own faculties of moral reasoning and (b) a verifiably accurate understanding of the world. Alienated cognition therefore not only leads to an atrophy of the moral reasoning of individuals, making them reliant on the more unified value systems that are ambient in their society, but also affects their nonmoral epistemic capacities to reason, evaluate information, and view their world critically. The very substance of alienation now becomes the result of the relative powers of the capacity of subjects for moral reasoning—of the individual’s ability to call into question the norms and institutions that predominate in her or his world. In the end, the values we possess are therefore related to the ways that we invest meaning in the world, conceive of it in general terms, and how we evaluate information and make arguments about it to others. When our values are shaped by systems that are routinized and regularized, embedded in the institutions that socialize us, individuals tend to take them on in such a way that they do not go through a process of internal, rational reflection. Instead, such systems and institutions act cybernetically and will gradually “pilot” individuals through the maze of institutional life and become increasingly rewarded by the acceptance of others and of the broader culture. This, in turn, forms one of the fundamental foundations for the cybernetic society. Increasingly, a phenomenon of attitudinal

  an anatomy of heteronomy congruence comes to take shape, and the values, norms, practices, and institutions of our lives take on more and more of an unquestioned second nature.30 We become more inclined to take on the belief systems and values of those with whom we associate and with whom we identify.31 But this process hastens moral atrophy to the extent that individuals tend to privilege this mode of thinking and feeling at the expense of the more existentially risky mode of critically approaching their world. There is also the problem of limited cognitive resources leaving us to rely on intuitive forms of moral processing and allowing the basic value system that is congruent with others to guide one’s thinking and action.32 This leads to a problem of alienation in the most acute sense: one is simply unable to be guided by one’s own reasoning, independent of the pressures, feelings, and values/ belief systems that become hegemonic in society as a whole. This kind of alienated consciousness goes to the heart of what Lukács and critical theorists were seeking to deal with through the theory of reification. For Lukács, reification was the inability of individuals to have moral agency in choosing to comply with the imperatives of capitalist society or to resist it. His basic thesis was that reification needed to be overcome for there to be a genuine movement to overthrow the source of modern exploitation. What remains compelling about this insight is that it serves as the core problem of modern capitalist societies. Because the socialization process involves the cultural embeddedness of the imperatives and goals of capitalism as a whole (profit accumulation, consumption, and so on), it becomes a standard point for the formulation of a basic value system. This basic value system, as it becomes increasingly predominant throughout society, takes on a new order of dominance, inhibiting the moral autonomy of individuals and securing forms of legitimacy for the system and its goals. Alienated moral cognition therefore serves as the crucial mechanism for the sustained, passive legitimacy of reified forms of agency. This, in turn, has an important impact on the nature of political consciousness and behavior more broadly.

Alienated Moral Cognition and Political Behavior Now that I have shown the different dynamics of value systems and their impact on the cognition of normative claims and codes, I can move

Alienation   on to how this relates to political phenomena more broadly. As I have suggested here, alienated moral cognition is a specific way of thinking through the values that undergird the institutions, practices, and commitments we have in our social and personal worlds. On this view, alienation is the result of value systems that impede the capacity for integrating information, synthesizing different moral concepts, and leaving us with intuitive emotional investments in the values we possess. As a result, this kind of moral cognition leaves the subject prone to the manipulation of elites but also bereft of some of the crucial kinds of information processing that are needed to engage in any useful way in civic life. The shrinking of the public sphere, of the practices of civic engagement, of the turning inward to the family and to tighter, more intimate forms of sociation— all contribute to the atrophy of moral consciousness. The impact on this is that political life can become increasingly conservative in terms of the need to protect what is seen as the basic value system to which all should conform. This value system, however, is never justified but felt; it is not reasoned out but intuited. But also, because of the effects of this on the higher capacities of reasoning (such as the conceptual and epistemic), reasonable forms of deliberation and information dissemination meet with a cognitive dissonance on the part of citizens. In a best-case scenario, this leads to the apraxic, disengaged citizen; in its more pathological forms, it can turn into reactionary forms of politics. Since democratic politics requires subjects to be able to participate in civic forms of life, alienated moral consciousness has a direct impact on the ways that democratic political institutions are articulated.33 Whereas the classical forms of alienation tend to see the subject as estranged from him- or herself and society as a whole, alienated moral consciousness can lead to forms of political inactivity or apraxia, but it can also lead to forms of activity in political life that make individuals unable to conceive of their own interests and fall into forms of false consciousness. In this sense, alienated moral consciousness can be seen as a theory that unifies the different varieties of classical alienation as well as reification and false consciousness. The apraxic individual moves away from political life and activity, does not participate in civic life, and generally remains passive to moral and political problems, preferring forms of privacy and family life as a shield from the pressures of economic, social, and political life.34 This

  an anatomy of heteronomy can be due to a series of overlapping social structures that come to form and shape alienated subjectivity—but the central dimension is that even those who are apraxic will find some form of community and meaningfulness within it, even though it may not foster their higher cognitive capacities or bring them in touch with any kind of autonomous moral reasoning. Alienated moral consciousness can also lead to a rise of activity in political life but according to interests and moral concepts that themselves are still heteronomous and the product of ideological thinking. In this case, alienated moral consciousness comes to serve as a means to motivate people to act in ways that seek to defend the value systems that they have absorbed and in which they become invested. In both cases, alienated moral cognition does not prevent individuals from association and tight forms of group-affiliation. These are maintained, however, as a result of sustaining one’s alienated form of cognition, not the reverse. Whereas classical theories of alienation sought to show that individuals would become alienated from social bonds and groups, alienated moral consciousness allows for the formation of group behavior that is nevertheless alienated. Indeed, the only way to maintain these ties is to refrain from questioning certain basic value presuppositions and common social practices; risking ostracism and marginality, individuals will feel pressure to adopt the unified patterns of values that are shared by the wider group, further suppressing and weakening their own moralcognitive powers. Politically, this tends to promote a unification of opinion and action, something that can have deleterious effects on the nature of democratic citizenship.35 The end result is that the strong centripetal forces that bring modern subjects under a unified, preformed, and prescripted value and belief system has strong effects on the nature of political behavior and ideology.

The Collective Mind “Without an ingrained habit of analyzing opinion when we read, talk, and decide,” wrote Walter Lippmann in the early decades of the twentieth century, “most of us would hardly suspect the need of better ideas, nor be interested in them when they appear, nor be able to prevent the new technic of political intelligence from being manipulated.”36

Alienation   Alienated moral cognition is a theory that seeks to understand this problem and to show that it has its roots in the specific structures of modern capitalist economic life and its broader patterns of rationalization and routinization that have become necessary for its efficiency and its legitimacy. If my thesis is correct, then its implications for intersubjective and pragmatist-inspired models of democratic theory are severe since we cannot rely on the power of reasonable or rationalist discourse to provide validity to the outcomes of group deliberation. What is crucial in this analysis is the idea that alienation can be broadened to cover the kind of cognitive and epistemic problems that come to plague advanced capitalist societies. This is because one of the central problems that democratic culture needs to face is that it is no longer problems of normlessness, marginality, and meaninglessness that should attach to alienation when it comes to questions of social and political life.37 Rather, the concept of alienation needs to encompass the problem that modern subjectivity is acutely detached from a capacity to call into question the highly structured and unified norms and values that undergird institutions that promote domination and asymmetrical power structures. What is lost, in this regard, is the power of critical reflection, of the lack of solidarity formation, and the lack of the capacity for an imaginary that can see beyond the horizon of the prevailing reality. Alienation as the atrophy of our moral-cognitive powers entails a freezing up of our sense of ourselves as creative beings, as relational beings, as beings capable of articulating a better, more rational, more humane world. I also think we can see in this category of alienation a crucial variable in the cohesion of modern forms of domination that are themselves constituted by a socialized, apathetic legitimacy on the part of subordinates to authority structures. At the same time, I believe it points not only to a descriptive account of alienation but also to a critical-normative account of its pathological effects. If, as I suggest, alienation can be conceived as atrophied moral cognition, then it is certainly the case that specific institutions and forms of socialization exist that can account for this subjective state—institutions and forms of socialization that can be transformed and overcome. Even more, it seems to me to suggest a crucial problem in the theorization of social movements. Since part of my aim here is to explain certain kinds of political behavior, the contribution of

  an anatomy of heteronomy alienated moral cognition to our understanding of social movements can be found in the ways that individuals come to misconstrue their world. Even in those cases where people do take part in movements—whether right or left of the ideological spectrum—they tend to be prone to the kinds of bias and false understanding of their objective interests that alienated moral reasoning tends to produce. Our successful social movements therefore tend to have the effect of strengthening elite interests rather than public interests. This does not mean that individuals are incapable of acts of compassion, of dissent, or of other kinds of moral behavior that disrupt the unified value fields that contribute to this kind of alienation. But it does mean, I think, that it makes those kinds of actions less likely and, when they do occur, more sporadic. In the end, alienated moral cognition seems to me to be a central factor explaining the denaturing of modern subjectivity. The impact of the massification of society and alienation has evolved, in other words, beyond what theorists who used industrial society as their base paradigm hypothesized. The increased rationalization and unification of a basic, regularized value system secured by hierarchical institutions capable of socializing individuals into legitimate forms of life that predominate within capitalist economic relations therefore serves as the core explanation for forms of degenerated citizenship that have come to characterize advanced societies. At the root of this thesis is the fact that capitalist institutions and their logics come to dominate almost every sphere of modern life—from education, leisure, work, the family, aesthetic values, and so on—and only the acceptance of those values that such a social system tolerates will come to be internalized by most subjects. The responses to economic crisis, inequality, injustice, the legitimation of hierarchies, and so on speak to an inability to cognize the realities of such a situation, not to mention the inability to formulate critical and oppositional forms of consciousness to them. Lacking this, we may be witnessing the final phases of the completion of the great, proverbial iron cage of modernity.

chapter 5

Reconsidering False Consciousness An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition

If alienation can be seen as a defect in our relation to our own moral cognition and our evaluative powers, then this indicates a pathology of self-consciousness and agency. Since such a pathology is shaped by the internalization of external norms and value patterns, it should be clear that it must also have an impact on our epistemic capacities—that is, our ability to process our experiences about the world and what we know about it. Indeed, the key problem that I would like to explore in this chapter is the extent to which the inculcation of institutionalized norms and normative patterns of thought shape our capacity to think about social facts themselves, about social reality and how it works. When we think of the phrase “false consciousness,” there is a tendency to dismiss it as crude, unsophisticated, and simply an incorrect way of understanding the nature of ideology in modern societies. This view may at first seem to deserve some merit, considering the way the phrase has been employed politically by vulgar Marxists. But I would like to suggest that it is in fact a concept that deserves to be reconsidered and one that needs to be reconstructed. My basic proposition here is that false consciousness is a deeper, more complex phenomenon, one that can help clarify many of the problematic, irrational tendencies that persist in modern societies, in particular the various mechanisms of ideological consciousness itself. At the core of false consciousness is not only an account of how individuals fail to grasp the world

  an anatomy of heteronomy in rational terms but also the implication that this failure succeeds in hiding from view a power relationship, some expression of dominance that is repressed and concealed from rational awareness and cognitive reflection. In focusing on a new or reconstructed understanding of false consciousness, I am suggesting that attention be paid to the actual structures of consciousness, thought, and mental processes of reasoning that individual subjects perform in order to understand the ways in which dominant ideas, value patterns, and forms of legitimation come to neutralize critical attitudes and forms of consciousness. These structures of consciousness should be seen as both products of the ideological environment one inhabits and into which one is socialized and as actively constituting the power relations that pervade within the social order. What makes consciousness “false,” in my sense, is that it is locked into a routinized pattern of cognition that disables the critical cognitive and epistemic capacities and naturalizes the dominant ideas and values that legitimize prevailing power relations and interests. Hence, my focus in this chapter is on the very mechanisms that produce and constitute those mental processes that create false conceptions of the world and allow hierarchically organized elites to exert dominance over others. To begin, consider what Friedrich Engels wrote concerning the problem of ideology: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process.”1 Intrinsic to Engels’s thesis is the notion that there exists a split, a kind of bifurcation of consciousness: that one adopts not only ideas that are not one’s own but also, and perhaps more important, thinks in styles and “logics” that are not his or her own either. What is at the center of the theory if ideology in this sense is the notion that one thinks in the form of another, that one becomes heteronomous in terms of adopting the thought patterns, value orientations, and ideational positions of “others.” At the heart of false consciousness lies the idea that we are not simply adopting the ideological structures of the specific social order we inhabit, but that we think within its thoughtcategories as well. False consciousness, it appears, is a problem of the form as much as, if not more than, a problem of the content of thought. This means that breaking out from the powers of false consciousness may be

Reconsidering False Consciousness    more complex than simply adopting another ideological set of political ideas. Rather, it is more likely that the effects of false consciousness run far deeper than generally assumed. When I say that false consciousness concerns the form of thought that a given subject may utilize or think, I mean that forms of socialization have been able to routinize within one’s mental life a pervasive distortion of their cognitive and epistemic faculties. These forms of socialization are themselves deeply embedded in the structural and functional logics of capitalist institutions—institutions that place emphasis on capital accumulation as well as specific production-consumption patterns needed for its maximization. This means that cultural forms of life deeply shape the mental powers and capacities of individuals. But they do so not simply by having individuals adopt certain ideas or specific beliefs; rather, my thesis is that the functions and logics of institutions dominated by any elite group will come to shape the rules and structures of thought itself. False consciousness is not simply a matter of the ideas that people possess; it is a matter of the cognitive styles that are shaped by socialization and the ways that these cognitive styles come to limit and shape the powers of thought itself. If I am right, then this approach to false consciousness will not only help to rehabilitate it as an empirical and theoretical concept in the social sciences; it will also serve as a challenge to many of the current trends in contemporary political and democratic theory, particularly advocates of deliberative democracy and intersubjective approaches to critical theory. At the heart of my approach is the thesis that false consciousness is a product of irrationalism—a fundamental inability on the part of the subject properly to be able to conceptualize the world in any objectively valid sense. It is not merely an inability but also a pervasive way of thinking that is cultivated by our socialization into institutions that increasingly require us to think in ways that disable our capacity to perceive the systemic and structural nature of social power and domination. By irrationality I mean the specific ways that value orientations, acquired through socialization, come to distort the cognitive and epistemic structures of thinking. Individuals come to “think” certain ideas about the world (in factual as well as normative terms) owing to the ways that the dominant value patterns shape consciousness. This is irrational in a double sense: first, because the values that are internalized are heteronomous in that

  an anatomy of heteronomy they legitimize external ideas and values and, second, because subjects are generally unable to defend rationally the ideas and values that they possess. Put another way, the cognitive and the moral capacities of individuals are intimately connected and are shaped by forms of socialization and institutions that pervade contemporary capitalist society and culture. Irrationalism, seen in this way, is the inability to be able to know the objective processes of the world one inhabits or to assess it with any degree of scrutiny. Irrationalism is the term I use to identify a broad group of defective thought processes and habits that tend toward an acritical compliance to the dominant structure of social relations.

Irrationalism and False Consciousness The inability to track cognitively the real, actual, or objective processes of the social relations and mechanisms that constitute one’s life leads to irrationalism in the sense that such a subject will adopt alternative explanations for the phenomena they witness or experience. Irrationalism is the lack of applying one’s own epistemic powers to the beliefs one has and, more essential, to attribute social phenomena to nonsocial causes. We must consider the actual processes that produce such a pathology. The concepts or categories of thought that an individual possesses and uses to make some kind of sense of the world produce false consciousness when they are unable to capture the objective reality of the processes and reality of the social world around them. Rationality is therefore the relative accuracy of the correspondence of the ideas one possesses and the objective processes and phenomena that shape and affect one’s life. The problem with the irrational, on this view, is that it is a result of pathological forms of socialization. According to this view, socialization patterns and norms come to subjectivize agents into a matrix of value orientations and practices that shape the capacities of thought and reflection of individuals. In this way, we can see a means to overcome the way that false consciousness has been conceived in recent literature. On the one hand, it is seen as a pathology of the subject, as a defect in the cognitive powers of the individual and not dependent on the systems of socialization and their powers to develop and shape consciousness.2 On the other hand, there are the overly structural accounts that come from placing undue emphasis on

Reconsidering False Consciousness    the coercive powers of social institutions rooted in capitalist imperatives.3 As I see it, false consciousness is a dialectic between both approaches: those that emphasize cognitive defects and the ways that these defects are produced by specific structural-functional logics of capitalist institutions.4 Irrationalism comes into play as a means of understanding the former, which I will focus on here: the actual defects of cognitive and epistemic powers of the subject. Irrationalism is not simply a fault of the thinking subject; it is a particular way of thinking, of (mis)conceiving the world. It occurs when the thought categories employed by the subject are not able to (1) perceive or (2) adequately comprehend any object of consciousness. In this sense, irrationalism is not simply the fault of the subject but of the structures of thought that are employed throughout society and that therefore have some kind of hegemonic force over the subject (e.g., as when someone thinks about the world in ways that everyone else does without reflecting that the mode of thinking may be defective or inadequate). Simply put, the concept of irrationality that I am suggesting here stems from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, which sees it as the incapacity to distinguish essence from appearance, or process from isolated static elements.5 In this sense, irrationalism affects the capacity to judge and to know the world with any degree of objective accuracy, an incapacity to grasp in thought the actual structures and dynamics that actively produce the social world. Irrational ideas also attribute social facts to nonsocial causes, such as human “nature,” or to religious or abstract metaphysical doctrines; in other words, irrational ideas are mediated by ideological frames of understanding. Irrationality cannot penetrate reality, cannot grasp it conceptually. As a result, false consciousness cannot transform the social world because it cannot adequately comprehend or critique it. Instead, it reflects the social irrationality of the world that it reflects. The irrational mind is therefore unable to grasp the broader complexity of reality, unable to link—in any causal-rational sense—the disparate elements of experience and perception.6 This results in a way of viewing the world that is mediated by those frames of understanding, beliefs, values, and so on rooted in administered forms of socialization (i.e., schools, work, and so on) or the reality-affirming powers of the culture industry (i.e., popular forms of art, culture, mass technology, and

  an anatomy of heteronomy so on). The irrational is therefore a social product: it is the effect of progressive forms of socialization that result from both the need in modern societies to secure hierarchical and administered forms of production and the kind of subjectivity produced by a culture saturated with excessive consumption drives and imperatives. The irrational is, in my account, the nucleus of false consciousness in that these cognitive styles of thinking come to prevent people from grasping the core power relations that operate in shaping their world, thereby eroding not only the cognitiveepistemic powers of the individual but also their moral-evaluative powers as well. In this respect, I disagree with the argument put forth by Michael Rosen that not all false consciousness is irrational. Rosen claims that “Irrationality in general represents a failure of competence on the part of the individual: to say of someone that they formed a belief for bad reasons is to suggest that it was—or ought to have been—within their power to form it for better reasons. But there are defects of consciousness that do not consist in failures of rationality in this sense. For example, if someone is deceived then the fact that they believe something that is untrue . . . is nevertheless not a failure of rationality on their part.”7 It seems wrong to argue that temporary mistakes of reasoning be described as “irrational.” Rather, the basic premise of irrationalism is the inability to utilize reason to justify the ideas, beliefs, “facts,” norms, and so on to which one subscribes. In this basic sense, all false consciousness must be irrational since it is the condition of having beliefs or ideas about the world that one cannot justify rationally (even though they most likely are able to rationalize those beliefs, ideas, etc.). As I am arguing, irrationalism is a defect in ways of thinking that produces false consciousness. There are different levels of deception, but if I am cognitively unable to understand or question the premises that are put to me, then I necessarily fall into an irrational (rather than rationally impaired) mode of thinking and acting. Irrationalism, in the sense I am using it here, is not simply being deceived; it is the result of defective forms of reasoning that therefore conceal from the subject the true, or objectively verifiable, knowledge of the world they live in. It does not refer to the level of knowledge one may possess but rather the extent to which the person is able to engage critically the mechanisms that constitute her or his social world. In this sense, irrationalism means a defect

Reconsidering False Consciousness    in the ways I am able to process knowledge about the world. It indicates a basic failure in the correspondence between the ideas I possess and the actual, true nature of the ideas to which those ideas refer. As I noted above, the sources for this understanding of false consciousness as irrationality are rooted in the basic postulates of critical theory.8 For Lukács, irrationalism results from “the limitations and contradictions of thinking governed by understanding.”9 By “understanding” Lukács means the Hegelian category of thought where the subject perceives the appearance of an object without grasping the rational reasons that make up the essence of that object.10 When thought is unable to pierce the mere appearance of any object or phenomenon and also fails to see that this encounter with the object is self-sufficient, requiring no further development of thinking, it becomes “irrational” because it (thought or the thinking subject) “stops at precisely this point, absolutizes the problem, hardens the limitations of perception governed by understanding into perceptual limitations as a whole, and indeed mysticizes into a ‘supra-rational’ answer the problem thus rendered artificially insoluble.”11 Gramsci adds to this understanding of irrationalism as the root of false consciousness by pointing to defective ways of acquiring one’s conception of the world. For Gramsci, awareness and criticism can only begin once individuals have abandoned ways of thinking that disable them from properly grasping the objective world around them: Is it better to “think,” without having a critical awareness, in a disjointed and episodic way? In other words, is it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment, i.e., by one of the many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the conscious world . . . or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labors of one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the molding of one’s personality?12

Gramsci adds to Lukács’s thesis of the failure to adequately grasp the essence of phenomena the psychological consequences of subordinate groups accepting not only the ideas but also the flawed forms of cognition (i.e., “episodic” ways of thinking) from hegemonic groups and classes.13 False consciousness is not the result of an individual’s failure to cognize the world; it is a social, a group phenomenon instigated by the power

  an anatomy of heteronomy structures of hierarchical social dynamics. Subordinate groups adopt “a conception which is not its own but is borrowed from another group; and it affirms this conception verbally and believes itself to be following it, because this is the conception which it follows in ‘normal times’—that is when its conduct is not independent and autonomous, but submissive and subordinate.”14 Irrationalism is therefore a pathology of cognitive capacities that results from the imposition of values, ideas, and belief systems that actively interfere with the autonomous power of reason of any subject. But it does this through the shaping of cognition and, as I have been emphasizing, the structuring of consciousness and the capacities for thought itself. The specific mechanism for this lies in the socialization process, where the subject acquires the values, beliefs, and ideas that form the basis for legitimizing the various institutions that make up the social order. These values, ideas, and beliefs are instilled through socialization and come to form a consensus of legitimation and conformity, resulting in a correspondence between the values and ideas of the subject and those needed by institutional logics and functions. The extent to which a society is able isomorphically to harmonize its various institutional functions and goals with the subjects that inhabit them, the more it is able to secure an efficiency of domination and the more the consciousness of subjects becomes false in the sense that it is heteronomous and externally imposed. This external imposition of value patterns and norms is in itself an expression of social power; but we can also say that these values and norms, if they are successful, erect a kind of barrier to apprehending the power dynamics that constitute the world or, perhaps, a misdiagnosis of where power exists and who possesses it (hence racism, anti-Semitism, populist antielitism, and so on). We can therefore point to three different conduits of false consciousness: emotions, imposed interests, and tradition. Each of these is a means by which structures of cognition can be shaped by the inculcation of values that come to underwrite reasoning habits. Emotions can be used to confuse the rational process of inquiry; imposed interests (as opposed to spontaneous or authentic interests) are able to orient actions and behaviors toward goals imposed by the imperatives of the system; and tradition, habit, and custom become the roots of legitimacy for values and worldviews. In any event, these can be seen as the causes of false

Reconsidering False Consciousness    consciousness; my purpose moving forward will be to dissect and analyze the actual processes that make up defective cognition—that is, to map false consciousness. From this discussion of irrationalism—whether it is seen as the lack of rational reasons to account for our perception of the world or the kinds of “episodic” thinking that Gramsci emphasizes and its inability to comprehend the totality of any thing—we are dealing with an inability to cognize the causal processes that constitute the essential characteristics of the phenomena we experience. When we are dealing with the social world, this means an inability to cognize the social forces that govern one’s life and the imperatives behind the norms and values that one comes to follow. This means we are dealing with two separate but interrelated processes of thought: on the one hand, the capacity to process information rationally (a cognitive dimension) and, on the other hand, the problem of whose norms and values come to orient and legitimize our worldviews and beliefs about the world (a moral-evaluative dimension). Taken together, these two dimensions constitute social cognition, and false consciousness is to be seen as deformed modes of social cognition.

Mapping False Consciousness Thus far, I have been arguing that false consciousness needs to be seen as a defective form of reasoning about the world—one where an individual is unable to understand the mechanisms of the social relations that make up her or his world, particularly the relations between her- or himself and the elites that possess unequal power over social resources. To go a step further, I will now consider the styles of social cognition that can arise from the different ways defective reasoning can manifest itself. The basic thesis here is that false consciousness can take a variety of forms, but it is essentially opposed to a critical form of cognition that is able to conceptualize and analyze social phenomena, as well as the normative reasons that orient actions and beliefs. My intention here is not to dwell on the philosophical categories behind irrationality and false consciousness but to move us toward an operational set of concepts that can be useful for empirical research and theory construction. To this end, let me sketch several concepts and actual mechanisms of the kinds of cognitive processes

  an anatomy of heteronomy that are involved in the production and maintenance of false consciousness.15 As a starting point to this approach, I will point to two crucial mechanisms: those that affect the cognitive-epistemic capacities and those that infect the moral-evaluative capacities.16 Hence, I see false consciousness arising from defects in cognitive-epistemic competence that then come to shape moral-evaluative powers and then progress to certain attitudinal dimensions of the personality, all brought about not by endogenous defects of the subject but through their socialization by specific kinds of institutional structures. Irrationality must therefore affect epistemic and cognitive capacities, as well as the capacities for and powers of moral reasoning. Again, this irrationality must essentially be defined by the extent to which individuals are unable to perceive and cognize the objectively valid nature of the social processes, relations, and mechanisms that surround them. To operate with false consciousness therefore means, following Lukács and Gramsci, that the cognitive and epistemic deficits from which the individual suffers lead to a reliance on external schemas and concepts of the world, usually generated by other institutions that seek to legitimize, in some sense, their operational logics. Individuals are therefore conscious of the world around them, but their knowledge of the world is defective and is supplemented by the dominant ideas of the society around them.17 The false consciousness of any agent can therefore be outlined, in its simplest form, along two different but interdependent dimensions. First, there is what I call the integrative-diffusive dimension and, second, the criticalheteronomous dimension. The first registers the cognitive and epistemic style of thought, whereas the second registers the capacities for autonomous or critical moral reasoning and the extent to which one comes to rely on external thought schemes and models of explanation as opposed to one’s own understanding of the norms and values that underwrite her or his activities and beliefs. The Integrative-Diffusive Dimension The integrative-diffusive dimension registers an individual’s capacity to integrate concepts or matters of fact into her or his interpretation of reality. The chasm between the phenomenological experience of the world, on the one hand, and the actual, empirical realities of the world,

Reconsidering False Consciousness    on the other, results from the incapacity of any given subject to provide accurate reasons or explanations for the realities he or she experiences. Indeed, an individual may be able to give “reasons” for why a specific ethnic group is economically marginalized, why unemployment rates are rising, or some other aspect of her or his social world, but these “reasons” need not be fully rational in the sense that they are objectively verifiable by facts. Individuals may adopt prescripted narratives to explain these phenomena, but they may be unaware of the contradictions or lack of coherence for the explanations they adopt. Integrating different elements of any coherent system or totality is the essentially dialectical ability to grasp the causal links and relations between the elements of that system. My complete, objectively valid knowledge of any object therefore requires that I know how its complex internal relations are arranged and how they can integrate different aspects, facts, principles, and so on, of any thing. If an individual suffers from diffused forms of cognition, he or she is unable to accomplish this and ends up misperceiving and not properly knowing or understanding that object. This is what Gramsci seems to be alluding to in his discussion of “episodic consciousness,” where individuals fail to be able to grasp in any coherent sense the coherence of the world, its mechanisms, and the actual, true nature of the social relations that they live within. Diffusive cognition leads therefore to a host of defective forms of reasoning, such as a weakness in or lack of causal reasoning capacities, illusory correlations between phenomena, naive realism, the false consensus effect, the fundamental attribution error, and other problems of reasoning that can serve to mystify and reify the world. But this occurs, as I suggested in the previous section, because of the ability of value orientations to distort reasoning processes. Since socialization processes are organized around specific norms and values that are imposed on individuals, and that they must come to internalize, these value orientations can also condition the ways one comes to think about what is right and wrong about the world—what ideas should be accepted and what ideas should be rejected and so on. The cognitive defects that result from diffuse consciousness therefore contribute to the means by which individuals come to reify their world and help sustain relations of domination and control. This occurs because the ideas that they come to adopt are those that are convenient

  an anatomy of heteronomy based on their own ideological predispositions or simply the ones ambient in their environment. Diffusive cognition styles affect the ways individuals receive information, the ways they process stimuli, and come to formulate worldviews and legitimize their ideas about the world, as well as the institutions that constitute it. Integrative style of thought forces individuals to render a more objective formulation of the world and to integrate what seem otherwise diffuse aspects of the world into a more coherent totality. The less I possess this kind of thinking, the more prone I will be to adopting what seem to be workable and plausible explanations of the world from other sources. It is here that a connection exists between the cognitive and the moral-evaluative dimensions of false consciousness. The Critical-Heteronomous Dimension Information and knowledge about the world, when it cannot be generated adequately or satisfactorily by the subject her- or himself, therefore, has to come from some external source. The extent to which I rely on these external understandings of the world and come to justify them is a condition of “heteronomy,” that condition of taking truths and principles about the world from an other rather than from one’s own understanding.18 More crucially, it means lacking an understanding of the world that is one’s own, arrived at through the powers of the agent’s own cognitive powers, and therefore internalizing the concepts, schemas, and ideas about the world from others—usually opinion structures that are highly doxic and generally uncritical of the forms of power that pervade one’s society. This can affect the ways that individuals come to bypass attempts at rational thinking and instead rely automatically on the normative concepts that they have internalized.19 The more one turns toward a moralevaluative condition that is heteronomous, the more one will manifest the various attitudes typical of false consciousness in contemporary societies: belief that the world one lives in is inherently just;20 the tendency of oppressed groups not to perceive their subordinate status;21 behavioral compliance to prevailing institutional norms;22 and the justification of the individual’s social roles.23 Individuals come to possess heteronomous forms of moral consciousness when they internalize—through processes of routinization and rationalization—the value patterns and norms that are themselves

Reconsidering False Consciousness    needed for the reproduction of hierarchical forms of social relations. In this sense, processes of socialization perform the function of producing false consciousness by actively dissuading and suppressing critical forms of thought that will undermine the value consensus of consumer culture and market society. False consciousness is therefore primarily the result of the various ways in which thought processes and value orientations are subsumed by the dominant institutions of the community. This subsumption is an active process of the imposition of values and ideas—an imposition that occurs through cultural norms, educational forms, the pressure of peer groups, and so on. The effectiveness of false consciousness depends therefore on the extent to which the dominant ideas and values of those institutions come to be internalized by social agents. This point deserves further discussion. The mechanism of value acquisition is central because it shows how ideas and values are internalized, not in some abstract sense but through the ways in which norms are enforced within any social group. This is because ideas and values develop an active force in socialization once they are seen as part of a broader social consensus. Nascent egos come to identify with the individuals and the basic values that underwrite the institutions to which they belong. This is not simply the product of simple hierarchical authority figures, since mass culture has become a predominant means of communicating and disseminating the values of a consumer culture and the social order more broadly. The intersubjective process of value communication occurs initially as the result of authority figures imposing on and socializing the ego but also through cultural and technical means of dissemination (popular culture, television, internet, and so on), as well as peers within the community. Attitudinal congruence comes to solidify certain ways of thinking and judging. Certain ideas and beliefs about how the world works, how it ought to work, become deeply embedded not only in the content of thought; they also come to stunt the autonomous, critical capacities of the subject as well (think reification, episodic thinking, and so on). In this sense, Marcuse was correct when he argued that “in the social structure, the individual becomes the conscious and unconscious object of administration and obtains his freedom and satisfaction in his role as such an object in the mental structure, the ego shrinks to such an extent that it seems no longer capable of sustaining itself, as a self, in distinction

  an anatomy of heteronomy from id and superego.”24 What needs to be added to this is that the genesis of false consciousness is the ways in which this process of self- and egodevelopment is able to shape and structure cognition, the very mechanics of thought itself. It is my thesis that false consciousness is much more than the force of ideas and values penetrating subjective thought; it is the power of socialization and consistent adoption of certain ideas and value orientations that establish a defective style of thinking that makes it difficult for individuals to obtain critical cognition of their social world. Categories of False Consciousness In this sense, we can summarize the relation between the two dimensions I have described as a kind of cognitive map where the extensiveness and intensity of false consciousness can be registered. If we see the relationship between the dimensions dynamically, we can understand how different thought styles can be derived. I summarize these in figure 5.1, where I present a grid of four distinct styles of social cognition that emerge from the different combinations of the critical-heteronomous and integrative-diffusive dimensions discussed above. If we consider individuals with a high degree of heteronomy and diffusive epistemic and cognitive patterns of thought, we see a condition of extreme false consciousness, or reification, where individuals are unable to conceptualize properly the causal structure of the world in which they live and therefore adopt uncritically the worldviews, concepts, and ideas of “others” around them. Similarly, there are those who have highly integrative epistemic and cognitive patterns of thought but lack critical consciousness, instead internalizing the normative values of their social world. This presents us with a situation where the individual will be highly conformative to dominant social norms and values, even perhaps going to the extent that he or she will actively support and legitimize the norms of his or her social world, refusing to call into question the value orientations he or she has internalized. A situation of what Erich Fromm terms “automaton conformity” results. Next, consider an individual who is highly critical of the norms and values of his or her social world but lacks a coherent or integrated pattern of cognition. This instance, still a category of false consciousness, is one of transgressive deviance, where one rejects the values of the community but does so in a way that is not realistically constructive in terms of providing

Reconsidering False Consciousness    C

TransgressiveDeviant

CriticalCognitive

D

I

AutomatonConformity

Reification

H figur e 5.1. Ideal-Type matrix of social cognition styles. Horizontal line indicates the diffusive-integrative dimension and vertical line indicates the criticalheteronomous dimension.

legitimate alternatives to the things rejected. Last, a style of critical cognition results only when one is able to be critical of the value patterns of one’s social world and able to understand the actual mechanisms that create or produce the social phenomena of that world. In this sense, the categories of false consciousness come to cover a variety of social cognition styles, but they have coherence as a concept because each of them is able to direct the thought processes of the individual away from the sources of social power. The basic premise here is that false consciousness allows a society made up of unequal relations to social power to be seamlessly recreated by creating a culture of compliance to rational forms of authority. Legitimacy for the system therefore comes to be the result of a false consciousness of the pathological nature of the social relations that pervade the social world; as a result, false consciousness retains its centrality as a category of social power in that it is an active component of any domination relation. Consider the thesis that

  an anatomy of heteronomy any domination relation should be seen not simply as agent A interfering arbitrarily with the choices of agent B. According to this view, domination is the result of some kind of force where one is able to have power over the choices of another. But this hypothesis is empirically weak since it is much more accurate to assert that domination is the result of the acceptance on the part of agent B of the power or authority of agent A and that this acceptance or legitimacy is the result of a set of beliefs, ideas, or values that orient agent B to accept that power relation. On this view, the basis of any hierarchical system of power obtains its stability, efficiency, and security through the manipulation of consciousness itself. And consciousness can be manipulated—indeed, more than manipulated, it can be shaped and organized—to cognize the world in specific precoded and patterned ways to such an extent that they will legitimize from the bottom up the social order of power. For without false consciousness, modern, postconventional societies would almost certainly witness more manifestations of social conflict and struggle between unequal social groups.

The Social and Cultural Reproduction of False Consciousness The production of false consciousness is complex, but it does not result from problems of the isolated individual. Here the insights of critical theory are once again important in that the predominant social and cultural institutions and forms of experience that characterize late capitalism are particularly effective in generating the kinds of irrationalism necessary for a pervasive form of false consciousness. First, educational institutions are increasingly being oriented away from integrative forms of knowledge and learning and are oriented more toward instrumental ends. The colonization of social institutions by the logic of economic elites and the values of the capitalist economic system therefore presents us with an ambience of instrumental forms of rationality that are seen as universal and basic to the kind of world we live in. Second, technological change can also have an effect on the kinds of consciousness being produced. The explosion of consumptive forms of technology (iPhones, iPads, and so on) has enabled a new level of distractedness that enhances diffuse cognitive styles and severely inhibits the formation of more critical forms

Reconsidering False Consciousness    of reasoning that can move toward calling into question the norms and forms of obligation that we have toward social institutions. Third, media outlets have also been absorbed by a competition for viewers and increasingly unsophisticated forms of journalism as the commodification of news becomes rampant. And last, the culture industry has the ability to drain the cognitive resources of individuals through increasingly trite forms of aesthetic experience. All of this points toward the institutionalization of false consciousness. The reproduction of false consciousness needs therefore to be seen as a multicausal process, but its basic function remains the same: to secure compliance to the various institutions that produce hierarchical social relations. One way to explain this phenomenon is that it results from defective forms of intersubjectivity and that false consciousness and reification should be seen as the expression of a lack of reflexivity within intersubjective relations and socialization processes.25 But this seems more of a necessary but insufficient condition since intersubjective relations and practices are themselves deeply shaped by social institutions. The power of social structure to impose rules, logics, and functions on institutions and on consciousness is the real source of false consciousness, and it is only perpetuated by defective (i.e., nonreflexive) forms of intersubjectivity. We miss the real causal story if we eliminate the power of economic elites to redirect the functions of the community to fit their purposes and interests. To be sure, it is not the case that there is a unified ruling class but rather that elites must, in order to retain their elite status, be able, as Gaetano Mosca pointed out in the early 1920s, actively to disorganize the majority of the population in order to prevent threats to their sources of power. False consciousness in modern societies becomes more difficult to combat once we see that its vehicle of propagation is the increasing commodification of every sphere of social life, from education, aesthetic experience, journalism, and so on. As the commodification process extends its reach, so does the phenomenon of false consciousness, since the processes of socialization come to be marked increasingly by the imperatives of economic elites and the particular forms of production and consumption that characterize post-Fordist capitalism. The basis of my thesis has been that the processes of socialization under the conditions of highly rationalized institutional life dominated

  an anatomy of heteronomy by elites coordinating a complex market system based on mass production and consumption requires the distortion of ideational patterns but also that it results in a pathology of cognitive functions. This means that the ideas that dominate contemporary critical theory, which place emphasis on intersubjective theories of communication, discourse, recognition, and so on, cannot be adequate to combat the deep effects of socialization that shape false consciousness. Indeed, false consciousness—at least in the form that I am suggesting it takes, as a defect of social cognition and epistemic competence—should be seen as blocking and disabling the critical and emancipatory promises of these theories. Instead, we need to turn our attention back to the ways in which social power is inherent in institutional logics and ideational forms; to look again at a critical analysis of mass culture and its impact on subject formation; and once again consider the ways that reification is not a pathology of recognitive social relations but a distorted form of thought, of cognition itself. Indeed, in the end, it is a category that should be seen as central to any genuine reconstruction of critical theory. The Enlightenment project of producing autonomous, rationally competent citizens still should be a standard by which to judge the intensity of defective social cognition. We are still plagued by the pernicious reality of elites able to direct the attention of the remainder of the community away from its unequal control over resources and its unequal control over institutions, forms of culture, and, most important, the forms of consciousness that prevent critical scrutiny of their powers of direction and control. If we turn our attention to the dialectic of subjective forms of cognition and the institutional forms of reproduction of cognitive styles, we can perhaps begin to see ways of resistance. But before we can consider this, we need to explore the ways that the structure of the self and the intrapsychic processes that organize it are shaped by these same processes.

chapter 6

Cultivating Consent Reification and the Web of Norms

Rethinking Reification It has been fifty years since the apex of the student and social movements of the late 1960s. These movements embraced both Western and communist societies, from San Francisco to Paris to Prague. An awakening of the dullness and the injustice of modern, administered societies—both capitalist and communist—were among the central focuses of these movements. Viewed long range, the movements evince a very different kind of political agency and moral awareness from those in contemporary societies. Whereas movements for racial, class, and gender justice have by no means disappeared, there has been a deepening of the acceptance of liberal-capitalist institutions. The tacit consensus that pervades our world is rooted in a degradation of moral awareness and political dissent—results of the increasing power of moral alienation and defective social cognition. Add to the passive acceptance of these institutions the fact that we are also witnessing a decline of democratic institutions, values, and practices. How can we confront and explain these trends in modern society? I think that a core thesis is to expand the idea of reification to encompass the core spheres of the personality, consciousness, and the self that provide for the continued political and cultural stability of a society based on exploitation, domination, inequality, and alienation. In short, I want to show how the theory of reification can be expanded to provide an

   an anatomy of heteronomy account of subjectivity that accepts as legitimate and as basic the pathological consequences of capitalist society. Another aspect of the argument I want to explore here is what reification actually inhibits in one’s social agency. In this sense, the theory of reification must not only be diagnostic with respect to the problems of rational reflection within subjects, but it must also be normative in the sense that it can make evident that which is being blocked by reified consciousness itself. This second aspect of the argument is rich with possibility insofar as we see reification as hiding or even distorting our cognitive capacity to grasp the social-ontological structure of our world. What I mean here is that reification is not only a process whereby things that are human become nonhuman objects, but, more importantly and, I think, more accurately, it distorts and misshapes our cognitive capacity to see our world as cooperative, interdependent, and constituted by our actions. In this sense, it robs us of what Marx saw as crucial for any sense of social transformation: a conception of our species as self-conscious of our own sociopoietic capacities. In this sense, reification renders consciousness nondialectical. It is true that reification cannot be—indeed, no concept can ever be—exhaustive in its diagnosis of the problems of capitalist society. But reification comes as close as any of its competitors to such a category. Nancy Fraser, for one, has argued that “we must replace the view of capitalism as a reified form of ethical life with a more differentiated, structural view.”1 I do not believe this observation is correct. More than any other time in capitalist society, we can see our world as sustained by a culture of internalized, implicitly valid norms and worldviews with respect to the social goals posited by capitalist imperatives. More than any other time in the history of capitalism, we are witnessing a decrease in class conflict and an increasing stability of the system’s legitimacy—all of this despite obvious and well-publicized accounts of corruption, inequality, social pathologies, and other social defects. I want to suggest a widened conception of reification that is still rooted in the basic thesis put forth by Lukács in 1923: that consciousness has become colonized by heteronomous patterns of social life that have themselves been saturated with quantification, administrative reason, and exchange value. But as I see it, this basic thesis must be enlarged to confront what I think is a core pathology in modern

Cultivating Consent    cultures—namely, the degradation of agency and the self and its incapacity to articulate concrete alternatives to the prevailing social order. The central thesis of this chapter is that the concept of reification has to be expanded and cultivated into a richer theory about the nature of defective social consciousness in order for us to come to terms with the acute erosion of moral and political agency in modern societies. The idea is not that reification follows simply from the logic of commodification. Rather, capitalist society as a social formation consisting of certain kinds of social relations larded thickly with norms and value orientations has a strong constitutive power in forming the consciousness and personality of subjects. Norms are where much of the action is in the problem of reification because of the ways that norms underwrite our conceptual and evaluative dimensions of the self. As I see it, norms are capable of structuring our cognitive powers and conceptual fields to the extent that they are routinized by social institutions and systems and then internalized by agents who are “successfully” socialized by those institutions and systems. These norms carry with them what I call an “implicit validity,” by which I mean they require no justification to be accepted by the subject yet are accepted as second nature. Reification is not only a concern of this problem but also a consequence of the acceptance of these norms on our reflective and cognitive powers as a whole. What I would like to explore therefore is the impact that reification has on moral consciousness or, more generally considered, the capacity of individuals to reflect and judge their world from a rational, critical perspective. The essence of the problem that I want to diagnose is the demise of the rational capacities of autonomous individuals in modern, mass societies. We should consider this an important concern because it constrains and distorts the ability of individuals to come to a critical consciousness of their social world. A basic reason for this is that at the root of our cognitive faculties lie value orientations that are embedded within our consciousness as a result of socialization. These value orientations can be residues of traditional or conventional forms of morality, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, they are, most certainly, absorbed from the value systems put forth by modern administrative-capitalist institutions. Values of efficiency, of technical progress, of profit, of possessive individualism and consumption can undergird the ways we think cognitively through

  an anatomy of heteronomy our world. If these values were not successfully absorbed by social actors, there would be an erosion of the legitimacy of institutions that operate according to those imperatives. The problem here is that the more secure and more consolidated any system of socialization becomes, the more successful it becomes in securing its values and aims within the personality structure of the subject and, as a result, the more heteronomous will be the subject’s moral-political consciousness. But another reason for taking this seriously is the current emphasis in philosophy and in critical theory on norms and on moral consciousness as the mode in which critique occurs. The postmetaphysical and normative turn in moral philosophy more generally and critical theory more specifically is premised on the capacity of individuals to participate in a community of reason givers and reason takers that can obtain objectively valid values and norms via agreement and the project of justification. On this view, critique is seen as a means by which we ask for reasons and justifications for the social norms that we are asked to accept.2 But this approach takes no account of the effects of reification and the ways that it serves to frustrate, if not totally block, such a capacity. Indeed, this approach misses entirely the fact that essential to any system of modern dominance is the capacity of that system to deploy norms and values that render its activities legitimate in the minds of its actors. This is the essential problem of reification and why it remains such an essential category for any critical theory of society. Without a diagnosis of this pathology of consciousness and social cognition, there will be no way for us to comprehend how culture is the handmaiden to other systems of power and dominance. The basic problem that the theory of reification seeks to address is the inability of subjective consciousness to find appropriate mediations for self-understanding. A false totality is impressed on consciousness that represses and distorts reflection on the actual and potential ways we can structure and shape our social life. Again, this is because of the role played by norms in consciousness: they orient the intentional structures of consciousness that in turn shape social action and the meaning we attach to those actions. Since the thinking subject becomes unable to find a critical means by which to cognize self and world, thought is collapsed into the object. In this sense, given that social facts—unlike natural or brute

Cultivating Consent    facts—depend on our intentions, on the normative meaning we ascribe to them collectively (think of Peirce’s concept of the legi here, as well as Searle’s theory of collective intentionality), it follows that if social institutions can shape these forms of normative-intentional meaning, they can also orient our cognitive capacities and endow social facts with a secondnature-like objectivity. Lukács’s theory was constructed using the language of German Idealism; it was meant to intervene in the debates of neo-Kantian and Marxist theories of consciousness and social theory. I want to defend Lukács’s totality thesis, which states that reification results from a patterning by the economic system of other spheres of social and cultural life. This patterning of the totality is a gradual but increasingly penetrating phenomenon, and it results in a deep distortion of the subject’s capacity to gain critical cognition of what we can call the “false totality” of capitalism. As Andrew Feenberg has remarked: “In modern societies, the reified formal rationality of the technical disciplines and experiential knowledge of the technical achieve a partial separation at the level of discourse, but in the material reality of artifacts and systems they interpenetrate through and through.”3 We need to take this thesis seriously because it nullifies, or at the very least seriously calls into question, alternative logics of critique that believe an immanent critique of modern forms of power and domination characteristic of capitalist social relations and institutions can come about via the intersubjective practices either of language, justification, reason giving and reason taking, or recognition. What Lukács’s theory implies is that logics from these kinds of social action cannot carry over into a critique of the totality.

The Classical Theory of Reification Lukács introduces his concept of reification as a result of a prolonged attempt to understand the problem of the crisis of culture that he witnessed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He saw the precepts of orthodox Marxism—which posited a mechanistic form of consciousness that would propel working people to revolutionary praxis—as misguided. What was lacking in Marxist theory was a concept of mind and consciousness adequate to grasp the problems of cognition

  an anatomy of heteronomy under industrial capitalism. To accomplish this, Lukács read Marx’s theory of the fetishism of commodities through several important sources. First, there was the philosophical problem of idealism raised once again by neo-Kantianism. According to this view, a separation of facts from values was necessary to construct a conception of science that was free from the moral baggage of normative claims. Empirical facts could only be grasped rationally through being cleansed of normative value judgments, which were to be resolved not through the analysis of facts but through the discursive domain of culture. In terms of its epistemic theory, neoKantianism also broke with the Hegelian view, which held that rational knowledge could only be approached through the dialectic of essence and appearance: I come to know what something is not through an analysis of empirical facts but through the teleological end that any object holds within a system or totality. To return to empiricism in social theory would therefore mean a reifying of consciousness in the sense that objects disappear from cognitive view. Lukács therefore saw one root of reification as the return to subjective Idealist models of mind, as well as an epistemology that privileges empiricism over coherence theories of truth. Another source for Lukács’s concept of reification came from his sociological studies with Weber and Simmel. From Weber he took seriously the thesis of rationalization, which maintained that modernity was being characterized by a methodical calculation of means and ends and that this was coming to affect the subjective capacities for judgment and knowledge of the social world. Since modern industry was characterized by a heightening of rationalization, or a “methodical attainment of a definitely given and practical end by means of an increasingly precise calculation of adequate means,” its ability to shape consciousness according to its patterns of operation enhanced the dominance of elites.4 From Simmel, Lukács took seriously the thesis of the “tragedy of culture,” which saw a growing inability of modern individuals to be able to comprehend the totality of social life and its many mechanisms and forces—a rift between what Simmel termed “subjective” and “objective” culture. Lukács saw Marx’s theory of the fetishism of commodities as the prism through which these theories could be made concrete. Both Weber and Simmel saw their diagnoses as essentially fatalistic and pessimistic; there would be no way out of the dilemmas of modernity, and they were

Cultivating Consent    consequently unable to locate an agent of transformation. But for Lukács, reification theory brings together the theory of mind and the theory of society: it seeks to reconcile the problems of subjectivity and objectivity from the abstractions of neo-Kantianism by positing their relation within a totality. As with Marx, the fetishism of commodities is the expression of the fragmentation of a consciousness that can no longer grasp the whole process that produces it, for Lukács, reification is the inability to grasp totality, to see the internal relations that undergird reality itself. The ability to know the essence of reality is to be able to grasp dynamic process as opposed to isolated particulars. It is the ability to conceive of the processes that shape objective and subjective life; it is the very groundwork of what allows capitalist institutions to maintain their legitimacy in an age of legal-rational authority. Central to Lukács’s concept of reification is the notion that objects of consciousness—most specifically, those things that are human—become “thing-like.” What Lukács has in mind here is the thesis that the social world loses its inherently human character and ceases to be seen as created by human praxis. But also, it turns human beings themselves into objects for manipulation and into extensions for one’s own projects. Think of a waiter in a restaurant, a cashier at a store, or a cab driver. All are transformed from human subjects to practical objects that can be utilized via the cash nexus. The social bonds between people become reified, dehumanized. Since humans make the world not only materially through the labor process and the shaping of nature through work but also cognitively via the intentional structures of consciousness, to lose the human character of the world means that it becomes estranged from our comprehension of it as collectively formed and recreated. The commodity form under modern forms of capitalist production is responsible for this change in consciousness. What occurs through the division of labor and the rationalization of mass production is the fragmentation of the object. No longer do we see the objects created by human labor as human; rather, we increasingly see them as inert objects. As Lukács notes: “this fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject. In consequence of the rationalization of the work process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with

  an anatomy of heteronomy these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system.”5 The “thingness” of reification (recall the German term is Verdinglichung, literally, “to become thing-like”) is now also a cognitive problem insofar as a “thing” (Ding) is, in Kantian terms, an object that fails to become an object of cognition. It literally disappears and is taken for granted, not thought about, not reflected on. As a result, the subject encounters the world not as something in which to share in making but rather as an already-formed totality into which the individual must fit and to which he or she must conform: “He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.”6 The effect of this is the deterioration of the subject’s will as he increasingly surrenders his autonomy and power of judgment to the functional imperatives of the system: “As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.”7 The subject now becomes divided against itself. Reification renders one’s consciousness passive to the activity of the system. The system is, of course, recreated by us, by those rendered passive. Hence, one is still active in the sense that one labors, one purchases, one lives one’s life according to the structures and norms shaped by the system. But now, each of us does this without reflecting on the purposes and ends of that system. We take it for granted, as basic, as the fundamental background conditions for our lives. As such, it is rendered outside the scope of critical consciousness. But what this means for Lukács is more than a mere cognitive defect. He argues that reification effectively hides the very purposes and legitimacy of the social order as a whole. We become unable to critique the totality or to see it as the cause of any of the particular subjective pathologies we may experience. We are unable, in effect, to move beyond the phenomenological experience of social pathology or to question the system as a whole. “The question why and with what justification human reason should elect to regard just these systems as constitutive of its own essence (as opposed to the ‘given,’ alien, unknowable nature of the content

Cultivating Consent    of those systems) never arises. It is assumed to be self-evident.”8 The key issue here is, once again, a question of drilling down into the “essential structure” of the system itself, the system as totality. The core property of critique now can be seen in Hegelian and Marxian terms: as the penetration beneath the phenomenological, empirical manifestation of the system and its products into the essential structures and processes that constitute it: “The question then becomes: are the empirical facts—(it is immaterial whether they are purely ‘sensuous’ or whether their sensuousness is only the ultimate material substratum of their ‘factual’ essence)—to be taken as ‘given’ or can this ‘givenness’ be dissolved further into rational forms, i.e., can it be conceived as the product of ‘our’ reason?”9 Reification now is further revealed to be our incapacity to rationally comprehend the essential structure of the system. By essence is meant not some inflated metaphysical substance but the basic structure of the system as a whole and the way it structures social relations, social processes, and social ends or purposes that constitute the social whole and our subjective orientations as well. The key idea here is therefore one of critical metaphysics: dereified consciousness is not some mystical, special power to which only a select few have access; it is the result of an ability to thematize the nature of the social system as a whole. There is an ineliminable socialontological component to this thesis. Lukács sees in Hegel and in Marx a need to understand that social reality is the product of our practices, practices guided by ideas. Hence, the nature of social reality corresponds to the nature of the ideas we possess about it. Indeed, if we go back to the Aristotelian conception of praxis, it is not simply a matter of activity, but it is thought directed to an end. As Aristotle says in his Nicomachean Ethics: “thought [διάνοια] alone moves nothing, but thought directed toward an end [πρακτική] does; for this is indeed the moving cause of productive activity [του ποιεῖ] also since he who makes something always has some further end [τέλος] in view.”10 This means that for a practice to change, it must entail a transformation in the end toward which that practice is organized. Now we can glimpse a richer idea of what reification is about. Once we connect our powers of cognition with the idea of social practice, we can see what the social totality means as an ontological category. The totality is not an entity external to us but one that is constituted through

  an anatomy of heteronomy us—through us as practical beings. It is an ontological category because it embraces the total world of social facts that we as members of any community create and endow with meaning and significance. As Lukács sees it, what is special about capitalism is its ability to constitute the entirety of the totality; it is a capacity to reshape and reorient all social practices toward ends that it posits as valid. Once we see practice as consciously directed activity, reification presents itself as a corruption of praxis; it is the supplanting of heteronomous ideas about what the ends of our activities should be that reorients our world-creating powers toward heteronomous ends and purposes. These ideas are normative, for they express ways that we should orient our activities, our practical lives, as well as the ways that we rationalize and legitimize those regimes of practice. Capitalism as a total process, indeed, as an “inverted world,” as Hegel would have referred to it, is not only an economic but a total social system once it is able to absorb not only our time and labor but our practices as a whole.11 It has absorbed our capacity to see that the ends toward which our activities are oriented possess class character—that capital is material force insofar as it has the capacity to colonize our practices by supplanting its ends as our ends. The key idea here is that reification is not epistemic in nature but rather (social) ontological: it re-organizes the very reality of the social world via this shaping of our consciousness and the norms that underwrite it and our practices. What I want to show now is how this shaping of consciousness is a matter of the shaping of norms and values that are absorbed through socialization processes; I will then return to this theme of a critical social ontology that can provide us with a means to shatter the effects of reification.

An Expanded Model of Reification As I suggested above, the main thesis that Lukács puts forth is the idea—taken heavily from the project of German Idealism—that the subject’s impulses for ethical and political obligation and, implicitly, of dissent rest on the ability to comprehend the social reality within which one lives. This is a theme taken from Hegel’s phenomenological understanding of the ways in which the thinking subject transitions to absolute knowledge: one is able to comprehend one’s world and as a totality, but also, if one is

Cultivating Consent    free, one sees that this totality is rational—that is, that it serves the rational, universal interest of the social whole rather than elevating a particular part of it over the whole. The Marxian twist on this is a critique of capitalist society that distorts the social-ontological structures and processes of society to run counter to the common social interest and instead valorize private surplus over social, human ends and needs. Reification is a lack of the kind of cognitive power to penetrate the appearance of capitalist society as “natural” and justified based on its mere existence. Reification is the defective form of reasoning that limits this power of reflection. But there is also a neo-Kantian trace in Lukács’s thesis in that he is claiming that the central capacity—indeed, the critical capacity—to be able to perceive the world as a proper object of knowledge disintegrates, and we are left with the problem of the reified subject relating to the world as mere appearance, where essence (or the space of causal reasons) is veiled beneath a haze of “natural” processes and forms. The neo-Kantian separation between fact and value renders the subject unable to grasp the connection between the way that values constitute the world—that there is, in fact, a unity between the norms and values we possess and the nature of the social facts that are generated and then interpreted by us. By insisting on a separation between these two spheres, consciousness is rendered unable to see that this distortion in consciousness is the result of the transformation of norms that are generated by rationalized forms of production, consumption, and social coordination that are successfully internalized by subjects. At the core of the phenomenon of reification, it can be said, is this mechanism of the generation and internalization of norms and its effects on consciousness and cognition. Think of reification therefore not simply as a transposition problem within consciousness but as a recoding of the norms that shape and structure our cognition and our practices. This thesis entails the idea that any norm is not simply value but is also a routing of cognitive and epistemic capacities in such a way that they are unable to work outside of the boundaries set by the system of ambient norms within the community. In this sense, norms take on a kind of social power in that they can orient action and the reasons for such actions. As Joseph Raz has pointed out: “Generalizing, one may say that normative power is the power to effect a normative change. A normative change can be interpreted to comprise every change

  an anatomy of heteronomy in the reasons for action that some person has.”12 If we explore this idea, we find that the concept of normative power entails the capacity of our norms to be shaped and oriented by others. But going further, it entails the shaping of our intentionality, the very way that we endow meaning and significance to the world—that is, the very creation of social facts itself. Since social facts are created by our intentionality, the power to shape norms is also the power to shape social reality itself. This, in turn, leads to a deeper problem in that social power now operates within the normative valences of consciousness. Raz calls this “influence” and argues that it “includes the power to affect the goals people have, their desires and aspirations. Beliefs in the desirability of pursuing certain styles of life are induced through educational institutions and the mass media.”13 Reification, on this view, can be seen as the result of this kind of power and social dominance. Elsewhere, this has been called constitutive power or the power to shape and orient our norms and value orientations that in turn transforms not only our consciousness but also our social practices.14 But what reification adds to this discussion is that it is not simply a neutral shaping or orienting of consciousness. More specifically, it is shaped according to the logics of the dominating social systems and their imperatives. Historically speaking, under rationalized capitalist forms of social production and consumption, it means that these new norms and values absorb subjective life into the system of production and consumption that generates private surplus. But what is particularly problematic here is that the different dimensions of subjectivity are shaped by this reification of consciousness. Pointing to three different dimensions of subjectivity, we can say there exist cognitive, evaluative, and cathectic dimensions of the self and that each is underwritten by the normative structure of consciousness. Now, this means that the phenomenon of reification runs much deeper than the cognitive layer alone. Hence, the extent to which subjectivity gets folded into the fabric of the social order is more deeply rooted than a cognitivist framework can account for. Going back to Raz for a moment, we can see that norms have a deeper impact on how we see and how we judge and evaluate the social world. Any norm can shape our evaluative capacities. Think of the simple argument that says: it is right for you to φ, which leads to the logical consequence: φ-ing is good. Once

Cultivating Consent    successfully internalized by the subject, the personality system may also come to invest itself cathectically in φ: It feels good whenever I φ. This is, to be sure, an overly simplistic argument about the effect of norms on consciousness and personality, but it captures much of how the norms that shape systems can also reify consciousness. Norms and values therefore constitute a crucial means by which reification can serve to hide a more critical account of the social world. It also goes a long way in demonstrating that phenomenological and pragmatist arguments concerning critical reasoning are unable to overcome the problem of reification. Indeed, as much as communicative and discursive theories of judgment may appeal to some, they are unable to explode the structures of reification that fuse subject and object in capitalist society. Norms are therefore more than simply structures of practice; they are also structures of meaning in that they serve as the ways that we as subjects and members of a collective form of life assign meaning to objects and phenomena that occur within the lifeworld.15 In this sense, the alteration of social practices necessarily entails a transformation of norms. Since a practice is, as Aristotle and Marx agree, thought-directed activity, once we change the meaning and purpose of any activity, we also change the thought behind it. Capitalism patterns meaning just as it patterns practices; it therefore becomes constitutive of new norms and value patterns that form coordinated webs of norms that shape social action and subjective dispositions. But these norms are rooted not in the spontaneity of the lifeworld, or according to some democratic consensus about how we should organize our world, but according to the imperatives of productive and consumptive demands of an economic system oriented toward private surplus and the means to expansion of that surplus. These imperatives gradually reorganize the very ontological structures of the social world and create a new social reality. Reification therefore constitutes a deeper pathology, not only of consciousness itself but of those structures of meaning that orient practices and the very reality that our social practices create. The key idea here, taking after Talcott Parsons, is that there is a sense in which “successful” forms of socialization are understood to be the extent to which individuals take up the norms of the social systems and institutions around them. But as Parsons points out, these norms cannot simply be acquired in mature adulthood. There must be some background

  an anatomy of heteronomy basis for the acquisition of more complex social norms. For Lukács, the thesis of reification holds that it is the activities of the workplace—the technical transformation of production, the collapsing of time into space in terms of the expansion of productive capacities, the rational forms of bureaucratization, and so on—that serve as the soil of reification. This may have been true in the early twentieth century, but as these norms of production and consumption, or rationalization, the legitimacy of the capitalist economic life and culture penetrated more deeply into the layers of culture and social institutions as a whole, reification became more trenchant since the acquisition of the values of capitalist life are acquired at younger ages. Hence, Parsons concludes that “it is the internalization of the value orientation patterns embodied in the role-expectations for ego of the significant socializing agents, which constitutes the strategic element of this basic personality structure. And it is because these patterns can only be acquired through the mechanism of identification, and because the basic identification patterns are developed in childhood, that the childhood structure of personality in this respect is so stable and unchangeable.”16 Once the social order is seen as, essentially, a collection of norms that guide and coordinate social action, we must also see that for this to be successful, it must be absorbed or internalized by the ego structure of the individual. This leads, as Herbert Marcuse insightfully points out, to a crippling sense of reification as one-dimensionality, literally as a folding of the ego into the social structure itself, unable to distinguish itself from the social reality: “The mediation between the self and the other gives way to immediate identification. In the social structure, the individual becomes the conscious and unconscious object of administration and obtains his freedom and satisfaction in his role as such an object; in the mental structure, the ego shrinks to such an extent that it seems no longer capable of sustaining itself, as a self, in distinction from id and superego.”17 Hence, we can see that reification can be expanded to understand the ways that norms and value orientations fuse the subject to the objective domain of the world of social facts. The more that capitalism, as an economic-socialcultural formation, is able to make its web of norms efficiently internalized by the ego, the more that reification will be deeply rooted in the subject. As Andrew Feenberg points out concerning the analysis of reification, “The

Cultivating Consent    focus must shift from the mechanistic ‘influence’ of social conditions on consciousness to the generalized patterning of all dimensions of society.”18 This internalization of the web of norms deployed by social institutions is what causes the reification of subjects, what essentially explains their relative lack of awareness of the defective nature of the social order of which they are a part and which their practices have been oriented to recreate. It also quells the antagonism of class conflict. This is one reason why industrial and postindustrial societies have witnessed a sharp decline in the politicization of economic inequality: the normative webs of the system have penetrated deeply into the culture that socializes its members to such a degree that critical reflection has been stunted. But again, norms are more than mere normative “A should φ” statements. They also constitute social facts in the sense that they endow our practices with a social-ontological facticity.19 Here reification becomes more pernicious and more deeply rooted. I think Parsons was correct to argue that successful internalization is a means to the stability of any social system and that the ego must internalize social norms for it to stabilize the ego. But this also means that it has the capacity to create new social facts as well. Hence, the link between norms and consciousness. At a more technical level, we can see that the collective-intentional structures of consciousness shared by any community is active in the ways that it articulates their social reality. This is because, as John Searle has argued, the norms we adopt coordinate collective forms of meaning by assigning objects “status functions,” or forms of meaning with which we endow objects based on collective forms of intentionality, or collective forms of meaning-giving. In this sense, social facts are the result of this collective intentionality, and the ability to control the norms that shape that intentionality is also a power to shape the structure of social reality. In this sense, reification and social ontology are deeply entwined and constitute not only a theory of defective consciousness but also of power.20

Reification of Consciousness and the Web of Norms I have been arguing that an extension of reification as a concept for critical theory should focus on a particular conception of cognition that sees epistemic capacities as tied to value orientations. I have also argued

  an anatomy of heteronomy that these value orientations have the ability to shape cognitive and epistemic powers. Most important, they are able to form the basis not only for the content of reasoning—both normative and cognitive ideas that individuals carry with them and use to understand their world—but also for the formal aspects of thought, given in terms of isolated, episodic thinking styles as opposed to holistic, dynamic, and relational forms of thought. The latter form was considered critical in the objective Idealist sense in that it was concerned with the actual, objective features of thought and reality. Whereas for Kant, and Enlightenment thinkers more generally, cognition was conceived as an independent process, contemporary psychological models of the mind show that it is more correct to see it as a function that is embedded in the personality system of individuals. According to this view, the problem of cognition is linked to the kinds of value systems that individuals possess. Lukács echoed this view in the sense that he saw the central problem of reification as residing in the ways that practices are reordered by new normative regimes that pattern the background conditions for our reflective and evaluative judgments about the world.21 Reification can now be seen as a pathology of consciousness, one that is itself linked to the pathology of personality. Since norms come to socialize agents, the nature of the norms will come to shape value orientations that also give form to the concepts used to understand the world. Reification is the result not of the rationalization of society alone—that is, of the technoindustrial order and of forms of strategic action—but of the values that are required to secure legitimacy of a system of extractive social relations. Here, Lukács lays the foundation for an extension of reification that goes beyond techno-industrial forms of social integration and toward one that can capture the intricacies of social power and domination in a systemic sense. A society that can routinize particular norms and values therefore has the ability to shape the powers of cognition as well. Reification is a pathology of the whole self—a problem that affects the total personality of the subject, not simply forms of reasoning. As such, it presses itself onto the powers of reflection and critical judgment by ensconcing the subject in a web of norms from which it is difficult to escape. What I mean by this is that as the web of norms is increasingly rooted in the systemic imperatives of the social order, and the more that this social

Cultivating Consent    order is articulated by rational, administrative-capitalist purposes and goals, the more that this web of norms will exert pressures on different spheres of agency. The social field, where the web of norms is located, exerts four kinds of pressure: internalization, routinization, rationalization, and socialization. In the first level, the ego must absorb the value patterns (web of norms) that are ambient within the social world. This becomes more efficient in modern societies by routinizing them so that they become part of the background hexis of the subject. As these value orientations and the practices that they shape become more routinized and internalized, they carry with them their own rationalizations. This is because they become increasingly self-referential as the system becomes more imbued by those value patterns and more and more spheres of life and institutions are colonized by the logics of rational authority tied to economic imperatives. These pressures lead to socialization pressure, where our active forms of judgment and reasoning are pressed into the structural constraints imposed by the social system but also, once it has been successfully internalized by the subject, are imposed from within as well (see fig. 6.1). According to the schematic presented in figure 6.1, reification is the result of the constraints placed on cognition by the value systems resulting from the inculcation of social norms. It is also a diachronic and synchronic process that affects multiple levels of consciousness and social action. This means that the powers of reason and of judgment, in the model, are affected by the types of value orientations that the subject has absorbed. The goal of social norms under capitalism is to maximize the absorption of all forms of life into its process of commodification, as well as its administrative organizational imperatives and goals; one must be brought to collaborate with the system in as seamless a manner as possible. To this end, it is crucial that subjects accept the goals of such institutions as their own, to see that the only real purpose of their own actions, values, and ideas is in some kind of conformity with the world around them. Hegemonic values and norms therefore are the starting point for the deformed kind of consciousness that constitutes reification. These values are increasingly heteronomous in that they emanate from institutional worlds that do not require nor do they ask for any form of rational justification. Rather, they are increasingly taken as basic and form the background condition for the various forms of deontic power that hold social action together.

  an anatomy of heteronomy

figur e 6.1. Scheme of socialization and the reification of consciousness.

As I have been arguing, norms affect consciousness in a straightforward way. They have the ability to shape our practical activities, as well as the rationalizations for those activities and their effects. This occurs through the problem of value heteronomy, where the socialization process has been able to successfully inculcate a basic value system that orients the evaluative capacities of the subject. Value heteronomy is the condition where modern forms of authority express themselves as interior to the subject. Recall that for Weber, authority or domination is “the chance of commands being obeyed by a specifiable group of people,” a collective in which “the content of the command becomes the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake.”22 The reification of consciousness therefore begins with the inculcation of routinized and rationalized value systems and concepts that shape normative orientations toward the world. But they also, as Weber points out, solidify and legitimize the social relations that serve as the conduits of authority and socialize the sense of self that constitutes the personality of the individual.

Cultivating Consent    The reification of consciousness therefore begins with the uncritical acceptance of heteronomous value systems that legitimize ideas, norms, values, social relations, institutions, and goals. Crucial in this sense is that the norms be accepted as they are presented—that they become part of the subject’s interior structure of attitudes. But it is not possible for this to happen if the norm is questioned or if some rational basis is sought for its acceptance. When this occurs, there is generally some form of deviance involved. But more important for my purpose here, it also implies an affect of the rational faculty of cognition: to accept norms without rational justification means to accept its conception of the world. Rationalized social and institutional norms that serve the powers of elites and their economic ends—norms about labor, about inequality, about income and wealth, about education, about the purpose of social goals, and so on—are imposed on consciousness, which results in a lack of consistency among the different values within the subject. This lack of logical consistency, over time, requires that the subject’s cognitive powers be weakened in order to accept the particularistic norms of capitalist institutional logics. Rational consciousness and evaluative consciousness are therefore dialectically linked. Recall that the reification thesis has at its core the insight that consciousness is shaped by norms and value orientations. What this means is that since norms are constitutive of social facts, as I have demonstrated, it also means that such social facts carry with them their own validity, what I call implicit validity. This is because the mechanism of value acquisition does not come as a result of rational justification but because it is embedded in the practices and norms that constitute the social world.23 As a result, reified consciousness is able to split reality into particulars. It lacks consistency and can only know isolated, static forms of reality as opposed to dynamic and processual forms of reality. It is unable to grasp internal relations and to connect the logic of the social world with the pathologies one experiences, at a social and existential level. Since value systems establish a basis for the evaluative capacity of the subject, they also form the basis for the cognitive capacity of subjects in the sense that knowledge about the world requires the suspension of critical cognition. As Milton Rokeach claimed in his investigation of “open” and “closed” minds, “Isolation between parts reflects a tendency not to relate beliefs to the inner

  an anatomy of heteronomy requirements of logical consistency, but to assimilate them wholesale, as fed by one’s authority figure.”24 As a result, reified consciousness shapes not only cognitive but also evaluative capacities about the relative rightness and wrongness of things, irrespective of the “reasons” given for them. The reification of consciousness—conceived as the concealment of dynamic social reality behind the facade of isolated, episodic consciousness—therefore implies that the mind is somehow constrained from grasping the essential nature of the world. And this only makes sense because the value systems that constitute subjectivity under capitalism exert the pressure of partial, immediate forms of reasoning. They offer for the subject simple scripts for understanding the world, not how it actually works but how they must work within its conception of how the world should be. Hence, the relation between the value system and cognition becomes manifest: a critical, mediated relation to the world is displaced by an immediate relation to the world. The values that steer consciousness also deter the subject from rational inquiry, from being able to see the world in its actuality. As Lukács argues: “As long as man adopts a stance of intuition and contemplation he can only relate to his own thought and to the objects of the empirical world in an immediate way. He accepts both as ready-made—produced by historical reality. As he wishes only to know the world and not to change it he is forced to accept both the empirical, material rigidity of existence and the logical rigidity of concepts as unchangeable.”25 Reification of consciousness therefore is not simply to be understood as the inability to conceive of the social world properly; at its root, it is the result of specific forms of values and norms that stultify the forms of socialization that make individuals critical, open, and able to see social praxis and civic life as an essential aspect of their individuality. As Lukács wrote much later in “Literature and Democracy”: If we are not aware of this relation, or if we do not wish to take notice of it, then our so-called external destiny, that is, our economic, political, and social destiny appears, in our creations, to be stripped of every human element. Then we do not experience and imagine this destiny as being our social interactions with other people, but, rather, in our self-consciousness, we fetishistically transform it into external objects and lifeless things. Instead of the concrete economy of life, the colorful web of our interactions, an abstract, impoverished, oppressed “I” stands opposed to an external world that has become an abstract, fetishized, dead thing.”26

Cultivating Consent   

Overcoming Reification through Critical Judgment So, is there a way out? If critical theory is to serve any useful end, it must move beyond the merely diagnostic and into the political, where we can perhaps use rational reflection to militate against reification. Even though the argument I have elaborated seems complete and totalizing, this can never be the case. Rather, any social system suffers from its own imperfections, as subtle as they may be. Pathologies of society and self still emerge in the process of our lives, and only when those pathologies are experienced in some way can we have an entrée point into the possibility for social critique. To combat and dissolve reification is therefore only possible when we are open to questioning the basic value orientations that shape the social reality of which we are a part. This must be a political act, or the result of a political challenge to the culture that perpetuates the forms of social power that pervade our lives. For this reason, combatting reification must be a central role of any political critique of power. For reification to become the object of political critique once again, it is necessary to understand the inherently social-ontological structure of Lukács’s argument. With this in mind, let me return to how we can reconstruct a theory of critical judgment from the reflections I have laid out here. As I see it, the essence of critical judgment must be expressed in an expanded form of thinking that can encompass the social totality as the basis for understanding any particular expression of social or political power. Reification becomes increasingly difficult to combat the more that it penetrates into cultural and personality structures. But the reality it creates is always open to critique because it is a false totality; that is, it is a totality that is irrational because it does not serve universal ends and purposes. The contradictions generated by such an irrational system are the necessary cracks that force us back to retheorize the totality. In this sense, we must ask about the purpose and end of the social totality; we must inquire into the validity of ends and purposes of our lives as interdependent, cooperative social beings. This, I think, is precisely what Lukács urges in his critique of reified consciousness. His idea of “expressive totality” may seem out of date politically, but I want to suggest that it has been dismissed too soon, without proper theoretical treatment. What Lukács argues is that only when working people discover that they are the “subject-object” of history can reification be overcome. This

  an anatomy of heteronomy kind of consciousness, though, is not a contemplative form of consciousness but an active one. He has in view here the need to change the practical relations we have with one another and with nature, and this requires, as I have been arguing, a transformation of the normative structure of consciousness that orients our activities. As Lukács puts it: “the consciousness of the proletariat must become deed. . . . Since consciousness here is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self-consciousness of the object[,] the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object.”27 What this means is that consciousness must become a new selfconsciousness that sees the immanent ontology of our sociality and the ways that this has been shaped and formed according to the interests of others, directed and oriented toward private needs, ends, and purposes as opposed to those of all. A rational universal is therefore discovered through a new form of self-consciousness. But this self-consciousness is to know ourselves as social beings, as practical beings, and as members of a totality that entails a new way of thinking and judging. For this reason, Lukács maintains that three aspects of critique must be in play. First, we must become aware of the contradictions that plague the system as a whole. If we are able to do this, then it is necessary, second, for us to have “an aspiration toward totality, that action should serve the purpose, described above, in the totality of the process.” What this means is an ability to grasp the truth of the totality—“the truth that in the dialectical totality the individual elements incorporate the structure of the whole.”28 In this sense, we need to be able to see any particular contradiction or norm or practice as part of a total process. Last, if we are to be able to judge any given norm or practice, “it is essential to relate it to its function in the total process.”29 If we are able to do these three things, then the hold of reification can be loosened. The reason is that thinking in terms of relations, processes, and ends or purposes is the grammar needed to think the totality as an ontological reality. Once we see this, we can begin to grasp the ways that uncritical practical activity helps to recreate and sustain the false totality that generates the contradictions in the first place and push us toward embracing a “critical practical activity.” This may seem overly philosophical, but we can make this more concrete by casting it in terms of a social ontology. Once we gain self-consciousness of ourselves as social beings, whose existence is interdependent on, and

Cultivating Consent    within relations with, other beings; that these interdependent relations are embedded in processes of change and activity; and, finally, that these processes and practices have ends and purposes, we can glimpse the essential structure of any given social reality in ontological, as opposed to empirical, form. The totality of social reality begins to expose itself. I go to work each day to bring home money to pay my bills and purchase things. But as isolated “facts,” these things taken independently render critical reflection inert. Once I ask about the purposes or ends of that work, or the things I purchase, or about the kinds of relations that are needed to bring about the things for which I work or that I purchase, and the other institutions, norms, and practices that uphold such a social reality, I begin to inquire into the legitimacy of such a system. Is it rational? Does it exist for the benefit of all? Reification only begins to break down at such a point, when the question of the ontology of my social world and my place within it is raised to consciousness. This is why Lukács argues that “Marxist theory is designed to put the proletariat into a very particular frame of mind.”30 Once we see this as an alternative mode of critical judgment, we can also see the severe errors of the postmetaphysical, discursive, and phenomenological approaches to judgment that are current in theory today. Relying on thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, or Axel Honneth cannot get us past the blockages posed by reification. Indeed, as I see the matter, such theoretical projects do little more than refract reified consciousness back onto the judging subject. Perhaps renewed attention to reification and its critical implications for culture and political judgment can help us return critical social theory to its original Enlightenment political aspirations for a rational, free form of sociality. And perhaps it can also enable progressive social movements to disclose a rationally valid emancipatory interest to overcome the dehumanizing, reifying tendencies of capitalist modernity. But in order to explode the influence of reification on consciousness, we need to grasp how the cybernetic mechanisms of socialization increasingly disable the intrapsychic processes of the self from articulating a more critical, more democratic form of consciousness. It is this core problem, the withering of the self capable of democratic agency, that I explore next.

chapter 7

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego

Thus far, I have been describing the kind of effects that the cybernetic society has on our capacities for cognitive and moral forms of consciousness, cognition, and self-awareness. I have been trying to show that the cohesive framework of norms, values, concepts, and practices that are embedded in the functional-administrative logics needed for the coordination of large-scale forms of production and consumption management also become constitutive of the collective-intentional structures of consciousness. As a result, the individual’s capacity to mediate this reality has gradually weakened over time, and critical efficacy has been lost to the extent that political and social transformation has been neutered. But the thesis I want to explore here is that highly integrated, hierarchical social forms that impart strong normative socialization pressures on the modern self have had the effect of degrading the strength of the individual ego. This means that the modern self’s absorption by the various, overlapping normative schemes of our highly institutionalized and patterned world entail its incapacity to act as an agent of critical reflection and the requisite psychic energy and desire for social transformation. In short, the withered self is the subjective counterpart to the macropatterns of the cybernetic society. Viewed in its long arc, this thesis may seem to be utterly pessimistic, foreclosing any sense of a way out for critical reason and reflection.

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     I cannot but agree: the fate of the individual in modern culture has been sacrificed on the altar of mass consumption as the only pillar for the sustenance of our civilization. What has resulted is a new sense of identity, a new kind of self that no longer has the requisite psychological infrastructure to give birth to critique or autonomy, to genuine, authentic individuality. In this chapter, my aim will be to show how the general psychic framework of the self has itself withered in the face of the cohesive, coordinating logics of cybernetic society. What I think we find when we peer into the inner dynamics of the modern character is an ego structure that no longer has the capacity to uphold the needed orientation toward the world that critical forms of autonomy and reflection require. What we find, I maintain, is a more weakened, more degraded form of the self—a kind of character structure that will help us understand with more nuance the effects that reification and alienation have had on the modern individual.

Social Hierarchy and Individual Powerlessness We should always keep in mind that any regime of power, of domination, also has its domain of powerlessness. The individual who is subordinated and controlled always experiences this powerlessness, whether directly or indirectly. I have been mapping in this study the phenomenon of the “twilight of the self”: the decline of the robust form of individuality that is capable of democratic citizenship and critical agency. Thus far, I have been exploring the mechanisms that shape the self’s compliance toward external normative authority and the active cultivation of a kind of domination that consists in the alienation of our critical powers as moral agents. I have been arguing that the interface between the self and society should be viewed not in terms of a seamless net of intersubjective relations or pragmatic forms of action but rather as mediated by hierarchical forms of power and control that have deep and widespread effects on the articulation of individuality. It is marked by the unique form of socialization that occurs within the context of the cybernetic society: a kind of social formation that is characterized by instrumental logics of subordination and control that rely on the cultivation of compliance on the part of its members.

  an anatomy of heteronomy But as I have suggested, what is often overlooked by those who study the nature of social power and domination is the way that its dialectical opposite, that of powerlessness and the experience of powerlessness, is also mediated by the extent to which individuals experience having power exercised over them. As a general rule, this is not consciously perceived and grasped but rather displaced into other aspects of our lives. Powerlessness is not a conscious state but an experience that distorts our own sense of self. This idea of a withered self and of the ego’s “primitivization” is a core aspect of the nature of modern culture and the eclipse of autonomous, critical agency. As I see it, the withered self is a product of the social processes that increasingly deprive the ego of its own self-governing functions as it is socialized by increasingly anxiety-ridden relational forms of life. As a result, the ego “primitivizes” insofar as it searches for the needed security from anxiety, for a sphere of protection from a world increasingly devoid of meaning and human purposes. The cybernetic society does not only cause the preconditions for this withering of self and the ego’s primitivization; it also provides the cultural frameworks that will be able to swaddle the self and prevent it from either rebelling against the system or becoming so defective that it can no longer serve its systemic purpose. In this way, the self becomes subsumed by these social logics. Unlike previous phases of capitalist modernity that suffered from defects in their comprehensiveness over the self, cybernetic society engulfs the individual not only in the affirmative ways that it requires for the normative success of its institutional goals but also in terms of the various pathologies of the self that are produced by the social irrationality of these institutional schemes. There is no space for the self to migrate—not religion, not aesthetics, not philosophy, or any other psychocultural domain—to serve as a critical reflex to social and personal pathologies. Previous social phases of capitalism were unable to reach into the very processes of socialization that shaped the self. As a result, these other domains were largely untouched by commodification. But the post-1960s era has shown capital’s resilience and creativity in subsuming the cultural attitudes, as well as basic normative frameworks, of self-development that inculcate values and practices of the social world and that isomorphically shape the self in line with functional, systemic institutional logics. Any reservoir for countercultural and antistructural energies is therefore absorbed by the system

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     and redirected away toward what the system itself can tolerate. The “great refusal” of the 1960s counterculture has collapsed into a passive affirmation of what is no less than an often active participation in the values that prop up the system. For my purposes, the idea of the self can be understood as a complex of self-states that form the subjective, intrapsychic infrastructure of the individual. Our interpersonal relations with others through life produce different “selves” or “self-states” that form an ensemble of dimensions of our subjectivity. The ego, in this way of understanding it, is the agency that is rooted in the self’s organizational framework. From sadistic aggression to masochistic needs for care, the decline of the capacities for autonomy should not be viewed, as postmodernists and others of their ilk have, as adequate descriptions of decentered personhood but as a defect in our capacities for social reason and critical agency. Powerlessness—the very condition of the self under the pressures of cybernetic society—leads to the regression of the ego, to the need to seek out forms of identity and relations to others and to self that will preserve some semblance of ego security in an age racked by insecurity and anxiety. This was not always so. Through the early stages of capitalism, there was a coexistence with nonmaterialistic values and pursuits, with religion, aesthetics, and philosophical and scientific inquiry. Bourgeois life still possessed a sense of vision for a better world that nourished artists, philosophers, and citizens. They existed in a world that was still capable of articulating a self that could promote mature values into actual practice, a self that knew it needed to struggle for a more ethical, more emancipated world to emerge. This kind of self was not the product of the smothering intimacy of modern family life, nor was it the product of a world where public life, norms, relations, and practices had disintegrated. As the regimes of extraction expanded and became increasingly technical, these spheres of value and activity have either vanished, been colonized by capitalist logics, or been perverted beyond their original design. The phenomenon of the subsumption of the self has meant that the self’s intrapsychic structure has been constricted to fit into the systemic imperatives of the logics of technical and administrative dynamics of late capitalism. The self no longer occupies a rich, expanded horizon of agency and self-consciousness.

  an anatomy of heteronomy The result has been a gradual, yet deliberate, desiccation of nontechnical forms of meaning and value. The technical logics of instrumental regimes of action and administration are an adjunct to hierarchical economic and social patterns of the relational life that continuously exposes individuals to routinized authority, deforming their own sense of agency and standing in the world. As society becomes more hierarchically structured and oligarchical, those who occupy subordinate status possess, as John Gaventa argues, “a greater susceptibility to the internalization of the values, beliefs, or rules of the game of the powerful as a further adaptive response—i.e., as a means of escaping the subjective sense of powerlessness, if not its objective condition.”1 But what happens as this process unfolds is that the kind of self that is shaped by these cybernetic relational contexts is increasingly deprived of ego-strength and security; it experiences anxiety and the need for collective forms of meaning to frame a world that is increasingly out of one’s personal control and eludes one’s ability to navigate and create a meaningful life. To properly understand this aspect of the decline of the individual in modern society, I again need to highlight the transformed structure of economic life under cybernetic society. The shift from a productionbased economy in the nineteenth century to a mass-consumption society in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has now morphed into an economy increasingly dominated by rent-extraction, expanded working hours, decreasing wages, and highly secured internalized values for consumption as proxies for personal success and feelings of self-worth. As Paul Verhaeghe observes about the values of neoliberal society: “All have been given the same message—namely, that every need can be fulfilled and every desire gratified, even in the short term, and that pleasure is life’s main goal, to be achieved through consumption.”2 Oligarchic social policies have whittled away most forms of economic equality and sufficiency that existed during the postwar social democratic contract and replaced them with highly routinized normative regimes of compliance and patterns of control that have bled into every institution and cultural sphere. Everything from education to popular music to slaughterhouses is essentially governed by the same logics. But it is not simply the compliance to these norms and the receding impulse for critical consciousness that concerns me here. I want to

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     investigate the ways that the forces and dynamics of the cybernetic society have been able to reshape the self. The key thesis I want to explore is that modern forms of individuality suffer from a lack of robust secondary forms of relatedness and internal, intrapsychic forms of organization that render its capacities for democratic consciousness bankrupt. This lack of robust secondary capacities results from shifts in our culture and social organization that are rooted in defective social relations characteristic of the cybernetic society. New norms about the place of the public realm in relation to the private realm, an expanded emphasis on intimacy—itself seen as both a refuge from an alienating world and the primary cite of consumption—at the expense of conflict and struggle in the developing ego have affected the modern self and its capacity to deal with the anxiety that permeates a world that increasingly shifts and changes in order to maximize regimes of expropriation and to ensure compliance to its evershifting norms. What I want to show in this chapter is that what I refer to as the withering of the self can be understood as a condition or state of being, as well as a process of becoming.

Pathological Relations and the Withering of the Self To understand how the process of the withering of the self occurs with more sophistication, I want to begin with the nature of social relations and to highlight their salience for understanding the inner dynamics of the self. As I see it, the mechanisms of constitutive power that I have discussed in previous chapters entail certain effects on our subjectivity and agency that also disable the critical potentiality of theories of social action that assume that our critical awareness is rooted in our everyday practices, such as communication or recognition. This is because the culture of capitalist society is such that the alienating effects of everyday life force the ego to fold back in on itself, taking refuge from the increasingly dehumanizing world of damaged social relations. This ego is now in less of a place to challenge the social order and more likely to create a protected space of identity that seeks its affirmation from others. In short, what we are witnessing is a transformation of the modern character structure: from one that was rooted in strivings for individuation and ego strength to one that has been “primitivized” in the sense that it

  an anatomy of heteronomy fails to develop the necessary structures that will enable the ego to achieve a sense of critical autonomy. Marcuse offers insight on this problem: “the ego that has grown without much struggle appears as a pretty weak entity, ill-equipped to become a self with and against others, to offer effective resistance to the powers that now enforce the reality principle, and which are so very different from father (and mother)—but also very different from the images purveyed by the mass media.”3 The weakened, withered ego that Marcuse describes should be seen not only as a consequence of damaged social relations but also as a counterthesis to the idea that recognitive relations, embedded in the “intramundane” fabric of everyday life, are unable to articulate selves with the psychological resources requisite for moral-political resistance. What I am calling here the withering of the self is meant to describe how the structure of the individual’s personality changes in response to the kinds of social relations that constitute cybernetic forms of sociality. Centrally, this concerns the ways that the patterns of the self and its selfand other-relations are organized in order to compensate for the deprived relational needs produced by pathological or damaged social relations. Cybernetic society is unique in its capacity to affect and to shape the early life of its members. The family has been absorbed into its logics and affected by its dynamics. Whereas previous phases of social history saw a latency period between early phases of development and socialization into later phases of work and life, cybernetic society begins to affect early periods of childhood experience. From the frantic time-squeeze brought on by increased working hours in the family, increased stress brought on by economic inequality and social insecurity, not to mention the cultural norms that saturate the cultural industry, norms and values that were once external to the family have displaced more traditionally internal family norms and relations.4 As Paul Verhaeghe has argued: The influence of parents and family has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. . . . The processes whereby children are molded as they grow have come under serious pressure in our changing society. Because of the way in which work is organized, very few children enjoy a predictable and stable environment. Most infants experience at least one change of surroundings and caregivers per day, and in some cases even two. At the same time, the art of wielding authority has been virtually lost, and parents find it hard to forbid their children anything.

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     Paradoxically, this makes infants more insecure, with the result that many children fail to bond normally or to develop normal self-confidence and confidence in others.5

As children go through higher phases of socialization, this pattern only increases its intensity. Beyond infancy, the patterns of social relations that they encounter only increase the sense of anxiety, inequality, and competitiveness that will characterize full adulthood. As society becomes less cooperative and interdependent, and rooted more in the market logics of katallaxy, competition, hierarchy, and an ideology of “self-reliance” within the context of the cybernetic mechanisms of modernity, the more that the self is pressed into ever shallower one-dimensionality, the more that both its anxiety and its inability to develop mature, secondary psychological processes deepens. What results from the cybernetic society is the nesting of pathological, damaged social relations. To understand the idea of damaged social relations, I will assume that all social relations take on certain shapes or structures, which we can call relatum. These relatum consist of relata or the members of the relational form that are in fact related via particular norms and practices. Furthermore, I will distinguish between two broad categories of relatum: anabolic and katabolic forms.6 The former, anabolic, relational forms are those that enhance or benefit the development of the relata involved, whereas katabolic relational forms are those that instrumentalize their respective relata, seeing them as means to an end. The purpose of such a relatum is not the common good of each individual’s developmental needs but the particular good or purpose of those that control and regulate that social form. Damaged relations are those that emerge within katabolic relatum; at a social level, they are characterized by exploitation, marginalization, extraction, subordination, or control. But they are also to be found in early childhood and adolescence, in forms of attachment anxiety brought on by neglectful caregiving, or perhaps by overindulgence and permissiveness as caregivers compensate for their own adult lack of healthy secondary bonds. They inflict trauma on the individuals involved, and they need not be only characteristic of formal social relations, such as bureaucracies and corporations, but also may inform personal relationships, intimate relations, and family life, too. Katabolic relations do not seek the rich

  an anatomy of heteronomy development of their members but rather some external good that is in some way extracted from other relata. A friendship that taxes one friend at the other’s expense; narcissistic parents that organize their children’s lives around their own immediate needs; a lover that exploits another lover for physical self-gratification; an economic firm that seeks enhanced profits at the expense of the benefits and wages of its employees—all constitute broad examples of katabolic relational forms, emotional as well as material. Katabolic social forms essentially treat their relata as instruments toward an end, good, or purpose that is for the particular benefit of a subset of that relatum. As a result, it does not view its relata as worthy of receiving developmental goods but as a means to a particular end. Alienation, reification, and exploitation are characteristic of these pathological social relations. It is important to emphasize that katabolic relations are not only those rooted in economic life but also those rooted in new forms of parenting and the transformation of the family, which has been evolving throughout the twentieth century. Whereas some have seen the transformation of family life from the 1960s onward as beneficial for selfdevelopment,7 it is perhaps more accurate to point out that the increased intimacy of family life that has emerged as a result of the decline of public life (and the conflicts and struggles to be found there), the overinvolvement of the child in parental activities as well as shrinking family size means a waning of the oedipal constellation and the struggles that were once prevalent.8 This results in an extension of preoedipal needs and a prolongation of primary defenses into adulthood. Heinz Kohut frames the problem: “Although I am fully aware of the significant wholesome effect that the emotional closeness to such parental leisure activities provides for the child’s forming self, I submit that the emotional participation in the parental play and leisure activities do not supply the child’s nuclear self with the same nutriment as the emotional participation in the activities of real life—particularly with regard to the limited, optimal, nontraumatic parental failures that provide the fuel for transmuting internalizations.”9 In this sense, katabolic relations are found not only in environments that directly degrade their relata but also in those, such as modern family life, that deprive the child of necessary exposure to public life and overprotect the developing ego. In this sense, the child becomes the object of the

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     parents’ own narcissistic needs rather than the robust development of its own individuality. Anabolic social forms, however, have different features. A relatum of this kind is defined by features that treat its members as interdependent for a common purpose, a purpose that has in mind the development and enhancement of the relata involved. The most salient feature of anabolic social forms is that their relations, their norms, and their practices, as well as their ends and purposes, are organized for the mutual benefit of the relata involved. That is to say, the quality and feature of those relations are designed and intended to treat each member of the relatum as ends in themselves, as worthy of development qua individuals, not merely as instruments for the group’s purposes. These healthy or nonpathological social forms are characterized by solidarity, equality, and democratic forms of authority, as well as secure bonds between self and other. These relations take the interests of the relata into account as a part of the common purpose of the relatum itself. All of this has a profound impact on the development of the self and the nature of individuality in such a culture. One reason for this is that as pathological relations increasingly saturate the developmental culture of youth, the fundamental psychological building blocks for autonomy and critical consciousness are undermined by narcissistic impulses toward self-gratification. Not unlike Rousseau’s diagnosis of amour propre, the nature of social relations that are pathological and katabolic result in the breaking down of the self’s inner infrastructure, in the withering of its capacity to judge and to be able to cognize the kinds of public interests and concerns required for a viable and effective democratic life. The self that has been consistently exposed to these defective relations produces selves that are anaclitic: their essential disorganization requires consistent propping up, either through masochistic forms of need or sadistic and aggressive forms of destruction. Either way, the self fails to achieve selfintegrity, or basic nuclear structure, that can serve as the foundation for a critical form of autonomy and individuality.10 As Karen Horney lucidly argued: “The very compulsive character of these drives inevitably deprives the person of his full autonomy and spontaneity. As soon as, for instance, his need to be liked by everybody becomes compulsive, the genuineness of his feelings diminishes; so does his power to discriminate.”11

  an anatomy of heteronomy Also consider how modern forms of child-rearing contribute to the withering of the self. The proliferation of television shows, portable internet devices, and videos, games, and other distractions that saturate even the youngest child’s environment, let alone the increasing overscheduling of children’s time by parents shuttling them to and from school, afterschool activities, and other commitments—all this crowds out the autonomy of imagination and free time so essential to childhood. Whereas earlier forms of childhood would have been ripe with the possibility for an autonomous imagination, now the psychic imaginary is colonized by the external world of iPhones, YouTube, and other innumerable heteronomous and commodified forms of “imagination.” The self’s capacity for imagination gradually becomes subsumed by industrialized cultural patterns of feeling, thought, and perception; its autonomy within the self is weakened and, in some instances, destroyed, rendering it essentially heteronomous. In adulthood, this lack of an autonomous imagination severs the individual’s capacity for free thought, for criticism, for judgment. It whittles away the generative, creative capacities of the self, rendering it incapable of imagining alternative forms of life, values, and norms. The self’s capacity for spontaneity dries up as it becomes a cog in the machinery of the waves of conformity controlled by commodification logics. The closure of meaning to self-exploration that constitutes the essence of reification now forms an iron circle outside of which the self cannot move. As Cornelius Castoriadis notes: “The imagination of the living being is, in the main, enslaved to its instrumental functions: conservation and reproduction.”12 All human beings require relations to and with others. We are phylogenetically relational, as well as practical, beings.13 The need for secure attachments to others has positive developmental effects on the self. When these break down, fray, or are absent, the result is a withering of ego strength since the self needs to seek out these secure primary attachments later in life to prop up what was missing in early development. But the more one is engaged in anabolic social forms, the more ego strength is enhanced and, with it, the capacity to achieve a more critical form of autonomy and agency. But as these social relations become negated and gradually disappear, the new normal becomes defined by alienation and reified forms of identity. The culture of cybernetic society is not, contrary to all appearances, the diversity of lifestyles and identities. It is rather the

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     incessant quest for security, ego comfort, and compensation for the lack of meaningful or the presence of disturbed primary relations. As we become socialized through different phases of our psychological development, we encounter ever-widening networks of pathological social relations and norms. The stability that was once crucial for youthful development has been displaced by the competition for security, status, and material satisfaction. We need to keep in mind that what we commonly refer to as the “self” is not a single monadic entity but, rather, a function of the degree of coherence and unity among diverse identities or self-states.14 There is, as Harry Stack Sullivan noted, a different self for each interaction in which we engage. What I am referring to here as the “self” is in actuality a function of the relative coherence and capacity to experience a multiplicity of selves constituting the relative organization of our subjectivity. In psychoanalytic terms, this means that what we can call the robustness of one’s self can be understood as the extent to which our internal self-states interact. As Bromberg notes: “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them—the capacity to feel like one self while being many. ‘Standing in the spaces’ is a shorthand way of describing a person’s relative capacity to make room at any given moment for subjective reality that is not readily containable by the self he experiences as ‘me’ at that moment. It is what distinguishes creative imagination from both fantasy and concreteness, and distinguishes playfulness from facetiousness.”15 Bromberg’s thesis can be used to understand the mechanism of the withering of the self and its consequences. The more that the cybernetic society fits us into its systemic imperatives, the more it produces individuals who will seek out forms of personal meaning and identity in systemic form. The closure of meaning that thinkers such as Castoriadis have emphasized is produced by the constricting of the self and its reduction to a crude but efficient one-dimensionality. Such a self withers because it no longer possesses the psychic resources to critique, to refuse to cooperate. Such a self is constituted by a constricted horizon of perception and meaning that can only lead to a passive acceptance of the forms of life that occupy its social field. Just as important, once we see the self in this way, we can also see that its relative strength or weakness derives in large part from defective

  an anatomy of heteronomy relations to others. The different self-states that make up the self are functions of different relations-to-others. My ability to become a robust individual, one who will have the ego strength for democratic, public life, withers because the sociological frameworks responsible for socializing the ego into developing those self-states no longer exist in any consistent, nonmediated sense. Instead, knowledge and judgment and what was previously a distinct set of norms, practices, and attitudes about others have become a mere extension of the personal. With this, the public realm loses its special ability to develop a public, civic, and democratic form of self and, with it, the attendant kind of consciousness and evaluative powers that underwrite it. Indeed, one crucial aspect of cybernetic society has been its capacity to degrade the public realm, to slowly render the public sphere and public square another dimension of our own privacy, to reduce it, indeed, displace it by the pursuit not of solidarity, not of the contestation of power and aggressiveness, but rather the search for secondary-intimate relations: distended recognitive relations that will scaffold an ego that cannot withstand the harsh realities of a world riven by exploitation, injustice, and winner-take-all realism. At a deeper, more psychoanalytic level, what is really happening is what we can call a constriction of the development of self-states. What this means is, following on Bromberg’s thesis about the self being composed of a multiplicity of self-states, that the modern self is prevented from developing more diverse and robust self-states; it is confined to those that can navigate a world that is essentially competitive and dependent on the presentation of self for any form of success. The self therefore oscillates between two different poles: on the one hand, it must become ever shallower as it is undersocialized by being restricted to intimate relations bound by close familial or friendship ties, thereby frustrating abilities for public, democratic self-hood. On the other hand, the self can absorb the logics of hierarchical institutions and seek to excel within them, thereby producing a kind of self that is co-opted by its logic, rendering consciousness acritical and affirmative to predefined social goals. In either case, in place of a public realm defined by conflict and self-development, the modern self is thrust into a katallactic realm circumscribed by the market’s colonization of social life—a realm defined by competitiveness and instrumentality, where the presentation of self is

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     mediated by market forces and relations. The hierarchies of the cybernetic society are increasingly defined not by conflict but by passive acceptance of the rules of the game and the outcomes of the market. Indeed, unlike the cultures of industrial and immediate postindustrial societies, the self in cybernetic society is embedded within the system. This embedding, which occurs at a very young age, incorporates the self’s libidinal and recognitive needs. As a result, the psychic resources for social disruption and social change are routed either toward apolitical forms of transgression or toward cultural experiences produced by the system itself. On the other side of this process, the self must continue to strive after primary relations of recognition and intimacy, for a form of selfvalidation that can prop up the ego that has not been developed through struggles and conflict but rather has been shielded from conflict, which has allowed fragments of primary narcissism to persist and infect the secondary relations of adult life. Hence, as Richard Sennett has pointed out: “Today, impersonal experience seems meaningless and social complexity an unmanageable threat. . . . In an intimate society, all social phenomena, no matter how impersonal in structure, are converted into matters of personality in order to have meaning.”16 Public space was once not only the frame for civic and group activity; it also played a psychological function on the ego, developing within it new forms of relatedness and civic consciousness.17 The demise of this public realm has had deleterious impact on the modern individual. What results is not a robust self but a withered self: an individual dependent on the validation and recognition of others rather than a robust self that can enter into genuine interdependent relations with others as an equal, as one who can give and take, as one who can achieve the Aristotelian excellence of citizenship: as “one who knows how to rule and be ruled in turn.” The robust self is able to enter into solidaristic relations with others, but it is also able to question authority and not seek safety or concealment. The self mired in the search for primary relations cannot achieve these relations to others or to self; instead, it occupies a neurotic or even self-disturbed state (such as narcissism) that undermines the articulation of a civic, let alone democratic, form of selfhood. The key idea here is that a self that is relatively disintegrated or underdeveloped is one that lacks both a variety of self-states and

  an anatomy of heteronomy self-awareness about one’s capacities for solidarity and cooperation, as well as intimacy and warmth. The withering of the self therefore refers to this lack of robust self-state development, to the fact that the inner world of the psyche approaches and interacts with the world in an increasingly one-dimensional framework. Reification and alienation become crucial pathologies of the self in this case since they represent the defective development of the self’s cognitive and affective abilities. Reification, on this view, is the ability of external forms of socialization to be able to constrict one’s self-states, to be able to subject one’s various self-states—as parent, as student, or whatever—to the same regulative logic; to force one’s conformity to the kinds of experiences that can be fitted with the market, with the commodification of experience as a whole. The more constricted my self-states become, the less capacity I have for thinking through the world from differentiated perspectives. A society that needs ever more compliance to overlapping frameworks of norms, that requires ever more regulation of consumption patterns and activities, simplification of political messaging, and so on, will also require a simplicity at the level of the characterological structure of the person. It requires this because without it, the confines of such a world will not be tolerable. But, even more, as katallactic relations become more predominant, the distended need for primary recognitive relations deepens within the self. Social relations become increasingly instrumentalized and shallow, and the self is forced to look for more basic recognitive needs. Instead of a self that develops to see the contradictions and paucity of meaning in its environment and to seek social change, the self under the pressures of the cybernetic society becomes folded into the environment, and a kind of hyperreification begins to set in. As this process becomes the predominant reality, the self loses sight of the horizon of alternative forms of sociality: now it is unable to see cooperation and solidarity as potential forms of life, instead seeing the world from the perspective of a monadic self in search of primary bonds. As Philip Slater once pointed out, “cooperative societies are unassuming—it’s the competitive ones that are concerned with appearances.”18 The more degraded and damaged our social relations become, the more instrumental and formal they are, the more the self withers, and the less it is able to differentiate its own self-states, becoming less pliable

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     and less plastic. The withered self therefore seeks relations but in a pathological way: it suffers from the need for what we can call surplus recognition, or that amount of recognitive awareness by others that exceeds what is required for a stable sense of self-awareness and robust individuality. Surplus recognition is what is needed when the ego suffers deficits of its self-states; when the brittleness of self is so severe that its sense of identity is threatened unless it receives validation from others. Such a self cannot achieve critical agency, or the capacity to call into question what exists from any other perspective, since its psychological tendency is to look for relations that can support and scaffold it as its independent agency withers. The more that forms of socialization are restricted to intimate relations at the expense of mature public relations, the more simplified the self will become and the less able it will be to process and handle the stresses and anxieties of such a world. Instead, such a self regresses to more primitive states of organization and, in the process, seeks out more regressed social relations and needs—in a word, it becomes increasingly narcissistically organized.19 The self can therefore be viewed as a scalar concept: it achieves higher and more robust forms of actuality given the proper sociorelational environment for such development. The self withers, in the sense that I am conceiving it here, when katabolic relations have been able to successfully undermine and negate the requisite psychic and emotional building blocks that prop up and grant our cognitive and evaluative modes of reflection structure.

Anxiety and Group Narcissism Perhaps one of the most salient implications of the phenomenon of the withered self under conditions of damaged social relations is that the ego will seek out new means to soothe or to compensate for the anxiety that is produced by those pathological relations. Anxiety is the product of damaged relations that fail to offer forms of security and meaning to the individual; it is the neurotic state of ontological insecurity that emerges from a disturbed relational world that has failed to grant the ego a stable emotional and self-organizational infrastructure. Katabolic relations have this effect, as I argued above, in that they do not seek the genuine development of the relata involved; rather, they seek some

  an anatomy of heteronomy purpose or end that treats the relata as instruments toward a particular end rather than a common good or purpose. In his prescient study of this phenomenon, Franz Neumann argues that what he calls “persecutory anxiety” is responsible for the rise in authoritarian government in the first half of the twentieth century. This occurs “when a group (class, religion, race) is threatened by loss of status, without understanding the process which leads to its degradation.”20 This, in turn, leads to a “psychological regression” where individuals come to identify with a strong leader as a “substitute for a libidinal tie.”21 For Neumann, there is an inherent relation between the problem of alienation and that of anxiety that comes to determine specific political ideas and movements. The alienation affects the individual’s ability to feel secure in his or her attachment to the social world. As mass society, the division of labor, and the density of bureaucratization expands, so, too, does the individual’s alienation from the social world. Neumann’s basic orientation seems right to me; nevertheless, it is trapped in a more orthodox understanding of Freud’s drive theory and does not account for the ways that the self is shaped by relations and their dynamics. Rather than looking at anxiety as the result of the displacement of a libidinal tie toward strong leaders (which is nevertheless a real phenomenon), I think it is more important to see it as an emergent property of the damaged relations that I discussed above.22 Anxiety is the result of the failure of human relations to consistently give contexts of meaning and security to the self.23 Within katabolic relational structures, this occurs as individuals become reified as objects—as instrumentally manipulable and disposable. But it also goes much deeper, into the actual development of the ego in childhood. Since cybernetic society is characterized by oligarchical forms of wealth and income inequalities, it is central to see how the loss of security in one’s economic fate also has deleterious effects on family life.24 Infants can experience the anxiety of their caregivers as social stress, and insecurity holds sway; but even when anxiety is waning, there is the density of commodification that captures basic drives for consumption, steering the self toward unificatory experiences and an “empty” self. The result is a constriction or even negation of libidinal spontaneity that forms the groundwork for a patterning of the self. The rise of substance abuse and other pathological relations in family life erode the requisite security that

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     infants require for developing a stable sense of self and the basic struts for robust ego-strength later in adulthood. Primitivization of the ego now entails not merely a search for a powerful leader, and an identification with it, but, more generally, with the phenomenon of the withered self: a kind of personhood that lacks the fundamental capacities for autonomous judgment and ego-strength. Ego primitivization is the reflex reaction to the experience to anxiety and alienation in the sense that it seeks moral simplicity and either an escape from, rather than transformation of, the social order or the inflammation of aggressive drives that seek its destruction or the destruction of the perceived threats. Since the ego is the self’s primary agency, its primitivization means a striving for bonds that will serve to assuage the internal deficit of the self. The primitivization consists of the incapacity for selfdetermination and the neurotic need for social bonds that will grant the individual comfort and scaffold the sense of self. This is distinguished from, say, regression in that the withered self has not actually developed a state from which it can regress; it has not properly, or with any sense of efficacy, developed the appropriate secondary structures of the psyche that can grant the ego the internal infrastructure for autonomy and critical judgment. Such a pattern of individuality is made up of a primitive or even archaic psychic need for primary relations in place of the formation of robust secondary relations. As the ego’s mature development and individuation is frustrated, the self gradually withers: it no longer is capable of critically mediating self and world, no longer capable of autonomy and self-direction. Libidinal ties are now not so much focused on the strong leader but on the ego ideals that the culture industry is able to project and that hold the development of the self hostage. The self collapses inward in an infinite regress of prestructured (industrial) emotional frameworks that organize its selfunderstanding. Cultural products such as social media and the iPhone are vehicles that enhance, as well as play out, these one-dimensional forms of fantasy life. “The use of headphones,” Mark Fisher insightfully notes, “is significant here—pop is experienced not as something which could have impacts upon public space, but as a retreat into private ‘OedIpod’ consumer bliss, a walling up against the social.”25 The reason I emphasize this departure from Neumann’s thesis is that such a condition affects not

  an anatomy of heteronomy merely those who seek out authoritarian politics but also the culture more broadly. There are, then, two reactions to the alienation that characterizes katabolic social-relational forms. The anxiety produced by the alienation of agency that they produce can lead either to aggressive and malignant forms of behavior and an attraction to sadistic relations, or they can lead to the need for ego-soothing that undermines the requisite ego-strength needed for critical civic life and consciousness. But this anxiety is not simply experienced in the same ways as in past phases of mass society. Today, as the public realm shrivels, anxiety has increasingly become experienced as an internal dynamic of the self. Increased inequality and hierarchical forms of life only make the individual less significant, driving us inward rather than outward to deal with the sources of the anxiety. Now, as the cybernetic society throws up a screen of a perfectly working social order, the problems one experiences become viewed as a property of one’s own defects. As a result, the anxiety eats away at the inner core of the self; it dissolves the struts for ego strength that could otherwise serve as a fulcrum for focused, critical awareness. This new kind of anxiety is caused by the degradation of anabolic social relations, by the weakening of the ties to others that once permeated a more robust civic world. As William Davies has noted, it appears now more as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder: The symptoms of PTSD can develop even when there is no clearly identifiable trauma causing it. A parent constantly worrying about the safety of their child, a teenage girl aware that all her friends are judging her appearance via social media, or an individual who experiences sustained bullying or discrimination may all start to display the symptoms of PTSD. These are some of the many ways in which economic inequality and political marginalization become imprinted upon the body and its symptoms, creating an almost permanent condition of anxiety. In each case, it is the sustained power inequality that is critical, and the feeling that there is no escape.26

Sustained inequities of power entail a deepening of defective, katabolic relations and forms of life—relations both to other and to self. The new accent of this phenomenon is that the power inequalities are experienced but not cognized; they actively shape our inner emotional economy, but their root cause remains concealed from view. As more individuals are socialized via such katabolic relational social structures and processes, the

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     self becomes ever weaker, ever more racked by anxiety, and it searches increasingly for some way out, some way to compensate for what it lacks. Both search out forms of meaning via what Erich Fromm termed “group narcissism,” a form of group identity that highlights one’s own identity and particular needs in order to foster group identity. We are accustomed to understanding narcissism as an expression of one’s own sense of grandiosity; but this is in fact the result of defective relations to others, primarily in early childhood. Narcissism is what results from the withered ego’s need to prop itself up, to achieve some kind of ego strength and self-esteem. According to this understanding of narcissism, it is not the Freudian thesis of a libidinal cathexis to the ego (instead of the id) but, rather, of the self rather than the world more broadly.27 Protected by narcissistic caregivers (parents who generally see their children as extensions and reflections of themselves) and hyperstimulated by mediated forms of technological interaction, this kind of self is withdrawn from broader social relations and conflicts. As a result, the self withers as it becomes racked by anxiety, inferiority, and a general sense of insufficiency.28 It is a core feature of group narcissism that it serves to appeal to the needs of the weakened ego, to the most primitive needs for recognition and esteem that the individual lacks. This is because groups themselves can foster forms of narcissism as a means to hold that group together. Freud pointed to the emergence of this kind of narcissism, in its most basic sense, within groups: In the undisguised sympathies and aversions which people feel toward strangers within whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self-love— or narcissism. This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration.29

The idea here is that narcissism is, for Freud, a means for the individual’s “preservation,” and this means not merely a physical, but a psychic, form of preservation: the self’s identity is sustained and formed by group membership. This group identity is defined through a differentiation with others and a kind of intolerance or at least a tension with them. But these aggressive feelings subside within the group, where the ego finds security through a kind of uniformity:

  an anatomy of heteronomy But when a group is formed the whole of this intolerance vanishes, temporarily or permanently, within the group. So long as group formation persists or so far as it extends, individuals in the group behave as though they were uniform, tolerate the peculiarities of its other members, equate themselves with them, and have no feeling of aversion toward them.30

This is an important starting point for understanding the modern self’s need for identity and uniformity in identities that are group-oriented as opposed to autonomy. As Fromm describes the phenomenon: Group narcissism has important functions. In the first place, it furthers the solidarity and cohesion of the group, and makes manipulation easier by appealing to narcissistic prejudices. Secondly, it is extremely important as an element giving satisfaction to the members of the group and particularly to those who have few other reasons to feel proud and worthwhile. . . . There is compensation for one’s miserable condition in feeling “I am a part of the most wonderful group in the world.” . . . Consequently, the degree of group narcissism is commensurate with the lack of real satisfaction.31

Relations cease to be based on empathy for others and are replaced by relations of exclusion and narcissistic empathy: having concern for others because they are, in some sense, like you, thereby increasing the self’s absorption into the group identity, enhancing the feeling of security from existential threat or of any form of external critical engagement. It is no small wonder that the spread of cults (religious and secular) and conspiracy theorists of all stripes and political persuasions have sprouted in recent decades. Nevertheless, although Fromm’s original intent of the concept was to describe the dynamics of aggression, I think we can expand the concept of group narcissism out to understand how it serves as a compensatory device for the withered self. To do this, we should distinguish two different forms of group narcissism: a malignant and benign expression of the phenomenon. Both share the basic conceptual framework but differ about the orientation of the group itself. In malignant group narcissism, the motivation of the group is a sadistic, destructive intent. Members of the group want to vent their weakness by harming, subordinating, or applying violence (symbolic or physical) on others and groups that they see as weak and undeserving. They achieve a sense of self-satisfaction and compensate for the insecurity brought on by their own ontological anxiety

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     through this sadism. In benign group narcissism, by contrast, the primary orientation is not sadism but masochism: the group seeks to create forms of interpersonal care that shield them from the pathological relations of the outside world. In these groups, identities find their recognition and bond with others on the basis of some ascriptive identity. Both malignant and benign forms of group narcissism degrade the autonomous capacities of the self. Both exist because of each member’s capacity and will to resign the exercise of other aspects of the self in order to fit into the group and to internalize the identity that grants the withered ego its scaffolding.32 Both are the hearts of an increasingly heartless world. This phenomenon is inversely related to the demise of a vibrant civic world. As the process of individuation proceeds in the course of psychic development, so, too, should the development of robust secondary relations, practices, and norms that are distinct from intimate, family-based relational ties and bonds. As the ego is exposed to these forms of relations to others, so, too, does the centrality of his or her own self become the basis for understanding the world. Mirroring the departure from primary narcissism in the infant’s development, these secondary social relations, norms, and practices begin to decenter the ego and allow for a gradual learning process, where one comes to see oneself as interdependent on others rather than as a mere object of their consciousness or will. In this secondary, postintimate sphere, conflict becomes an essential component of ego strength because its very decentering also leads to a recentering but on a new, richer plane of consciousness. In Hegel’s philosophical terms, we move from an “I-consciousness” to a “we-consciousness,” where the conflict surrounding the struggle for recognition leads to a new, higher structure of self-understanding as a relational individual as opposed to an independent, particular being.33 Our self-consciousness therefore expands out of the tight boundaries of the atomistic self and into a broader horizon as an interdependent, relational, cooperative, social being. Defects in the process of decentration and recentration mean that the ego will remain in a more primitive state, stuck in a more narcissistic form of organization. Such individuals will be unable to develop higher forms of self-awareness and social cognition owing to their preoccupation with the depleted aspects of the self. They will develop anaclitic tendencies with others, needing surplus recognition to feel belonging and hold

  an anatomy of heteronomy on to whatever shallow forms of self-esteem they possess. The other possibility is that the decentration process is too violent, delivering a shock to the self so profound that it is unable to achieve recentration. The individual subsequently sinks into alienation, where it is unable to normalize itself within the pathological spheres of life, but also finds depression and neurosis blocking any capacities for higher self-development and self-consciousness. In either case, the Hegelian philosophical thesis has its psychoanalytic counterpart: the withering of the ego, in both cases, is tied to its incapacity to properly incorporate a new kind of self from the conflicts and struggles of public life. But this expanded self, this new understanding of oneself as a social being, is not, for Hegel, a turn to some kind of incoherent communitarianism. Rather, we need to keep in mind that he is arguing that the realization of our ontology as social beings is something that needs to be absorbed into the structures of self-consciousness, that the individual’s cognitive and practical conceptual manifold is enhanced and expanded as a result of this struggle for recognition. What the rational self comes to realize is that he or she must think in more socially mediated terms. We do not, therefore, abandon the concept of the self; we enrich and expand it. If we think about this in psychological terms, we can see two essential processes in this pattern of psychosocial development. The first is the process of decentration and the second that of defamilialization. When the ego decenters, it no longer sees itself as a core point of reference; it is no longer the center of experience and world but rather a part of it. The recentering that occurs means a new sense of self and an ego that has expanded its horizon of reference to include others. One becomes conscious of oneself as a being-among-others. Defamilialization is the process of leaving behind the bonds of intimacy as the only paradigm for relations with others. As the self matures via conflictual, decentering forms of social learning, bonds with others can be formed on a more mature, more rational footing—not as intimate ties, nor as objects of one’s narcissistic will, but as associations of fellowship and solidarity. But when these secondary processes are frustrated or negated, the self fails to differentiate; it is not able to properly abandon its prolonged narcissistic state; instead, it prolongs its dependence on others to prop up its neurotic and even narcissistic needs. Here is where the phenomenon of

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     surplus recognition becomes central. In healthy forms of self-development, recognition serves to scaffold the ego’s development via a process of ego strengthening. The child comes to see that his or her achievements are validated and that one comes to know oneself as distinct from others, but it also, as Jessica Benjamin puts it, “is that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self. It allows the self to realize its agency and authorship in a tangible way.”34 Of course, within the family, or the early years of intimate relations with caregivers, this should form the foundation for the ego’s higher or secondary structures. But as cybernetic society displaces the social spheres of the public realm and commodifies personal experience and identity, these secondary structures do not emerge properly. In cybernetic society, the individual must be reduced to the shallowest and most manipulable variables possible; subjectivity itself loses its depth and its richness, and what passes for one’s inner world is really merely a shadowy reflection of the organized patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior of the prepatterned and commodified outer world.35 As in the waning of the oedipal conflict with the father, the real problem becomes more sociological: with the lack of conflictual struggles in the public realm (i.e., of the secondary processes of decentration and defamilialization), the self’s capacities for autonomy wither; it no longer has the requisite endopsychic foundation for more diverse, robust self-states that can ground a robust personal and civic self. This is an essential aspect of cybernetic society: the less of a genuine public realm that exists, the less people will view it as a legitimate arena to contest power. As the public realm continues its disintegration, so, too, does the modern self continue to wither, and political life becomes refracted through the prism of the narcissistic self rather than reconstituted as a domain of solidaristic associations struggling for common purpose and common goods. As intimacy has displaced public life, the public self withers, and the self-states that should emerge from such a sphere of conflictual socialization are smothered. This has real consequences on the political nature of the individual. As Sennett has pointed out: But what kind of personality develops through experiences of intimacy? Such a personality will be molded in the expectation, if not the experience, of trust, of

  an anatomy of heteronomy warmth, of comfort. How can it be strong enough to move in a world founded on injustice? Is it truly humane to propose to human beings the dictum that their personalities “develop,” that they become “richer” emotionally to the extent that they learn to trust, to be open, to share, to eschew manipulation of others, to eschew aggressive challenges to social conditions or mining these conditions for personal gain? Is it humane to form soft selves in a hard world? As a result of the immense fear of public life which gripped the last century, there results today a weakened sense of human will.36

What emerges now from the ashes of the demolition of public life is what we can call the anaclitic self: a type of self that is dependent on validation by others and denies or avoids those relations that challenge or threaten it. The anaclitic self literally “leans on” recognition by others; it needs to recreate the intimacy of childhood in adulthood in order to possess a coherent sense of self; thus, a consistent need exists for the approval of others and their acceptance. The proliferation of social media has only deepened this tendency that was once a basic feature of early childhood. In the process, the public self-state is further removed from view and the kind of ego decentering powers that it holds never filter into the anaclitic self’s internal world. It is not only the mechanisms of intimate relations within the family, but also the ways that intimacy displaces public life, that extend the narcissistic state of the self. Without being challenged by conflict, without a public realm that can provide the self with more robust self- and otherrelations, the ego requires constant external recognition to prop it up. What occurs in a world that is shot through with mediated relations to others and the extended period of intimacy with the family as public life shrinks is the distortion of these recognitive relations by their embeddedness in society at large. Now the developing self’s recognitive relations are embedded within the actual defective relations of the concrete social world.37 Surplus recognition, by contrast, is a defective, inflamed need for others to validate the self. It is defective not because one has an intersubjective need of an other, for this would simply be the expression of our essentially social-relational constitution. Rather, it is defective insofar as the relations do not develop an integrated ego—integrated in the sense that it seeks out interdependent relations, associations based in equality and common purpose as opposed to dependence on others—but rather an anaclitic self that is unable to achieve autonomy and critical awareness of

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     self and world. Rather, the anaclitic self’s ego is so weakened, so incapable of any kind of autonomous individuality, that it relies increasingly on others and their validation for support and scaffolding. As a result, the ego is insufficient to stand on its own and is in danger of losing its integrity without leaning on such recognitive relations. It is a response not to healthy forms of socialization, where different selfstates are constructed over time by a process of conflict, resolution, and recognition, but to the fact that the intimate world extends the illusions of primary narcissism via the constricted, maldevelopment of self-states. The recognitive “we-consciousness” that is supposed to develop within the subject from anabolic relations is not achieved, and the self remains trapped in a primitive state of development unable to move properly in public, civic life. These forms of recognitive relations are not those that strengthen the ego but serve as a crutch for its defects and weaknesses. The primitive ego needs this to compensate for the lack of self-development due to excessive forms of conformity, submissiveness to social norms and institutions, and permissive-consumptive forms of child-rearing that deprive the ego of needed forms of conflict that can enlarge and strengthen the ego. In addition, as the family structure dissolves without a more emancipatory form taking its place, the child’s development can be damaged by distorted object relations that frustrate the development of a more robust, stronger sense of self.38 As the cybernetic society weaves a cohesive structure of norms and values that orient the self toward passive acceptance of its own reality principle, the developing ego consistently looks for external forms of recognitive validation in terms of the identities and ego ideals that the spectacle of this reality principle exhibits. At the same time, the gradual subsumption of all social and cultural spheres under the logic of capital, and the administrative economism to which it subjects all forms of life, means that those forms of conflict that once existed in previous periods of capitalism have evaporated, leaving the subject in an autoplastic relation to the prevailing reality principle. We need not look to the changing dynamics and function of the Oedipal Complex to see this defect of individuation in action. As the family becomes increasingly fragmented by the pressure of extractive capital, it also becomes subsumed by its logics and parameters. At the same time, the narcissism of caregivers—themselves the product of an alienated world

  an anatomy of heteronomy dominated by the reality principle—only serves to disturb the developing ego of the child. Add to this the need to compensate for the lack of intimacy and care in the external, social world by overprotecting and enabling archaic forms of self and primary narcissism of the child. Meanwhile, the oedipal configuration sinks into the background and loses its once primary significance in the struggle for individuation. Individuation now, more and more, becomes marked by the prolongation of archaic structures and less and less by the structural dynamics of the oedipal struggle. Again, the more damaged pathological relations become—the more that they evince the cold formalism of technical, administrative, and instrumental relations—the more the ego’s need for surplus recognition is inflamed, along with the growth of group narcissism in proportion. The Orwellian vision of automata that merely move through their lives without vitality and will is not the fate of the cybernetic society. Instead, with one hand it takes the resources that each individual possesses in the form of labor, credit, consumption, and so on while with the other it provides a culture where all are “free” to indulge their identity and a narcissistic exploration of self. But what occurs is the collapse of social reason, the degradation of the requisite ego strength to challenge authority rather than merely escape or mock it, to resist the herd mentality and instead build forms of solidarity where robust individuality is a function of healthy forms of interdependence and common interest. The politics of identity may strike many as comprising expressions of marginalized groups seeking recognition and rights of full citizenship. But look deeper: what is really in operation is nonthreatening to the cybernetic order. For without a new sense of common purpose and objective interest, there can be no challenge to the system, only the possibility to cushion the blow of alienation rather than the elimination of the forces that cause it. One does not have to look far in cultures that are characterized by cybernetic forms of sociality. Consider the ways that cybernetic society can undermine the stability of the developing ego, causing anxiety and the search for ego security. Thinking of childhood alone, we can perceive the ways in which the hyperorganization of time and space represses instincts toward play and open creation, or the ways that pressures on family life due to inequality and the incessant drive to either maintain or expand the consumption basket shred familial ties, the ways that the child encounters

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     increasingly prestructured environments that can suppress spontaneity, and so on. But perhaps most crucial is the idea that Marcuse points to, which is the declining authority of the family and the increasing externalization of authority outside the sphere of family life. Again, this is a crucial facet of cybernetic society: the capacity to, as much as possible, absorb the self into the collective norms of production and consumption, the need in any market society rooted in oligarchic surplus extraction to reify a single form of life as the means to achieve one’s personal happiness and foreclose an alternative dimension for human life. If we take this view of the thesis of reification seriously, then it affects the socialization of the self and its cognitive capacities in particular ways. Through internalizing the constitutive rule-sets of the prevailing social institutions via the routinization of their norms and practices, they come to be reified in the cognitive and intentional structures of consciousness. This conceals much of what is objectively pathological within the society, such as the ways that our social relations are structured, the kinds of ends and purposes of our social institutions, and so on. These objective features therefore have consequent subjective implications for the self. The eclipse of autonomy, the erosion of the critical ego, therefore, is a product of the kinds of social-relational structures and functions that predominate and constitute the self and the cognitive and evaluative aspects of the person.

The Withered Self and the Primitivization of the Ego As capitalist society continues to absorb the institution of the family and to colonize its practices and infiltrate it as a sphere of values and norms, the self will become, as Heinz Kohut notes, “understimulated,” and, as a result, the self becomes withered and constantly in need of fulfillment to prop it up. For Kohut, this is because the family in modern society has become increasingly distant, while the child’s psychological development becomes “psychologically undernourished and its cohesion weak.”39 The result is that recognition, again, can and indeed does become oriented not toward an awareness of the unjust social order—that is, toward a critical consciousness worthy of the rational political aims of democratic citizenship—but a narrow identity politics where each yearns for the comfort

  an anatomy of heteronomy of having one’s identity “recognized” and therefore to serve as a psychological bubble protecting it from the alienating, dehumanizing powers of administrative-capitalist society. The modern self is a wounded, weakened entity, incapable of genuine autonomy or moral courage. It prefers either the comfort that an in-group can provide to shield it from the ravages of an instrumentalized world, or it becomes co-opted by it, seeking to succeed in it by aping its imperatives, norms, and values. In either case, we can see that this essentially constitutes the spectrum of what I will call here the primitivization of the ego: the regressing of the structural and organizational patterns of the self’s character structure toward needs and desires that render the sources of social and personal pathologies out of sight. The ego—conceived as the agentic dimension of the self—is primitivized to the extent that it is motivated by self-referential desires and needs. At its base, the social system produces forms of anxiety that are simultaneously managed by regressed forms of self- and otherrelations. It is this titration of anxiety-amplifying and anxiety-attenuating dynamics in our social field that is at the center of this phenomenon. The primitivization of the ego means that the self’s very agency becomes driven by the anaclitic and narcissistic needs of the withered self. It is the product of the anxiety produced by the cybernetic society’s incessant stripping of genuine meaning from our social relations and the kinds of purposes to which our institutions are organized to realize. But this has proceeded further into the processes of self-development than the time of Kohut and his analysis. A central feature of the modern individual is the problem of the instability of identity—the existential lack of grounding and meaning that once provided the needed context for individual autonomy. Once the relational frameworks that shape early development are embedded within the katabolic relations of cybernetic society, new cohorts find it increasingly difficult to achieve critical agency and personal autonomy. They are unable to move outside the narcissistically constricted self-states because the ego has not moved out of its primitive self-absorption. The robust kind of agency requisite for moral autonomy is constantly frustrated by the ego’s weakness and inability to move out of its own sphere of reference. Cybernetic society is a culture rooted in excessive mass consumption, as well as elaborate forms of routinization of society and the self,

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     but it is also rooted in the need to redirect the aggressive, erotic, and spontaneous aspects of the ego in order to neutralize them or at least to bring them into the frame of the market and into disciplined forms of productivity, at whatever level is required. This is generally achieved by driving these forces inward, manifesting themselves as depression, anxiety, incoherence of goals, anhedonia, and so on. Or it is directed outward, expressing itself on the stage of competitive life and consumption, treating others as objects, consuming objects, food, sexual activities, and so on. At the same time, it produces, via the increasingly alienated forms of life that it produces, pathologies of self and society that it seeks to manage via commodification itself. The maintenance of social order and the collective tolerance for increased extraction, exploitation, and instrumentalization of the human and natural world is achieved by deactivation of critical consciousness—but this itself is achieved by the ways that the self evolves under these conditions. Our society is not, as thinkers such as Foucault believed, a “disciplinary” society; it is more aptly characterized as populated by persons in possession of regressed egos that find gratification in the flat forms of escape the culture industry provides. Loneliness, meaninglessness, and alienation occur—unlike in the 1950s and 1960s—within the context of a plethora of avenues of escape. It would be wrong, as I have been trying to emphasize, to see this as some kind of grand project from above, a design for masterly social control. Quite the opposite: the reason that the meaninglessness and loneliness is so profound is due to the extent that elites and the organization of society in general no longer need people—except for consumption. As the economy becomes increasingly technologically complex, we do not need more engineers and educated workers, as theorists of postindustrial society believed, but fewer and fewer of them. And those that are needed require less and less technical virtuosity. The economy now needs service workers, those that can serve the top echelons of the economy, from baristas to Uber drivers to a vast army of delivery personnel. The systematic disinvestment that society has placed in its youth, as evinced by the collapse of the nonelite university system and forms of education at all levels, has resulted in the unconscious introjection of valuelessness. Is it any wonder why ego regression is so prevalent and devastating? Is it any wonder why adults young and old fall “into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the

  an anatomy of heteronomy soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana”?40 Both expressions of the self emerge from the same source: the alienating forms of social relations that deprive it of the moral infrastructure for critical awareness. But in many ways, there is a sense in which too much weight can be placed on the individual. It is the shredding impact on social relations that new regimes of work and material security have had not only on the individual but also on the forms of social solidarity that had traditionally served as a counterweight to the atomistic and hierarchical tendencies of capitalist society. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right, noted how the need for social groups rooted in social solidarity and common interests to mediate the centrifugal forces of market society (of what he termed Korporationen) were necessary to mediate the particular individual with the universality of the social whole. What the cybernetic society feeds on is therefore a twofold process: dismantling our selfconsciousness of the sociocooperative forms of solidarity that help mediate the individual’s relation to the social and, perhaps in tandem with this, dismantling the subjective and psychic resources and capacities that facilitate the self’s ability to integrate with such solidaristic groups. The withered self is no longer able to join interdependent relations where its own autonomy voluntarily comes into interface with public concerns. It is compelled, owing to its regression, toward group narcissism or other forms of atomized, narcissistic drift. But this is a direct consequence of the ways that cybernetic society has shredded public life as a distinct, ontological space of being. The withering of the ego takes place in large part as a result of the shrinking of what was previously a more vibrant and interactive public square. As forms of interaction become more restricted to family and close friendships, the public consciousness of the individual shrinks. Interactions that were once rooted in solidarity, debate, and competing visions for society have now receded into self-interest and the protection of one’s identity. The relations that characterized the democratic cultures that existed prior to mass-industrial society generally and the cybernetic society in particular were defined by mutuality of interest, associations that were not intimate but based on principle and conviction about a common life. What emerged from these kinds of associational practices and norms were

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     political movements and cultures that could challenge power, and they comprised robust forms of individual conviction and principle. Going back to the theory of the self as an organization of multiple self-states, we can see that a distinct civic self was able to emerge in tandem with one’s personal self-states; it was not an either/or proposition but rather a mutual strengthening of these kinds of self-states that allowed a more robust ethical life to emerge. But the pressures of the cybernetic society have eroded and undermined these civic practices and spaces. Privacy now displaces the civic self; the shift is away from the concerns of the res publica and an increasing need to shore up a self that has been gutted of its inner capacities for ego strength. As Richard Sennett has argued, “Western societies are moving from something like an other-directed condition to an inner-directed condition—except that in the midst of self-absorption no one can say what is inside. As a result, confusion has arisen between public and intimate life; people are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning.”41 Sennett saw this shift happening already in the 1970s, and it has only increased in intensity. The idea of differentiated self-states helps us understand more clearly the ways that the withering of the ego has direct political consequences: for now, identity rather than class, feeling rather than interest, identity rather than the concrete organization of power are the focus of political consciousness. As a result, the ego fails to properly develop the secondary processes required for more organized structures to manage aggression and anxiety. The primitivization of the ego now can be seen to emerge where the individual is either plagued by a lack of will or seeks to vent aggression and consume. In either case, what the primitivized ego lacks is the capacity for interdependence and common purpose.42 The self-states that come to make up this kind of individual are therefore constricted, underdeveloped, and lacking in differentiation. It is not only anxiety and the need for the group that undermines autonomy and critical agency in modern culture. Mass culture, or what Adorno rightfully decried as the “culture industry,” has the capacity to cultivate forms of practical passivity that further degrade autonomy, recircuiting energies of frustration into other commodified realms such as popular music, gaming, self-help and “wellness” industries, and so on.

  an anatomy of heteronomy Even those anxieties about political and social life that would otherwise have compelled the individual to act, to motivate some kind of political activity, are weakened. Social protest becomes a spectacle rather than a manifestation of political power and will, just as sharing YouTube videos is a compensatory act that stands in for actual political organization and praxis. What Robert Pfaller has termed “interpassivity” results where the movies, music, and other products of the culture industry compensate for the actual activity of the individual.43 The regressed ego not only seeks out the simple distractions of mass culture; it also increasingly needs it to fill the hole of actual political activity. The society of the spectacle—from parade-like street demonstrations to commodified culture—are now the self-righteous, impotent stuff of protest.

The Dissolution of the Democratic Self The effects on the culture of democracy that result from this devolution of individuality are real. The eclipse of autonomy begins to occur once the withering of the self sets in, once the regression of the ego takes hold as a psychological mechanism to compensate for the powerlessness and alienation that the cybernetic society breeds and actively cultivates. The relation between the withered self and the culture of democratic life is no small matter. In the absence of robust, autonomous selves, there can be no robust public life, no critical culture, no reflective practices and institutions of any efficacy or worth. The regressed ego approaches public life either with disdain or with fear. Lacking ego strength and preferring the comfort of relations rooted in some form of group narcissism or inert autism, it eschews domains where its disorganized internal world will be brought into conflict with itself or anything akin to an external tribunal of reason. As a result, it is unable to act democratically in the public sphere. Aristotle’s famous understanding of the excellence of citizenship, in which the citizen is one who “knows when to rule and be ruled,” is degraded to a form of agency that cannot view relations to others as interdependent but only in instrumental, sadistic, or masochistic terms. My argument has been that the withered self results not from shifts in the oedipal relations of the child in family life but rather from the changing context of the family itself and its relation to the broader society.

The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego     With the demise of the public realm comes the extended life of the family and its relations; with this comes also the lack of alternative social spaces and intersubjective relational forms through which other self-states can emerge. The result is the prevalence of preoedipal disturbances of the self as opposed to neurotic conflicts rooted in the oedipal constellation. The persistence of inflated needs for intimacy are not the product of a culture that is becoming more personal and humane but of one that is becoming psychically weaker and less able to cultivate civic substance. What we have been witnessing over the course of postindustrial society is the gradual demise, only now being acutely felt, of the civic self-state that in previous phases of modernity provided a distinct political form of consciousness. The narcissistic tendencies of the modern self are the result of the incessant need for forms of intimate dependence that is a consequence of atomization and the demise of public life, institutions, norms, and culture. The need for a robust inner life, a variety of self-states that can capture the nuance of human relations and imagination, is a requisite for renewing democratic culture. Individuality should not be confused with particularity, with one’s separateness from the public realm. Rather, it should be understood as the status of personhood that is capable of mediating the needs of a common world, of reflecting on one’s interdependent and interfunctional relationship to the res publica. I am reminded here of an insight by Barry Sanders: “Public discourse—genuine conversation, motivated by openness and goodwill—demands a rich private life. Without that inner life, we can do little more than take up predetermined positions, which we then defend, life enraged warriors, in shrill tones and nasty language. . . . Without an inner life, without the ability to reflect and analyze—the ability, in effect, to process daily experience—public discourse remains at best a remote possibility. In true discourse, people give and take ideas, they trust each other and themselves to move through complexities toward conclusion or compromise.”44 The devolution of the self has a disintegrating effect on the public sphere, which has essentially been commodified and is inelastic to critical debate. As Guy Debord pointed out as early as the 1980s: “There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it.”45 But the chance to reverse and

  an anatomy of heteronomy combat this is made less tenable because the sphere of individuality has itself become constricted as the ego fails to achieve coherence and integrity via the differentiation and sophistication of self-states. The public self and private self, broadly construed, are not to be understood as in opposition to one another but rather as mutually nutritive of one another. The withering of the self therefore describes a condition of distended narcissism as well as anaclitic self-needs that continuously seek validation rather than critique and transformational conflict and struggles. It is not difficult to see that this ideal-typical situation has receded as a cultural value no less than as an active reality. In this sense, autonomy— that once laudable goal of our moral and cognitive faculties—is not, as postmodern writers and those that have uncritically adopted their stance have posited, a myth or some kind of false construct. It is a construct, to be sure, but one that nevertheless exists as a function of the world of intersubjective and relational dependencies that shape us. Autonomy must be seen as the expression of the robust, coherent self as I have been describing it. It is the achieved status of personhood that is capable of seeking relations of interdependence rather than dependence; it is a form of personhood that moves in a cognitive and ethical space defined by a need to associate with equals. I say that the autonomous self is a state that is achieved rather than ready-formed because it is arrived at via a process of conflict and struggle that systematically and at once decenters the primitive strivings of the narcissistic ego and recenters it on a new plane.46 This new plane is one that I will explore in the next chapter, where philosophy can press us into a new space of being and thinking and, perhaps, help us construct a new kind of individuality capable of withstanding and transforming the powerful logics of the cybernetic world.

part iii

to the lighthouse

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chapter 8

Autonomy as Critical Agency Reconstructing the Democratic Self

So what is the way out? Can the idea of the critical, self-reflecting individual be salvaged in an age that has been built on its very demolition? Should we even care about the project of regenerating a concept of the individual and the value of autonomy? If the picture I have painted of modern, cybernetic society is even conditionally accepted, it would seem that I have painted a picture so dire that the very possibility of freedom has been made impossible, with no way of cutting ourselves loose from the dominating logic of the megamachine. I want to suggest here that we must reconsider the very nature of the concept of individuality itself and its role in modern culture in order to renew and intensify the self’s capacities for critical reason and consciousness. I want to suggest that we expand our ideas about what individuality means and see it as dialectically related to our practical and social-relational lives. Autonomy—a word that has become the target of postmodernists, communitarians, and others— is the concept I want to reinvigorate here. The idea of autonomy as critical agency can serve as the antidote to the kind of heteronomy and unfreedom that I have explored in previous chapters. At the heart of this idea is the need to shatter the strong centrifugal pull of reification, to be able to resist the strong constitutive domination of modern institutions, the commodification of culture and consciousness, and the deformative effects these elements have had on the modern self. I submit that contemporary

  to the lighthouse approaches to autonomy fail at this task and that, until we have an adequate theory of autonomy, we will also lack a theory of democratic reason. Early in this study, I began my theoretical reflections with the Weberian problem of the relation between the individual and individual conscience, on the one hand, and the systematic forms of life that have created a new kind of fatalism and determinism, on the other. Ethical personhood, for Weber, was that status of selfhood where each person would be able to determine for him- or herself the values for self-determining action. With the decline of conventional and ritualistic forms of religion and the rationalization of the political sphere, ethics was being pushed away from the common core of the community into the sphere of the self. This posed a problem since there were no longer any traditional struts of meaning for our ethical concepts to rely on, no external foundations for directing our evaluative and normative courses of activity. For Weber, the solution to this problem was a more intensified Kantianism and secularized Protestantism: since modernity had eradicated all forms of collective meaning, the individual would have to provide for her or his own sense of ethical orientation, to give her- or himself meaning and value in a value-neutral world. This was the value of “authentic modernity” that Weber thought could be culled from the debris of modernity. This Kantianism-in-a-new-key meant that the individual would become the font of value. With the withering of traditional forms of life, value, and community, the modern self would have to be steered by its own direction and seek to seal itself away from the forces of instrumental reason. The nature of these personalized values would therefore need to transcend the material world and occupy a kind of ideal position within the ethical conscience of the subject. As modernity has intensified, this has become the model for understanding the relation of self to society. As Daniel Bell saw from his vantage point of the 1970s, technically administered forms of economic life were being increasingly accompanied by a cultural antinomianism where collective forms of meaning and value shatter into subjective strivings to transcend them.1 But as I have been trying to demonstrate, the problem of social domination and the rational, systemic nature of this kind of social power has so deeply shaped the mechanisms of social integration that what we can call the space for autonomy has essentially narrowed and become too

Autonomy as Critical Agency    fragile to support a vigorous form of critical consciousness and agency; Weber’s project was, in this respect, doomed to fail. The cybernetic society extends what James Block has identified as the central dilemma of the self in modern society: an entity subject to the “continuing application of available ‘means’ of engagement and participation on behalf of ends already written into reality.”2 What I mean by this is central to the thesis I will defend in this final chapter, for it points to what I see as a crucial deficit in the structure of contemporary subjectivity. What is necessary is a new form of reason, one that will be up to the task of dereification and the achievement of the status of self-determination. What I propose is an idea of autonomy as critical agency: that is, a kind of selfhood that is able to resist and question the ends and purposes that are inscribed into our reality and permeate our inner world while at the same time reclaiming the capacity to posit new ends and purposes, to become genuine authors of new values and forms of meaning in the world. At the same time, I propose that we rethink what the individual actually is: not a monadic entity bracketed from its relations with others but a form of personhood capable of entering into solidaristic relations with others, being able to think about the relational dimensions of the goods we pursue, and, most important, being able to explode the heteronomous structures of mind that reification imposes on consciousness. My proposition here is that autonomy is a status that our agency achieves once we are able to think in genuinely nonheteronomous terms— that such an achieved status must be understood not as a way of relating to one’s self as an agent, or one’s will, or whatever, but rather in terms of the kinds of reason utilized in one’s reflections about self and world. To be in a state of heteronomy is to think and act in a state determined by others or according to some nonrational criteria. Autonomy, by contrast, is the capacity to comprehend the essential substrates that constitute our social world as defined by the ends and designs of others rather than ourselves; it is the capacity to perceive of oneself as a practical-relational being capable of generating new forms of meaning and purposes in the world and of social reality as forms or shapes of our collective practical relationality. Autonomy, in this sense, entails a break from the alienated and reified structures of self and world in its capacity to question the existing reality in terms of its ends and purposes, as well as envision new purposes and

  to the lighthouse new forms of life with others. We become capable of this perspective on reality once we are able to think in social-ontological terms about what constitutes our social reality as opposed to our dependence on the phenomenal world as it is merely given to us. A rupture with our consciousness of the ontic world is possible once we begin to see the world as it actually is: organized forms of relations, practices, and purposes within which each of us participates and that generate the social world we inhabit, generally without any consciousness of this fact or the fundamental mutability of that world. I am therefore proposing that we view autonomy as an achieved status of self-consciousness that requires our capacity to grasp the ways that the ontology of our sociality shapes and forms a world that negates ends and purposes that we posit as our own. This view of autonomy derives from what I see to be the essential core of the structure of agency: the capacity to set our own ends and purposes for our practices. To be autonomous as a critical agent is to be able to posit the ends that govern my practices and relations or, at least, to be able to fully sanction the ends that seek my collaboration. I am autonomous as a critical agent when I inquire into the ways that the norms, practices, relational structures, and purposes of the social world I inhabit are shaped. If reification is the ultimate expression of heteronomy, it is because it constitutes a fundamental constriction of our ability to see the world as generated by our collective practices, that the power to direct and shape these collective practices has been alienated from us. And if, as Jonathan Lear has suggested, “psychoanalysis is a ‘cure’ for constrictions of self-consciousness,”3 then I want to go a step further and suggest that only when we think in these ontological terms are we changing the categories by which we reflect on our world and that open up for us a way of thinking the alternative, to imagining new ways of relating, acting, thinking, being. Autonomy as critical agency is, in this sense, a “cure” for the constrictions of self-consciousness placed on us by the thick forms of socialization and reification inherent in cybernetic society. Autonomy must be reconceived as an expanded sense of self and an expanded form of practical reason. This expanded theory of autonomy has its roots in the notion of multiple self-states that I discussed in the previous chapter. There I argued that one of the ways that the self withers in modern culture is through the

Autonomy as Critical Agency    constriction of self-states that we are able to articulate and possess. More specifically, it means seeing that as our self becomes less diverse, our inner world less nuanced, our capacity to think differently and critically is itself restrained. What this means for the idea of autonomy is that the constriction or simplification of our self-states entails a weakening of our capacity to see the world outside of frameworks that are given to us, that are formed and patterned by others. Autonomy, as I conceive it, defines the capacity to see my social world outside of the reified constraints imposed on me; it means viewing these norms as heteronomous insofar as they are organized for purposes that are not my own or which are not beneficial for some common purpose that cultivates my own freedom as well. Furthermore, it means thinking through the ways that these norms and practices enact relations, structures, and purposes that are not instituted for a common, cooperative good. In this way, autonomy can shatter reification and reconcile the individual with the relational and social infrastructure to which it is dialectically related. Even more, I want to suggest that the concept of autonomy needs to be understood as an agent’s capacity for self-understanding within the holistic structure of the social world that she or he inhabits. Put a different way, an autonomous person is not in any way external to the social world but rather inside that world, and as a result, autonomy is the capacity for a kind of self-consciousness that provides access to the ontological shape of the social-relational world of which one is a part. By accessing the totality as an ontological concept, critical agency becomes possible as the reified world is stripped away to reveal the potentiality for transformation and change; it pierces the phenomenal shapes of consciousness and grips the ways that our reality has been directed and shaped by others for their purposes. Autonomy is an achievement of consciousness in that it is a capacity to see self and world as constructs of the social forms of which we are members; autonomy is the self-conscious reclamation of our status as generative, interdependent, self-directing beings. Only in this way can we achieve critical consciousness—that is, a perspective on self and world that promotes the interrogation of the normative and practical structures of social reality that socialize me and that require my cooperation.4 The autonomous subject is not one that reflects on a formal structure of reason but rather one that is aware, self-consciously, of the contours of the

  to the lighthouse ensembles of practices and relations that make up one’s social world. The issue now becomes the capacity to reflect on the world in terms of a new space of reasons, in terms of an expanded form of rationality that possesses metaphysical depth in terms of the properties of social reality—the relations, structures, processes, and purposes that grant us ontological coherence. The central question as I see it is what kind of self qualifies as autonomous? If, as I have been arguing, cybernetic society compromises the basic normative, cognitive, and evaluative capacities for autonomy, how can we retain and cultivate critical reason and democratic civic life? The answer I will pursue here lies in the very concepts of self-consciousness and self-determination that many theorists have utilized but in a deeper and, I think, more coherent way. This kind of self-determination itself requires a particular kind of self-consciousness, a form of social cognition that can only be properly grasped by a kind of rationality that has our social-ontological status in view. Our practical identities can only be construed as autonomous, in this sense, once we are able to achieve selfconsciousness of ourselves as agents within a social-ontological framework of relations, processes, and ends; and these are constituted by the norms and practices that we, as agents, underwrite. Autonomy as critical agency is therefore the rational awareness that the social reality around us is in some basic sense dependent on the joint norms and practices that we collectively enact, that this social reality exists because each one of us actively participates in creating and sustaining it. Autonomy therefore requires the capacity to judge the legitimacy of the social institutions in which I participate; it entails employing a form of reason that can restore to the individual the criteria necessary for democratic engagement and critical consciousness.

Two Views of Autonomy . . . and a Third Before discussing these themes, I want to consider the way my own approach to autonomy differs from two of the most prevalent current approaches. The first holds that our autonomy depends on reflective capacities that enable us to move in a space of formal reasons. This is an internal stance that any subject takes, and it is conceived as taking place

Autonomy as Critical Agency    independent of any external social relations or other causal or constitutive forces. As in Kant’s concept of the categorial imperative, the subject reflects on its own, according to a formal conception of reason. At the center of this approach is the thesis that individuals possess the capacity to reflect rationally on their will and conduct and that it is a matter of universalizability of an ethical proposition that becomes the desideratum for any valid ethical statement or value.5 Ethics, in this sense, as R. M. Hare suggests, “is a logical thesis and not a substantive moral principle.”6 This approach holds that autonomy, the freedom of the individual, can only be understood as an agent’s capacity to endorse and act on ethical principles of action that conform to logical, rational features. This is essentially understood, in Kantian terms, as the universalizability of any ethical proposition or the idea that any rational self-command that I possess has to be understood as conforming my action only to those principles that are universalizable. Hare describes this: When we are trying, in a concrete case, to decide what we ought to do, what we are looking for . . . is an action to which we can commit ourselves (prescriptively) but which we are at the same time prepared to accept as exemplifying a principle of action to be prescribed for others in like circumstances (universalizability). If, when we consider some proposed action, we find that, when universalized, it yields prescriptions which we cannot accept, we reject this action as a solution to our moral problem—if we cannot universalize the prescription, it cannot become an “ought.”7

Hare’s thesis is rooted in the Kantian paradigm that seeks to liberate thought from external authorities and traditions. Kant’s move was to establish the freedom of the person as an autonomous agent by providing the rational form of self-reflection needed to call into question the constitutive power of norms and social institutions. Kant knew that this was an achievement of one’s will, not an automatic procedure of thought. Nevertheless, for Kant to be able to provide such a theory of freedom, it was necessary to separate form and content: failing to do this entailed the danger of the underlying social norms informing the individual’s rationalpractical faculties. As Charles Taylor points out: “Freedom consequently takes on a new meaning, and this entails breaking loose from any external authorities in order to be governed by one’s own reasoning procedures.”8

  to the lighthouse This is a crucial feature of what we can call the monadic approach to autonomy. The basic paradigm is that an individual possesses certain rational capacities to be able to reflect on one’s will to the extent that an act of one’s will is authentically one’s own. As Gerald Dworkin puts the matter: “The full formula for autonomy, then, is authenticity plus procedural independence. A person is autonomous if he identifies with his desires, goals, and values, and such identification is not itself influenced in ways which make the process of identification in some way alien to the individual.”9 This understanding of autonomy itself relies on a concept of the person who can exercise his or her will according to higher-order capacities, can conceive of a free will as one that is, as Harry Frankfurt has argued, effectively governed by a second-order desire. In this respect, the autonomous person is one who is able to self-deliberate within him- or herself in order to decide to act on his or her desires, to have a second-order desire to act on his or her first-order desires.10 But there is a problem that emerges quickly in this approach: how can a theorist who adopts such a framework secure that the second-order desires that govern the first-order desires are not themselves heteronomously constituted? As I demonstrated in chapter 3, the problem with reification is that it is a social constitution of the intentional structures of consciousness. It renders one’s internal, endopsychic world heteronomous by entangling its normative structure with the normative structure of the self, of consciousness itself. To amplify this point, consider the problem this approach to reification poses to the atomist paradigm of autonomy in the context of the cybernetic society. It is one thing to rely on a procedural or formal way to organize ethical reflection where traditional forms of authority hold sway. But once rationalized authority becomes the norm, then universalizability can be co-opted and colonized by collective-intentional norms that have become reified in subjective consciousness. The universalizability criterion now becomes a liability for autonomy once institutional norms rooted in rationalized authority have been able to embed themselves in consciousness. When this occurs, universalizing such norms can escape the net of such a procedure and get refracted back into moral consciousness. All the subject does is universalize and rationalize that which is given, the reality principle itself. I can rationalize social inequality, for instance, by universalizing the concept of “hard work” as a value where the common

Autonomy as Critical Agency    good is served by a “fair” distribution of reward for production. I can legitimize a system of social hierarchies if I see it as preserving social order and engendering a system of punishment and reward that I deem “fair,” and so on. The problem is that the formal character of universalizability lacks any kind of ontological referent to grant it critical weight. Reflective endorsement now has no means of direction, no ground that can provide it with the criteria for validity in any critical sense. The defects of alienated moral cognition and false consciousness and reification that I explored earlier now entail the corruption of the powers of this Kantian procedural and formal approach to autonomy. The Kantian approach to moral consciousness retains its power in the thesis that it is up to the individual to judge, that reasons must be separate from any historically or socially situated form of social norms and practices. But once we consider the power of what I have termed the reification problem, then we have to consider the extent to which the subject’s moral consciousness has been seeded with the norms and values of the social system as a whole, one that deforms and weakens autonomy. Perhaps worse, such a situation can lead to the self’s belief in its own autonomy even as it is merely refracting back within consciousness the predominant values and collective-intentional rule-sets that undergird its social reality. What is needed for a fuller theory of autonomy is a kind of reasoning that will open up for us the background reality that hides the ways that our thinking has been infected by heteronomous and reified concepts and norms—not a formalist or proceduralist form of reason, nor a substantivist or traditionalist conception of value, but an ontological form of reason that allows us to grasp the social dimensions of human value. Thinking about our relationality with others is one step toward a richer conception of reason that we can use to construct a more robust theory of autonomy. The second approach to autonomy that I want to consider here maintains that the self is embedded in social relations and that these relations are fundamental to our capacity to be autonomous. A central concern of relational approaches is that we see agency as embedded in social contexts. The point is that relations play not only a constitutive role in our agency but also a causal role. I may choose to act in a certain way, but if I am unable to because of social blockages to my will—say, because of my subordinate status, or whatever—then my autonomy will

  to the lighthouse merely be abstract and not actual. Social relations can serve to constrain my agency and the practice of that agency, thereby degrading my autonomy. As William James Booth argues from a Marxian perspective against the formalism of the Kantian perspective: “The self of Marxian autonomy is a richer one than that of Kantian moral philosophy: richer in the sense that it is embedded in a world, that it interacts with nature and with other persons; richer also in that it corresponds to the agent that we recognize in the everyday activities of choice that constitute the stuff of moral life, an agent with a formative history, acting within constraints.”11 This opens up for us a relational view of autonomy, where the concept migrates from an internalist, formal, noumenal procedure to an externalist and socially embedded conception of agency. In place of relying on a cognitive procedure to reflect on a universalizable principle, one that is abstract and devoid, as Hare argued, of substantive moral content, Booth suggests that a Marxian approach to autonomy takes into account the substantive, sociorelational world in which one finds oneself ensconced. What is crucial here is the insight that for critical consciousness to emerge, we must be able to grasp the relational, structural, and teleological dynamics of the social ontology that we inhabit. This is because by moving in such a space, we are able to grasp the ways that our social reality is mutable, the ways it can be seen as valid or illegitimate, worthy or unworthy of our deontic commitments. To see our social forms and arrangements as exploitative, as defective, as unequal or demeaning to common needs and goods will serve to construct a ground for critical judgment. To fail to do this is to give sway to internalized norms and values that have been internalized via socialization of the ontic realm we inhabit. Reification remains intact, and the self’s agency remains embedded within the ontic framework of norms and practices of the prevailing reality. The individual is now a relational one, and autonomy now has to take into consideration the relational context in which one finds oneself. As Andrew Sayer explains: “Autonomy should be understood not as complete independence of others but as self-command and capacity for agency within the context of relationships and responsibilities that afford us some support.”12 Autonomy is now construed as “self-command,” or the capacity to direct one’s will and actions, but in accordance with the relations and attendant responsibilities of said relations: “Responsibilities both tie us to

Autonomy as Critical Agency    others and require us to exercise our capacity for self-command, albeit in a way which takes account of others.”13 In this sense, the relational view of autonomy sees our relations with others as constitutive of the self. Put another way, our relations with others are construed as dependence. For Sayer, this should not be construed as heteronomous: “Dependence can be good or bad, empowering and supportive or disempowering. Liberal individualism tends only to note the latter, and hence views dependence one-sidedly as heteronomy. Autonomy and relationality are dialectically related—in some ways complementary and interdependent, in others in opposition.”14 Sayer points to an important advance in our conceptions of autonomy—namely, that it needs to absorb the inherent and constitutive relationality in which each of us finds ourselves. Granting this, there is still the danger that we will proceed too far toward what Dennis Wrong saw as the oversocialized concept of the person—namely, that if we are so thoroughly determined by our relations, then what is the space for individual reflection? What is the space for autonomy? Relational accounts of autonomy provide us with a context for how the self is constituted, but it also is a problematic account to the extent that it can become unable to resist the pressures of either reification or relativism, or both. The relational view is powerful in its position that the agent is constituted by relations and that these relations are constitutive of the self. But it does not follow that this can lead us to a normative path toward autonomy as a critical status of agency. Take what seems to be a perfectly defensible and humane theory of autonomy by Beate Rössler: In principle, a person is autonomous if she reflects upon how she wishes to live, upon the person she wants to be, and then both lives and is allowed to live in that self-chosen way, such that she as an individual is able authentically to identify with her own goals and projects, as well as being actually able to pursue them; if, generally speaking, she lives in conditions that make it possible for her to learn and to accustom herself to being autonomous, and to develop the structures of desire and need proper to an autonomous individuality.15

The criterion of authenticity is what defines this view—authenticity in the sense that the individual is seen as able to “identify” with her choices and able to “pursue” or to act on those choices—that is, that she is not blocked by social conditions from acting. But Rössler extends this argument by

  to the lighthouse including an element of individuality when she writes that “it is precisely the rich reflection upon one’s own situation and the quest for authentic needs, desires, convictions, and goals that could help to liberate one from manipulative relationships. For of course, projects can fail and relationships break down: and then the mark of autonomy is a person’s ability to free herself from her attachment to them.”16 The relational account of autonomy sees that the concept of selfdetermination requires external relations that can give support, or “scaffolding,” to the subject’s powers of agency. Catriona Mackenzie, for instance, argues that for a person to have authority over her life, she “must have a conception of herself as the legitimate source of that authority; as able and authorized to speak for herself.”17 Relations with others need be able to provide the attitudes requisite for such a self-relation—namely, “self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem.”18 We can now see that the relational approach meshes with the Marxian approach elaborated by Booth in that social relations are constitutive of self-relations; autonomy is a function of the sociorelational context that has developmental powers over selfdevelopment and agency. The materialist layer of this thesis harks back to Aristotle’s concept of autarky, or “self-sufficiency,” which holds that one’s self-sufficiency can only be obtained via the thick relations we have with others within a political community. A first move is to see that it is in the nature of our reasoning that this problem emerges as well as what the source of rationality or legitimacy for the reasons we employ actually is. Without a doubt, it is the individual who thinks and reflects, even if that thinking and reflecting depends on certain social-relational interdependencies with others. To be autonomous does not need to negate our interdependence and sociality; it needs to incorporate it into the very structures of the reasons that should count in any practical reflection. What I mean by this is that we need more than to say that autonomy needs to take others and the relations we have with others into account. Andrea Westlund makes a move toward this kind of synthesis: “Autonomy as self-responsibility makes room for—and in fact demands—attention to caring relations in which the capacity for autonomy is developed and sustained. Moreover, the account highlights an important aspect of what it is to be socially embedded: our identities and commitments are not inflexibly determined by our social positioning,

Autonomy as Critical Agency    but are instead worked out on an ongoing basis in dialogue with real or imagined others.”19 But there are still lingering worries here. How are we to ensure that there is any sense of authenticity to our decisions? What is the criteria that can establish authenticity? As I argued in earlier chapters, one consequence of the internalization of the norms and values that underpin relations and practices of modern domination is its tendency to become reified within the subjective field of the self. Authenticity needs to be replaced by a theory of self-consciousness that is able to reflect on the relational configurations within which one is ensconced, to possess self-awareness of the ways that the relations of these configurations are organized and what ends or purposes they are supposed to achieve. Autonomy is this capacity to ask what role one plays in the cooperative forms of life one lives and whether these forms of life are worthy of their own allegiance. This is a first step toward a genuine theory of autonomy. If we cannot establish this, then how can we know where the limits between our socialized self and authentic self begin and end? Freeing oneself from oppressive or otherwise demeaning relations is certainly an act of agency and self-determination. But escape from such relations need not, in and of itself, qualify as an authentic decision. What traps people in their heteronomy is the fact that they are unable to peer into the ways that their own social being is distorted by pathological social schemes—by forms of power that are entwined with the relations and background practices that constitute our world. It is true, as Westlund notes, that our identities and commitments are “not inflexibly determined by our social positioning,” but it does not follow that our self-consciousness will not generally track the reified regime of norms and practices that our social world makes ambient. The crucial question is, What are the criteria for judgment? How are we to pry open and explode the reified web of norms that ensconce us? What is needed is some criterion for what kind of reasons an autonomous person can use that qualify him or her as autonomous, as self-determined within a social-relational context. Although these approaches tell us much about the social goods and relations needed for developing autonomy, it still leaves open what autonomy actually is. I think both the Marxian and feminist accounts of relational autonomy give us insight into a more elaborate theory of autarky, not a genuine understanding of what kind of thinking, what kind

  to the lighthouse of reasoning allows one to achieve the status of autonomy within a relational social ontology. What I mean by this is that there seems to be a deep tension in any account that maintains both our strong relationality with others and an independent capacity for self-reflection. It is as if there is a dualism between the external and internal worlds. Even if we admit that there are external factors to the development and nourishing of autonomy, it still does not really tell us what autonomy is; it merely describes the kinds of attitudes and capacities an autonomous agent should possess. Reliance on authentic desires and choices is insufficiently developed in these accounts since there is no sense of what it actually is and, as I have emphasized, how we can be sure it has not itself been constituted by external, systemic norms and values. If we are so dependent on our relations, if they are as constitutive as these theories tend to propose, then where is the space for authenticity? What counts as an authentically determined desire or choice? How can we know when we are moving in a space of autonomy and not a reified space of false desires and interests? Relational theories of autonomy are attractive for their emphasis on relations to provide the self with a sense of self-esteem that serves as the foundation for self-determination. But there are serious problems that can render this account uncritical, particularly given the ways that the cybernetic society shapes self and society. The truth is that even the relational approach to autonomy is prone to the infiltration of reification and, hence, social domination just as the formalist approach is. One core reason for this is that self-esteem and self-respect are relative terms, achievable within defective as well as healthy social contexts. One can achieve a sense of selfrespect, recognition, or self-esteem from being a part of almost any kind of group or organization: a cult, a corporation, a militia. Cybernetic society has the capacity to control social patterns of production and consumption, for example, by circumscribing different predefined roles or activities that can grant one self-esteem and recognition. More simply put, one’s subjective sense of self-esteem and self-respect can be bolstered by relations without consideration of the objective value systems that organize those relations. The illusion of autonomy, or the narrowly subjective sense of one’s own self-command, is generally stronger than the objective reality of whether one is capable of thinking and acting in any genuinely autonomous way. As I argued in the previous chapter, cybernetic society, and the

Autonomy as Critical Agency    kinds of hierarchy that it fosters, produces a kind of self that is unstable and that seeks out false forms of autonomy in order to obtain the feelings of self-worth and self-respect that earlier stages of moral and personal development failed to grant.20 Here is where the formalist approach, rooted in Kant’s practical philosophy and which attempts to map an internalist account of what qualifies to govern an autonomous person and her or his will, comes back into the picture: there must be a space within one’s subjectivity for criticalrational reflection, an internal capacity that can mediate the relational contexts that enmesh us. At the same time, the relational approach asks us to consider the ways that our relations with others are somehow essential, but they still rely on a concept of authenticity that is itself fuzzy and overly subjectivist. My position is that the self’s capacity for genuine autonomy can be achieved by expanding its reflective horizon. By this I mean that one’s self-understanding be tied not to some formalistic procedure or some vague sense of “authenticity” but rather to a sense of whether the webs of norms and practices that constitute our social world are legitimate—as Rousseau would have maintained, that they serve common goods and purposes. The “good” in this sense is not rooted in my particularism, nor is it held accountable to a formal procedure that secures its legitimacy. What is rational, on this account, is a feature of the ontology of our social world—of the kinds of norms, practices, relations, processes, and ends that shape it. The core problem to overcome is therefore this: to formulate a conception of autonomy that is able to preserve an authentic nature of self-reflection, as well as the social-relational perspective to ground any kind of deontological commitments to ends that can be considered rational. Authenticity, considered in this way, does not refer to some inner conviction of sense of meaning but rather the space for self-reflection that is used to inquire into the shared norms and practices that are cooperatively sustained. The essence of autonomy as critical agency therefore means not merely being able to give reasons for why one believes or commits to what one does; rather, it is the capacity to give reasons that themselves are rational according to the criteria of what I will call ontological coherence—that is, the extent to which they can be seen as justifying practices, norms, relations, institutions, and purposes that are freedom-enhancing for our cooperative,

  to the lighthouse world-constituting practices. To be truly autonomous, one needs to be able to think as a relational being, to be able to be critical of the practices and institutions that deform the common goods and abuse our social bonds. Autonomy as critical agency thinks in terms not of formalism or proceduralism but in terms of social-ontological reasons—that is, reasons that grip the actual norms, relations, practices, and purposes according to which our social world is constructed. We can achieve self-consciousness of our autonomy as critical agents once we are able to see ourselves as the generative font for social reality, once we grasp ourselves as practical-relational beings and the idea that the purposes and ends of our relations and practices (of our social world more generally) should be subject to our collective determination and serve common, human ends; then we are moving in a space of autonomy, a space that explodes reification and its heteronomous effects on consciousness. But before proceeding further, I want to consider Cornelius Castoriadis’s connection between autonomy and ontology: “Autonomy is not closure but, rather, opening: ontological opening, the possibility of going beyond the informational, cognitive and organizational closure characteristic of self-constituting, but heteronomous beings. It is ontological opening, since to go beyond this closure signifies altering the already existing cognitive and organizational ‘system,’ therefore constituting one’s world and one’s self according to other laws, therefore creating a new ontological eidos, another self in another world.”21 Castoriadis rightly emphasizes the need for “ontological opening” as the key to autonomy. The heteronomous person moves not in a world that is ontological but rather one that is ontic—there is a foreclosure of mutative change; such a person sees the world as one-dimensional, as mere appearance dictated by the prevailing social logic. It appears as inert, as given, as second nature. Within such a context there is no possibility for autonomy since the cybernetic cohesiveness of the social totality saturates self and world; there is no space for the self’s freely constructive potential. Autonomous individuality regresses, and the individual now confronts the world as an array of forces and structures set over and against it. Self-determination therefore becomes impossible as false, defective ideas of personal expression and freedom that emphasize independence over interdependence take hold. Autonomous agents, by contrast, achieve that status only

Autonomy as Critical Agency    by understanding themselves as ontological beings where their being is a product of the norms, relations, practices, and purposes of the collective world they inhabit. Autonomy emerges within the expanded horizon of the ontological because only there can the substance of judgment, critique, and transformation be found; only by interrogating already-existing social forms and their purposes, by asking how a new world would be better, can autonomy come into being via a new perspective on the dynamics of our social being. This ontology also forms the framework for judgment in that any deontic commitment (or, by contrast, any act of dissent) we make must have criteria that qualify it as rational such that a critical, autonomous agent would accept it as valid. By rational I mean the extent to which it refers to social-relational structures and the ends or purposes toward which an institution or social form are organized. But this kind of rationality can only be achieved by an autonomous agent—that is, by one who has been able to reflect on the patterns of relations and cooperative practices and the kinds of power that characterize them. If we accept the thesis of reification and normative entanglement that I laid out earlier, then the authenticity condition that underwrites so much of contemporary philosophical reflection on autonomy cannot be secured. Indeed, it is an invitation to merely reproduce heteronomous norms and practices since it is most likely that the thought processes of such agents are reified and will largely be shaped by the limiting logics of external system norms. Rather, autonomy as critical agency must be conceived as a capacity to decenter one’s view of the world and to articulate reasons that embrace our socialrelational, cooperative ontology. Autonomy is achieved once reflection is able to see through the veil of norms, values, and practices to the ontological totality of the social schemes that one inhabits. Once the second nature of my social world shatters, the ontic is ontologized: I begin to perceive how the world is open and malleable, rooted in practices and norms that I, in coordination with others, shape and articulate. Even more, autonomous agency must call into question the existing structures and systems of meaning that underpin the ontic realm. Free, autonomous, critical agency inquires into the rational validity of the forms of life it inhabits, its institutions, culture, norms, and values. For autonomy to exist in the cybernetic society, it must therefore reject

  to the lighthouse the structures of meaning that form its hermeneutic lifeworld, existing as background conditions for self-understanding and judgment. As Adorno puts the matter: “Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”22 Instead, autonomy must move within the ontological horizon of human social being. The deeper question becomes, How am I to judge these social forms; how is autonomy to become critical agency? The autonomous person achieves such a status once she or her thinks in these ontological terms rather than through any solipsistic and “authentic” terms. In this way, subjective reflection maintains a dialectical connectivity to objective, social context but nevertheless retains its capacity to mediate and reflect on that context. What plagues contemporary ideas about autonomy is the emphasis on the criterion of authenticity. After rejecting the self-legislation model and accepting the relational model, we are still left with a sense that to be autonomous, I must have some reference to myself, to some sense of who I am, and a layer of subjective values that are mine. Take the description by John Christman, who argues that a “person is autonomous relative to her basic, orienting values and motivations, or indeed any factor about the person that pervasively and fundamentally motivates and guides action. That is, the fundamental structure of normative commitments and pattern of judgment is what must be ‘one’s own’ in order for the person to be autonomous in the sense that matters here.”23 The problem here is that social norms and practices are constitutive of the very faculties of selfconsciousness that the self would use as their basic orienting values. Put another way, heteronomy and autonomy are folded into one another: if the social forms of which I am a part have successfully socialized me, then they become my basic orienting values and normative commitments. This means they structure the criteria for the patterns of judgment I will employ, which itself entails that they are not “mine” in any authentic sense; rather, they are norms and patterns of judgment that I have internalized and are therefore heteronomous. What looks at first to be an instance of autonomy is quickly revealed as heteronomy via the reification of normative consciousness. Solving this problem will, I think, provide us with a more critical way of thinking about autonomy and critical agency. For one thing, it will allow the subject to overcome the problem of immediacy that was

Autonomy as Critical Agency    posed by the pre-Enlightenment challenge of the subject’s enmeshment in traditional norms and value orientations. This was the motivation for Kant’s formal theory of autonomy from the beginning: to transcend the substantive content of the moral norms and values that were constitutive of the subject. This will provide the theory with the condition of authenticity requisite for a robust sense of individuality. At the same time, the relational approach to autonomy shows that we need to understand how our social relations constitute our own sense of self. From this perspective, we can overcome the problem of abstraction or incoherence once we grasp ourselves as interdependent on others in such a way that the quality of our own individuality is a function of the qualities and constitutive features of the shapes that our sociality takes. This thesis provides us with an ontological ground, which is needed to prevent autonomy from slipping into an abstract form of subjectivity, one unable to track the effects of reification on consciousness. Indeed, these two approaches must be brought together: on the one hand, an Aristotelian externalism, with its emphasis on the relational factors that provide the objective sociorelational context for the individual, and a Kantian internalism that grants the subject a critical space of selfreflecting, self-determining mediation that provides the needed internal space for rational agency and the ability to repel the forces of reification on consciousness. Recall that in Weber’s account, an “authentic modernity” was one where individuals possessed the capacity to reflect on the external social world according to a noumenal conception of value. But as I have shown, the problem here is that there is no way to secure that these values will not be already determined or circumscribed by systems of value and power that are embedded within social systems. Instead, what I am proposing is that we see autonomy as the capacity to apprehend human value, our ethical concepts, as an ontological category—that is, to see value not as noumenal and abstract but as referring to what is constitutive of structured practices and norms that can (or do) exist in the world as objective, ontological social facts. Value, like meaning, cannot be constructed alone; it entails a way of living in relation with others and according to projects that have some sense of social weight. To be autonomous is to possess the capacity to question the extent to which the regimes of practices, relations, and ends, what we can understand as the general social ontology of the form

  to the lighthouse of sociality in which one is ensconced, exhibit either freedom-enhancing features (such as relations, processes, and purposes that have been subject to critical scrutiny) or freedom-attenuating features of life. And this means questioning the deeper ontological purposes, relations, and processes that the social world I inhabit realizes. Such a form of reflection begins the process of reappropriating the world as a product of our collective creation rather than as a distinct reality separate and alienated from us. To be autonomous is to be able to grasp one’s relation to the world as mediated by these norms and practices and to be cognizant of their normative validity; it entails being able to have them as the objects of one’s self-reflection and to see that their validity rests on the extent to which they serve general, common ends, purposes, and interests. To fail in this is not only to fail in autonomy per se; it is to fail in becoming a free, rational person: it means deforming into the false ontology of particularity that reproduces our alienation from the social world of which we are an integral part. Autonomy on this view entails a broader collective consciousness; it has the capacity to effect a transformation in the collective ethical life of the community, rendering it more freedom-enhancing by uniting the individual with the ensemble of social relations. From such a perspective, autonomy enables me to make judgments about the relative good of the world I inhabit, the ends I can articulate, and the relations that affect me; it enables immanent critique to explode the force of reification. But here we run back into the core problem for any rationalist approach to autonomy: how can I validate the norms, values, and principles that I hold and that orient my practices with others? My argument is that we can only achieve rational validity to the extent that we take into account the various ways that these norms, values, and principles exhibit legitimate relational structures, practices, and purposes—legitimate to the extent that they serve common and individual goods, that any enrichment or emancipation of the self is functionally dependent on interdependent social-relational forms of life that have common goods as their purpose and end. Put another way: they do not articulate forms of domination, control, exploitation, or extraction. These categories are not arbitrary ethical concepts. Rather, they describe defects in any rationally constructed form of social association or cooperation; put simply, they describe pathologies in what could otherwise be a robust, freedom-enhancing form of social

Autonomy as Critical Agency    reality. Autonomy is a difficult status to achieve because these very relations, practices, and purposes tend to be reified in consciousness, and to the extent that we have false consciousness of our social world, we will also be prone not to see them. This is why autonomy as critical agency is necessary, for it requires that we think about our sociality in terms of the kinds of commitments we have and whether they warrant our obligations.

Deontic Commitment and the Metaphysical Structure of Reason The model of autonomy that I propose here relies on a specific way of understanding human sociality and the self-consciousness of the social basis of our existence. A root idea here is that autonomy be conceived as critical agency—that is, as a form of self-conscious activity constituted by an awareness of the ways that we sanction and grant legitimacy to forms of social reality. To possess critical agency means to see oneself as constitutive of the social forms that one inhabits and to understand that these social forms—that is, the institutions and schemata of life that constitute our social existence—should themselves achieve rationality if they are to warrant our obligation and participation. Autonomy as critical agency means that the individual’s capacity for reflection is directly connected to his or her sense of commitment or obligation. The self, as opposed to a mere subject, has self-consciousness of its practical relation to the world, not merely a cognitive reflection of the world.24 To live as an autonomous person is not simply to have a specified self-relation; more important, it rests on the capacity to be in possession of a specific self-determination and self-relation that accords with our ontology as interdependent members of a community—an ontology that can be masked and concealed from our awareness via the reification of consciousness. Autonomy is the requisite feature of critical consciousness and the will that allows the individual to either dissent from defective social schemes or to endorse just, freedom-enhancing ones. The criteria for this kind of self-governing is itself dependent on the kind of self-consciousness that we possess. Self-consciousness, in the sense that I am elaborating on it here, is consciousness that needs to take place within a refracted relation of self and world; it must be understood

  to the lighthouse not as an independent object relating to an outer world but rather as a self that seeks clarity about the practical, relational, and purposeful dimensions of the life that one lives among others.25 The ideas we employ about who we are, the foundational reflective powers of the autonomous agent, must therefore be cast in terms of a social ontology that is able to hold in view the relational, practical, and teleological basis of the self as a social being. Only then will self-determination take on a more critical register, for it will be capable of utilizing reasons that have social-ontological ballast: in other words, it will be able to grasp the ontological structure of our practices and the relations and purposes toward which they are organized. Reason construed pragmatically cannot get us to this level of rationality, for it merely asks us to rely on the consensus of those involved in practical discourse. The danger returns of the reifying powers of social domination and their effects on self-reflection and self-consciousness since the pragmatist cannot guard against the ways that socialization shapes the norms within which we process our world and, by extension, infiltrate the noumenal structures of consciousness. With this in view, we can now see that a shift in our self-understanding entails a potential shift in the nature of our self-determination. Any rational, self-reflecting person needs to be able to work within a context of reasons that have one’s objective, social-ontological framework at her or his core in order for rational agency to be achieved. In other words, only once we’ve been able to grasp the totality of the social forms inherent in our norms and practices are we able to reflect on our deontic commitment to those social forms. Critical agency is the essence of rational autonomy because without it, the self can never sufficiently ward off the heteronomous powers of reification. Simply stated: individuals achieve the status of autonomy when their self-conscious agency renders them capable of critically interrogating the norms, relations, institutions, and purposes of the society in which they live. At the core of the structure of human agency is not merely the capacity to act but the capacity to generate purposes, ends toward which our practices and projects are organized. When these ends and purposes are imposed on us, or when we can only articulate them from within a constrained horizon of possibilities, our autonomy as critical agents is weakened and made sterile. The criteria rendering these features of our social ontology rational and legitimate are not some a priori list of features

Autonomy as Critical Agency    generated by pure reason, nor are they dependent on any substantivist, comprehensive moral doctrine. They are rooted in the features of social ontology that optimize social freedom—that is, by features of interdependent sociality oriented toward common interests and equal relations. These are not categories that spring from some “reflective equilibrium” or some other formal principle but are rooted in the practical and relational forms of life distinctive to human existence. This should not be construed as meaning that the individual is dissolved into some social essence. Autonomy still rests on the individual’s inherent reflective powers. Indeed, as Hare suggests, “What we are doing in moral reasoning is to look for moral judgments and moral principles which, when we have considered their logical consequences and the facts of the case, we can still accept.”26 The real question is, What kinds of reasons are we using to make these judgments? Put differently, what kind of reasons does an autonomous person employ to secure her or his autonomy? Taking this as a starting point, I would like to suggest that this constitutes a crucial dimension of what autonomy as critical agency means: specifically, the capacity to use reasons to provide justifications for the deontic commitments we make in the world. But now we have to inquire into what kind of reasons will qualify for such a purpose? My view is that reasons, in order to qualify as rational for any kind of coherent theory of practical reason, must be seen as having a metaphysical structure. That is to say, they must be seen as rooted in claims about the objective structure of the world and what promotes the actualization of those objective structures. Our normative reasons must be grounded in social-ontological categories that take into account the relational and teleological implications of a norm or practice since these are the building blocks of more complex social forms and systems. As critical agency, autonomy requires an understanding of our world as inherently practical, relational, and teleological because only then will we be able to articulate valid reasons and deontic commitments to them. Only then will we be able to grasp the ways that the reasons we employ are sufficiently grasping the social totality in which they are embedded. Let me explain this further. To say that our practical reason should be rooted in social-ontological categories means that we must open a space for critical thought to explore the relative rationality of the forms of life

  to the lighthouse that we inhabit. I call this the metaphysical structure of reason because it entails that for a reason to be rational for practical affairs, it must be able to have in view the ways that objective social-relational structures and processes are captured. As I see it, if all social reality is essentially practical, and all social practices are essentially relational, then all social forms can be interrogated on this basis. A social practice is learned socially and performed either jointly with others or individually. Each social practice also is performed for some purpose, some end; it is teleological. But what does a rational versus a nonrational practice look like? What criteria can we use to make such a judgment? I believe that rationality in this sense is to be understood not as what is reasonable or what passes some procedural process of consensus. Rather, it refers to the autonomous capacity of the individual to be able to think through the ways that the social world he or she inhabits promotes objective features of a rational life—namely, that of freedom as the common interest of our self-development. The real question is therefore the extent to which our reasons properly grasp the metaphysical shapes of our social reality without being confined to immediate experience, formalistic principles, or whatever. These are not abstract principles but objective, ontological categories that can be used as a means for critically assessing the ontic world in which one lives. If we accept the thesis that our species is inherently relational, practical, and teleological—that is, that we exist as beings who essentially relate to others via practices of joint activity for purposes and ends—it follows that all forms of social reality are themselves congealed forms of relations, practices, and purposes. If this is the case, then these congealed social forms constitute objective schemes of sociality that can be assessed according to the organizational pattern that constitutes them. Autonomy as critical agency places the burden on the person to make decisions that concern his or her deontic commitments. The only way to do this in a way that can explode the forms of alienation, false consciousness, and reification that I have argued diminish the self’s agentic capacities is to employ a form of reason that can grasp the totality of the social forms that one inhabits—in other words, by having in view the ontological structure that they take (e.g., the relevant relations, practices, and ends that constitute them) and asking whether this warrants their deontic commitment,

Autonomy as Critical Agency    whether it qualifies as promoting an interdependent form of individual and social freedom. Social rationality pertains not to the mere consensus of reasonable social participants; it needs to be understood as a feature of our social practices, structures, and purposes. Irrational social forms are those that have destructive ends or purposes, unequal and subordinating or exploiting social relations, and evince social processes that do not have common goods in view but rather particular projects in their stead. Since I am trying to defend the idea of autonomy as critical agency, I maintain that it is only within these socio-ontological categories that a genuine concept of autonomy can emerge, one that can provide the self with the means for true self-command and social critique. This is because the essential component of autonomy, authenticity, needs to be seen as a status that any agent achieves by being nonmanipulated in the deepest sense. Authenticity in this respect entails that our political and moral decisions are made against a backdrop of what is objectively in the interest of the individual as a social-relational being. Anyone who construes her or his individuality as independent of others or as having rights or powers that entail the dependence of others insists on a defective and potentially heteronomous form of social reality. The reason for this, as I have been laboring to show, is that theories of autonomy and personhood that rely on postmetaphysical and nonontological categories face the danger of falling prey to the strong pressures exhibited by the dense network of rationalized norms that socialize our sense of self and world. Since the forms of life that constitute the prevailing social reality, or what we can refer to as the ontic realm of the given, have the power to shape our reasons and act constitutively on our intentional states of consciousness, gaining some critical-reflexive competence is needed to allow the self not merely to fall into the trap of reified autonomy, where one believes oneself to be free and possessing of self-command despite moving in a heteronomous sphere of values, norms, and reasons. The reason critical agency is needed for a conception of autonomy is that it is fundamentally related to questions of obligation, commitment, and dissent. Deontic commitments are relations of the self to social practices, institutions, and projects that one can verify as part of a robust conception of freedom—a freedom that is emergent in the relations, practices, and purposes of the associational forms of life that require my

  to the lighthouse compliance and joint participation. This kind of freedom is to be grasped neither substantively nor formalistically—in other words, not according to conventions and habits we already have adopted or what some tradition hands down to us, nor from some procedure of agreement alone. Rather, my thesis here is that we can utilize social-ontological categories that allow us to mediate our relation to our social contexts and practices (hence the need for ontological coherence) and to evaluate the shapes that our sociality takes. Among these are nondominating, nonextractive relations, common purposes or ends, and the capacities for self-determination. These features relate to the actual ways that our social world can be articulated. Since we all live our lives relationally with others, act cooperatively toward certain ends and purposes, and either legitimize those forms of life critically or passively accept them, we can say autonomy as critical agency is the capacity to evaluate these social-ontological features of our reality. Autonomy is related to deontic commitment in the sense that it mediates the ways that an individual chooses to participate in, legitimize, or help to enact a broader social structure. Although theorists of relational autonomy are quite correct to maintain the importance of the requirements for attaining the competence for autonomy, such as categories like self-governance, self-authorization, and self-determination, these lose their force unless they are able to operate within a space of reasons that provides the person with the requisite forms of rationality that can secure a truly autonomous deontic commitment. My point here is that a person can be seen to possess features of relational autonomy and still not achieve the status of autonomy as critical agency that I am insisting is essential for any valid expression of autonomous personhood. In general, these categories derived for the relational autonomy literature fail to capture the reasons that ought to motivate one’s agency or will. Instead, they seek to describe properties of certain capacities that an autonomous person should possess. In so doing, they inadvertently end up desocializing the subject. In her excellent discussion of these three features or “dimensions” of autonomy, Catriona Mackenzie argues: Self-determination involves having the freedom and opportunities to make and enact choices of practical import to one’s life, that is, choices about what to value, who to be, and what to do. . . . Self-governance involves having the skills and capacities necessary to make choices and enact decisions that express, or

Autonomy as Critical Agency    cohere with, one’s reflectively constituted diachronic practical identity. . . . Selfauthorization involves regarding oneself as having the normative authority to be self-determining and self-governing. In other words, it involves regarding oneself as authorized to exercise practical control over one’s life, to determine one’s own reasons for action, and to define one’s values and identity-shaping practical commitments.27

Each of these three dimensions of autonomy are insufficiently theorized. Most important, they do not overcome the reification problem. Once the self has been to any sufficient extent subsumed by rationalized institutions and their attendant norms and practices, these categories would simply operate within such a reified frame. There is no sense that these dimensions of autonomy would provide the subject with the capacity to dereify and achieve a critically mediated position with respect to her or his social world. As a result, we would fall into a condition of reified particularity— a status where one believes one is acting according to her or his interests via forms of self-authorization and self-command but is nevertheless operating within a heteronomous framework that is functionally systemic and into which she or he has been successfully socialized. Outside of direct external, heteronomous control, which would clearly vitiate these dimensions of autonomy, there is no sense that they can hold up to the problem of reified selfhood. In sum, these three dimensions can still operate within a framework where the constitutive power of the norms and practices of ontic social forms have been able to shape conscious self-reflection. The ontic differs from the ontological, in my sense, in that the latter allows us to grasp the potential ways that our social reality can be rearranged and reorganized. The ontic does not present itself to us as changeable, as an object of transformation; it merely exists and is the reified whole of our social reality. The problem I am raising here is that what passes for autonomy in this sense can merely reproduce accepted norms and values that are generated by the reified norms of the community itself. Reification, in this sense, affects the capacity for authenticity because it is able to reshape the normative structures of consciousness to the extent that the subject’s intentional mental states are stamped, or in some basic sense organized, by external normative institutional frameworks. In this way, subjects may be unaware of the ways that reification has penetrated their own sense of self and agency; they may be unaware of the ways that their own “authentic”

  to the lighthouse desires and decisions have in fact been manipulated ab initio. For autonomy as critical agency to be achieved, we must be able to comprehend the ways that the reasons we employ about the world and our place in it are mediated by the metaphysics of our social world—how the collective forms of life in which we participate, and that shape our world, are legitimized and the norms, relations, practices, and purposes that constitute them. I emphasize this approach because autonomy requires a capacity to stave off the heteronomous powers of social domination seen as the capacity to shape norms, practices, and ends that individuals come to absorb as legitimate, thereby forming aspects of their agency. Recall that constitutive power is the capacity of institutionalized social forms to shape the collective-intentional rule-sets that become the background conditions for consciousness and social practices. The space for authentic agency—that is, nonmanipulated forms of reflection and self-determination—is possible only to the extent that one can create a cognitive space of mediation between the givenness of these rule-sets and the objective validity or rationality they possess or do not possess. Autonomy, when seen as in tension with heteronomy, entails the capacity to mediate the values, norms, and concepts we utilize for action and belief to see how they may engender internalized patterns of relational power. Put another way, we can speak of autonomy in the fullest sense of the term when we are able to think through the ontological processes of our social reality and judge them as worthy either of our obligations or of our nonobligation or dissent. What is required is a form of reasoning that is able to account for the objectivity of the reasons we employ for self-determination and selfgoverning. If we even conditionally accept the thesis that our social ontology entails an embedding in some of its norms, then there must be a way for us to mediate the power of “the given,” of the ontic forms of life that circumscribe our self-reflection and self-consciousness. The core issue here is what kind of reasons count as autonomous reasons, or, what kind of reasons can we say are genuinely those that are non- or antiheteronomous. This means giving reasons that support our deontic commitments to the social practices, norms, and institutions that organize our lives. But here we can see that this will itself require an account of why those social practices, norms, and institutions themselves qualify as rational and worthy of

Autonomy as Critical Agency    our obligations. Here autonomy makes a move out of the merely relational mode and becomes what we can call expanded autonomy—a kind of selfconsciousness and self-determination that allows the subject to cognize the kinds of relations, practices, and purposes that would enhance the common goods needed for self-development. Only this allows for an authentic crucible for the perspective of autonomy. We can now see why I am pressing the thesis that autonomy as critical agency must be understood as the achieved status attainable by employing a certain kind of reason. It is not merely the employment of reason that is at issue but the very structure of reasons that are used that account for our status as autonomous, critical agents. One reason for this is that, as I have been laboring to show, noumenal and procedural approaches to reason and reflection lack the capacity to stave off heteronomous forms of value and collective-intentional norms that give shape and structure to our cognition. The “reification problem,” as I have denoted this complex phenomenon, is capable of perverting autonomy through the creation of norms and value orientations that shape the self. The individual’s capacity for reason therefore operates within a space of reasons that is embedded in the web of norms that can be colonized by the imperatives of social domination. The internalist thesis is simply incapable of grasping the extent to which our social context and the forms of power that constitute it are also deeply constitutive of consciousness.

The Ontology of Value and Ontological Coherence The above discussion requires that we explore in more depth the thesis that individuals are essentially social and the ways that the values they possess articulate concrete forms of social life. Values serve as the background normative and evaluative concepts that shape not only our deontic commitments but also our cognitive and affective modes of consciousness. As such, they provide orientations for thought and action. Given this description, we may be lulled into thinking that values are noumenal categories of reflection that serve to mediate reflective consciousness, as neo-Kantians and their contemporary heirs maintain. But my thesis here is that this is mistaken. Instead, we should look at value as ontological or as possessing objective social implications. To say that value

  to the lighthouse is ontological means that it is a normative posture that orients one’s practices and intentions; it is constitutive of both our evaluative reflection and our concrete practices. Values can be more or less abstract in terms of the extent to which they are maintained by others, but they always shape our relational and practical lives and, as such, affect our concrete social reality. As Andrew Sayer has pointed out: “It is in the context of capability, vulnerability and precarious well-being or flourishing, and our tendency to form attachments and commitments, that both values and reason in everyday life need to be understood.”28 A value is ontological because it is not primarily a transcendent category of evaluation, nor is it merely bound to the sphere of consciousness; rather, it contributes to a concrete reality that is enacted through practices and relations. The thesis that values are ontological means that values are orientations for norms and practices that are coordinated in relation with others to produce the texture of social reality. An autonomous person must be able to understand that the values that we hold are taken up from the social background in some sense. Values are, in this sense, primary to our conceptual and practical capacities. This must therefore entail the capacity to call the values we hold into question but also to see that what we experience as our static social reality is really the expression of values that we as members of a social group maintain and use to orient and direct our actions and intentions as subjects. For this kind of critical self-reflection to be possible, one must embrace a different understanding of reason, one in which value is seen as underpinning our normative reasons, as well as the social reality that we inhabit. To call these values into question therefore requires us to take a stance toward the world that asks about our allegiance to that reality, to question whether the social forms I inhabit are rational and, on that basis, whether they warrant my obligation or my dissent. Once we see that ethical reasons concern the ontology of human relatedness and praxis, we can see that autonomy requires the self’s capacity to reflect on the individual’s own agency as a relational being, as one who must think as part of an interdependent totality. The expanded self is the “I” that understands itself, as Hegel once articulated it, as a “we”: it is a form of self-consciousness that grasps the social-relational and practical essence that serves as the infrastructure for all forms of social reality. Ontology, in this sense, refers to this very infrastructure and the ways that

Autonomy as Critical Agency    it depends on the acceptance on the part of each member of a given institution or social scheme of collective norms and practices. But the acceptance of these norms can be the result of manipulation, passive socialization, or some form of oppression. Autonomy is only truly achieved when coherence about the essential features of the social world in which I participate has been attained. The I and the we only become rational, or constitutive of a free life, once they are cleansed of the heteronomous values and logics of social schemes that do not have common interests and goods at their core; only once the self is able to reappropriate the world as a generated reality of our collective practices can we begin to move in a space of autonomy and hold up to scrutiny the norms and practices that undergird that reality. But to get to that point, we need to be able to grasp the systemic totality of the social institutions of which we are a part. We need to be able to gauge their rationality, to judge their efficacy in promoting and realizing the self-determination and self-development of its members. To do this, we will need to be able to gain what I call ontological coherence—a cognitive grasp of the relations, practices, and ends of the social institutions that involve or affect me. Now, as I have been arguing, if we see value as ontological, we can break its constituent parts down into three essential dimensions: relations, practices, and purposes. This means that any value that I hold is, in some basic respect, an orientation toward how these three dimensions of social reality are to be organized. If one values friendship, for instance, we can say that the ontology of that value consists in the ways that the relation between friends is structured, what practices enact that friendship, and what purposes the friendship serves. We can evaluate any friendship based on the extent to which these three dimensions are rationally organized: in other words, to the extent that the relation is nonsubordinating or nondominating; the extent to which the practices that enact the friendship are interdependent rather than fostering dependence or a lack of selfdetermination in its members; and that the purposes of the friendship are universal in that each member of the friendship benefits at no expense of any other. Values are ontological because, for them to have meaning in the world, they must be realized in some sense. Lacking this, they remain noumenal and abstract, lacking any ground in the real world. But if we choose a critical orientation to the concept of value, then we should see it

  to the lighthouse as something realized in the world, something that must become emergent in actual practices and institutions. In this sense, a value is ontological in the sense that it provides individual members of any social form with the cognitive and affective orientation requisite for that social form to be sustained. It orients norms and practices that enact and objectify in the world a specific kind of reality. I therefore achieve ontological coherence when I am able to attain awareness of the nature of the relations, processes, and purposes that constitute the social institutions that make up my social reality. The coherence refers to an awareness of these essential properties of social reality and the ways that an agent’s own practices and norms are constitutive of that reality. Autonomy is the capacity to reflect on these properties of social ontology; it is the ability to determine the rational legitimacy of systemic social forms. It means reflecting on the structure of our relations, the nature of the social processes that they enact, and the ends and purposes that they have been organized to promote. Social ontology addresses the objective, collective forms of life that we enact via norms and practices. Each individual enacts joint norms and practices, but these in turn achieve a higher status of reality in terms of structures of relations, processes, or patterns of activity and the ends they seek to realize. Autonomy as critical agency is when each member of a social institution or social scheme are aware and critical of these features of social reality: when each either participates in or dissents from the social institution or scheme because any one or all of these ontological features fail the test of social rationality. The key is to arrange and structure social reality to expand and enhance the flourishing of the individual, and this can only be done when individuals rationally and consciously uphold and articulate relations that have that common purpose in view. Understanding the essentially social status of personhood does not entail a diminution of our individuality; quite the contrary: it only expands our horizon of what individuality actually is. The classical Greek idea of “self-sufficiency” (αὐτάρκης) can help us understand this way of thinking. The Greek concept sees that robust individuality, or the rich development of the individual, is a function of the rich development of the nexus of common relations, practices, and goods that nourish it. The self is an emergent property of the specific forms of self-realization that takes place within the given structures of

Autonomy as Critical Agency    sociality.29 This is not a substantivist view rooted in communitarian concerns or some anachronistic conception of tradition or any other kind of “comprehensive doctrine.” Rather, it is a thesis about the ontology of human interdependence and the ways that we can judge the social forms into which we are socialized as those that promote the enhancement of the good or miss that purpose. In this sense, the dialectical relation of independence and dependence yields for us the concept of interdependence: that quality of individuality that is functionally coordinate with the quality of common goods and the nexus of relations in which it is embedded.30 People need relations, but not just any relations will do. Different relational structures entail different social processes and different purposes or ends. The rationality of any social form must satisfy the conditions of free self-development; and this, in turn, entails relational norms and structures that are reflexive as opposed to subordinative, social processes that are developmental (or anabolic) for the individuals that make up that social form, as opposed to exploitative or damaging (or katabolic), as well as ends or purposes that are in some way for the common benefit of the members of the institution, as opposed to serving the benefit of some particular subset of the group.31 The thesis of the ontology of values maintains that concepts such as justice or freedom are not abstract principles that are defined a priori, nor are they merely formally sufficient doctrines that can be used to guide deliberative processes. Rather, the thesis holds that value concepts such as justice or freedom are in fact fulfilled by the kinds of relations, practices, and purposes to which we collectively commit. The thesis is that these concepts denote social-ontological properties of activity and the relational and practical background conditions that such activities require. A selfdetermined person cannot be circumscribed merely by subjective reflection and personal action; such a person also requires self-consciousness as a member of relations, institutions, and collective practices that recursively have the social basis for that freedom in view. Put more concretely, I can only make a valid, rational form of personal choice when such a choice is made with respect to the relations and purposes of the social world within which I am ensconced. The reason for this is that only by taking this refracted view of oneself can we mediate the influence of heteronomous values, norms, and concepts that colonize consciousness. We can

  to the lighthouse say, then, that justice or freedom is either robustly or richly determined, on one hand, or it is defectively represented, on the other. Any self-determining, rational, autonomous agent must therefore expand not simply the horizons of one’s own perspective but, more important, take on different constitutive rule-sets that properly match the kind of hypercooperative forms of social reality to which we as moderns belong. The concept of an expanded autonomy now becomes one where the self is self-conscious of the relational practices that he enacts (and which are enacted back on him) but also according to the ends and purposes toward which the norms, practices, and relational structures that circumscribe our collective lives are oriented and organized. Autonomy now explodes the more narrow, formalistic, and subjectivist account and becomes selfconscious of the socio-ontological field within which it exists and acts. Autonomy can now be seen as more than a kind of psychological self-relation; it is more essentially a kind of self-grounding that properly grasps the relational nature of one’s being. The implication of this is not to dissolve the subject into communal relations but rather to push rational, critical self-reflection to understand the broader ontological context of the deontic commitments that one has. But we are still confronted with the reification problem: the problem that we can be so embedded in a particular social ontology that we have allowed its norms, values, and purposes to stand in for our own. How to explode reification and move forward toward a more critical sense of autonomy? My proposition here is that self-consciousness must achieve ontological coherence or a cognitive grasp of the social totality within which one moves and operates.32 Absent this, there is no real way to achieve self-determination that is not shackled by the threads of reification, no way to secure that the ways that we know ourselves and the desires that organize our will are not heteronomously shaped—in short, no way to secure autonomous individuality.

Self-Consciousness, Self-Determination, and Objective Interests Autonomy as critical agency can now be defined by the capacity to possess self-consciousness of one’s inherent sociality and the practices and norms that underwrite it. To be autonomous in a critical sense is to

Autonomy as Critical Agency    be able to think in terms of the common needs and relations that provide the context for self-development. When an agent comes to see oneself as relational in a fundamental sense, when one comes to see oneself and one’s own projects and practices as dependent on others, then the horizon of practical rationality naturally expands. Freedom in this socially thick sense is bound up with the individual’s capacity to engage and reflect on the social interdependence at the heart of our social reality. Rational reflection is rooted not in consciousness alone but in the kinds of concepts we employ: concepts that are mediated by the ontological account of our sociality and the ways that it is embodied in our practices, norms, and purposes. In this sense, autonomy as critical agency upholds both the salience of the capacities of individual reflection with the concern that we are socially constituted and that this social constitution is the objective field of our self-determination. This approach to the self asks us to recognize and to grasp cognitively the relational infrastructure that underpins our own self-understanding. Critical agency is therefore the capacity to shape a more rational, more freedom-enhancing expression of ethical life.33 Once an agent achieves critical-reflective capacities, this means that he or she is capable of understanding the ends and purposes of the ensembles of social-relational practices that make up our social world and the various institutions that embody it. But at a deeper level, it should also be the case that to achieve a critical sense of oneself as an autonomous agent, one should be able to posit one’s own ends and purposes in the world and to see that the common ends and purposes toward which our social schemes are organized must be worthy of our own individual efforts and ends as social beings. To lack this is to lack self-determination: a form of self-authorized practical engagement with the world as a collaborative, interdependent (not dependent or independent) being. But this must also mean that we can arrive at certain principles that guide autonomous choices and reflective activities. These principles can be understood as social-ontological as opposed to procedural or categorial in the sense that they are rooted in the kinds of relations, practices, and purposes that would enhance the kind of social freedom that would be both individually and generally emancipatory and developmental. The basis for this thesis is that any social activity is essentially cooperative and teleological; that is, they require relations and collective practices that are oriented toward

  to the lighthouse some end or purpose. This is what I have been taking as the very essence of a critical social-ontological approach to practical reason. But the key idea here is that self-consciousness itself asks us to take a position, a perspective on our relation to our own being. How we conceive of this answer to the question of self-consciousness determines the kinds of reality, the ontology of being, that we constitute and reconstitute. In this sense, what seems at first to be an abstract metaphysical question quickly becomes the essence of any practical question of how we live our lives and hence of a critical stance on self and world. This critical self-stance is elaborated by Ernst Tugendhat’s appropriation of Heidegger: Instead of saying that the relation of the person to himself proves to be a relation of oneself to one’s being, we can say this: What one regarded as a relation of oneself to oneself proves not to be a relation to oneself, but a relation to one’s being. . . . In those cases in which the person relates himself not merely to his own states but to himself, this self-relation must be understood as a relation to a proposition, which then must have a special status. . . . My capacity to relate myself in a voluntativeaffective mode to my existence rests upon the fact that the proposition to which I thereby relate myself is not the fact that I exist, but my existence as it impends; and this means the (practical) necessity that I have to be, and together with this the (practical) possibility to be or not to be, or to be or not to be in such a way.34

Tugendhat is right that the relation of oneself to oneself is an ontological question—a question of being itself. But when we consider this thesis, the nature of being can be understood not in Heideggerian terms but rather in social-ontological terms: we must take a stance where we see our being as relational and teleological—as acting in tandem with others but also capable of generating our own ends and purposes in the world. When I take a stance of self-relation to myself, I can get that self-relation wrong. I can be misled by the reified categories of thought that I have absorbed via social learning and socialization, or I may be impelled toward certain forms of self-understanding based on identities that are constructed for the protection of my ego and come to see myself in those terms, and so on. But I am suggesting that these false forms of self-understanding can be exploded by grasping a conception of ourselves as sociopractical beings: a self-consciousness of oneself as being a generator of the relational forms of life that constitute me and others and that this sociopractical ontology is a field of judgment, critique, and transformation.

Autonomy as Critical Agency    With this in view, we can now see that self-consciousness and self-determination fit together in a specific way. If one’s sense of selfconsciousness has been corrupted by reification or some other pathology of cognition and consciousness, then the capacity for self-determination itself fails to achieve the status of autonomy. This is because, as I demonstrated earlier, reification is a deep structural disturbance in the forms of collective intentionality that socialize subjects. In this sense, the structure of self-consciousness affects the self’s status as autonomous or heteronomous. Self-consciousness as a relational agent entails a different way of perceiving my world than if I conceive of myself in atomistic or nonrelational terms. Self-consciousness as a relational being entails a deepening of our self-understanding and allows us to see the world in terms of the critical social ontology I have been describing. Ontological coherence expands the horizon of our capacity to pierce our phenomenological experience of the ontic social world, the reality principle that governs the totality within which I act and appropriate the values and concepts used to mediate my self-relation (or relative lack thereof). Genuine self-determination now takes on a more socially embedded expression: it is genuine in the sense that it takes a stance, a perspective on the socio-ontological field itself, and asks about the ways that this is either a field of the enactment of power and domination or one of freedom-enhancing norms, practices, and institutional purposes. Selfdetermination is always itself in tension with our relations with others. This is because the self is always in existence in relation with others, and this further means that our capacity for autonomy requires that we see ourselves in this way, as being relational and practical. Autonomy does not press us to say, “I desire X ” but rather, “I desire X because I propose that X would be good for us”; or more formally, “If I am to desire X, it will be for reasons that have a common good in view.” The principles that I take to be worthy of my rational obligation and endorsement—and, as a consequence, to be worthy of institutionalization and political juridification— are those that must pass through a critical form of judgment that takes into account the kinds of social reality that these principles will enact and legitimize. Although this may strike us as an overly philosophical and burdensome task to place on any agent, I think that it is, to the contrary, actually a natural way for us to think about the world. As Tugendhat

  to the lighthouse points out: “It is characteristic of human freedom that we do not have to devote ourselves immediately to a purpose but can, so to speak, step back from it by asking or considering whether or not it is better to want (or to do) what is expressed in a sentence of intention. It pertains analytically to practical questions and to the meaning of deliberation that such questions can be formulated in this way: What is good, better, the best?”35 This is a core requirement of autonomy as critical agency: to recognize that we can step back from and question the world, that we can—indeed, that we must—interrogate the associational structures into which we are socialized and, to the greatest extent possible, inquire into the purposes of those forms of life. The reason this is an important attribute for autonomy is not hard to see. For one thing, it militates against one of the core drives toward normalizing heteronomous norms, practices, and beliefs by forcing us to consider the objectivity of the principle involved. A tendency toward the group mind is something toward which many individuals gravitate. It seduces each of us to follow the collective acceptance of norms and practices. It is not hard to see why this is the case: once we are socialized into a web of collective-intentional norms, we tend to find their groove and operate within their parameters. The cybernetic society does not allow much plasticity of these collective norms, and this makes autonomy an empty concept lest we grant it some critical potency. Autonomy as critical agency explodes this tendency and opens up for us the capacity to explore new norms and practices, as well as new modes of relating and cooperating, and new purposes and ends to these norms, practices, and relations.

An Expanded Model of Autonomy If this argument is accepted, even in some limited form, then it becomes necessary to recast the concept of autonomy as a more expansive grasp of human social being. More precisely, autonomy can now be conceived as the individual’s capacity to reflect on one’s status as a relational being, one who is ensconced in certain relational structures and practices with others. But this further entails inquiring into the legitimacy of these structures and practices; the self that is able to do this is one that moves in an autonomous space of reasons. It neither reflects on an abstract

Autonomy as Critical Agency    principle (such as the categorical imperative) nor tries to find or work from some form of inner, subjective sense of authenticity. Rather, the key idea is that the individual reflects on the ways that the world with which he or she interacts is a generative reality that one participates in producing. The ends and purposes of this reality should be judged on the basis of either their freedom-enhancing or freedom-attenuating implications. This is how an “I” can reassert itself in the world with a form of practical commitment; each of us must be able to assert the primacy of our capacity to withhold cooperation from a world that is pathological and defective, a world that does not have our relational goods as its highest priority. I noted above that when an agent comes to see itself as dependent on the relations and practices that are shared with others, its horizon of practical reflection expands. When the structure of consciousness migrates from organized around an “I-consciousness” to one organized around a “weconsciousness,” then, and only then, can we properly speak of autonomy in an expanded sense. The reason is that a relational self moves in a space of reasons that is structurally distinct from an egoistic self. A bachelor will make choices in a different way, live a life in a different way, than will a man in a steady, stable relationship. This is the case if he sees that his relation to his wife or partner is incorporated into the structure of reasons that he uses to make sense of his choices, his values, his purposes. They must, in some basic sense, include the ways that his choices will impact and affect his significant other. So, too, when it comes to our self-consciousness as a practical agent: once we see ourselves as praxis-oriented relational beings, we must see that our active, practical associations with others and the artifacts of that cooperative activity constitute a field for our critical reflection. Autonomy, in this sense, is always about what I should do and why I should do it but within the context of what we should do and why we should do it. The reason for this is that the expanded self reaches beyond the false ideal of independence that classical liberalism elaborated and grips the essential truth of human life: what I am is a function of what we are, and changing one requires the transformation of the other. Autonomy can now be understood as an achieved status of agency where an individual’s self-consciousness is able to grasp its inherent, indeed, its essential, capacities for practical sociality, an agent capable

  to the lighthouse of articulating authentic ends and not merely an agent of socially given means. Even further, it is a kind of self-consciousness of oneself as an agent that moves in relational forms of life with others, as well as social artifacts and goods. This ontology of our sociality—that is, the objective, causal features of the relational norms, structures, and processes of the world—must therefore become a core feature of any critical conception of autonomy. It is important to explore the thesis that an expanded form of autonomy is one that is not a feature of a social ontology but rather of a kind of self, of subjectivity, that allows one to articulate a new selfconsciousness and self-determination. An expanded theory of autonomy captures the idea that self-consciousness is transformed by the reconceptualization of one’s own agency as socially mediated. It entails a new way of conceiving how one should judge, orient, and organize one’s practices and to occupy a critical stance toward the web of norms that are deployed by the predominant social reality. Recall that in the last chapter, I referred to the process of decentration of the ego in order to theorize the ways that the withered self and withered ego form. The weakness of the modern ego, its lack of the requisite strength as an endopsychic infrastructure for an autonomous self, comes about because of the lack of developmental conflict and the decentrationrecentration of the ego that this entails. Just as in Hegel’s “master and slave” dialectic, the struggles through conflict that the ego must endure— conflict between fantasy and reality, between desire and failure to possess, and so on—all lead to a richer and more expanded horizon of subjectivity. Indeed, for Hegel (as for Rousseau before him), this expanded horizon of the subject means a new form of self-consciousness as a relationally dependent being. Critical autonomy can be achieved via this process of decentration and recentration: the development of self-consciousness as a social being means absorbing the ontology of our relational and practical essence into our modes of reflection and judgment. Not unlike Rousseau’s “general will,” which he saw as a property of the individual rather than of the collective, we learn to think as a constitutive component of an associational reality rather than as an independent agent. Expanded autonomy therefore refers to the cognitive horizon that comes into view when we shift our perspective of self-consciousness as ontologically relational, practical, and teleological beings; when our self-understanding becomes

Autonomy as Critical Agency    rooted in the concrete and objective categories of our social being rather than those affected and shaped by ideology and reified forms of consciousness. No rational critique without this capacity for cognizing the whole, the totality, is possible. There is what I referred to above as a process of refraction that takes place, where reflection is dialectically mediated by the ontological categories that underpin the social-ontological field. The subject is not separate from the object; individual and society do not constitute some kind of dualist model. Rather, any agent achieves rational self-consciousness when knowing itself as a relational and practical being seeking to realize purposes in cooperation with others in the world. And when this is realized, it becomes evident that the ontic forms of life that we encounter phenomenologically transmute into ontological categories rooted in us as agents. Reification has been the central mechanism for the cooptation of modern consciousness, just as the withering of the self and the ego has been the core effect of a social world increasingly reworked by market logics and social atomization. Only by reframing our reflective categories, by shifting our perspective on our own being, can we jolt consciousness out of the deep groove of reification. The core question, as I have suggested, is whether the relations and practices that participate in and jointly enact with others are directed toward projects, ends, or purposes that I can sanction as rational and good. In this sense, the relation between the individual and society, between subject and object, operates within a conceptual structure that allows autonomy to open up as a space for critical reflection. Once I see myself as ensconced in any social scheme, any set of relations, norms, and joint practices, I should, by achieving ontological coherence, interrogate the purposes of these relations, norms, and practices. The autonomous person inquires into the ontological features of a social scheme in order to reveal the relative rationality or defectiveness of that scheme. Autonomy does not require some undue epistemological or cognitive burden on the subject. What it does require is the capacity to see one’s own self as both a producer and a product of the social schemes within which she or he is ensconced. Recall that, in my discussions above about reification and alienation, the core effect of these pathological processes of self-development were that they detached us from this capacity, instead shaping a form of self-understanding where self and world were static, as

  to the lighthouse well as independent. But ontological coherence shatters this illusory form of consciousness: it asks the fundamental political question concerning one’s basic obligations to the norms, values, and institutional purposes or goals of one’s social world; it asks each of us to evaluate the organizational shapes that constitute our very being. Rational social schemes will promote freedom-enhancing relations and purposes; they will not legitimize inequalities of power or extractive, dominating, or oppressive relational structures, nor will they permit purposes or ends that promote them or that do not have common, universal aims. The individual’s consciousness of his or her interdependence with others marks a metaphysical shift not only of the self but of a new kind of sociality as well. Social solidarity becomes genuinely possible when individuals seek to relate and act in concert according to common needs and purposes. The nature of their relations is markedly different from the kinds of relations sought out by group narcissism or some other compensatory relational forms. The expanded self now is able to have in view objective, common interests that can serve as the basis for a more robust form of democratic politics. To think in these expanded terms entails richer and more humane affective relations with others: altruism, reciprocity, equality, dignity—all find fertile soil within the expanded self. Autonomy now has a broader field for its activity: not only to be able to reflect self-consciously on the world but also to see itself in new terms that facilitate a new kind of sociality, a new kind of social reality. Once I can repel the infiltration of norms and values that shape my practices, my self-consciousness, and my powers of reflection, once I begin to dereify my consciousness, only then can the new begin to emerge within the cognitive grasp of the pathologies of the present. The negation of the defective world begins the dialectical movement of thinking anew and the democratic possibility of thinking for and with others. I call this model of autonomy an expanded one because it describes a way of thinking and reflecting about ourselves and our values and norms that takes into account our sociality and the ontological potentialities of that ontology. I said above that this involves a kind of cognition that permits the self to grasp its own sociorelational features. This means that autonomy is the capacity to reflect on the deontic commitments one has to the social schemes that constitute one’s social reality. This refraction of

Autonomy as Critical Agency    the self takes place as a process in which one is capable of seeing oneself as a constitutive participant in the world, a perspective that places one’s rational faculties in critical relation to the reified experience we have of our social reality. Only then can autonomy as critical agency begin and a critical agent achieve a perspective on the world that forces a new perspective on our deontic commitments, on the validity of the purposes and ends toward which our institutions are organized, on the relative goodness or defectiveness of the society of which we are a part. Lacking this, there can be no genuine critical agency because there is no self-perspective that can decenter the self’s position relative to the whole. In its most basic sense, the resuscitation of the individual in modern society as a critical, reflective, practical agent will depend on the extent to which the richer model of autonomy along the lines I have explored here is instantiated in the world. This will require a substantive shift in the paradigmatic way that contemporary philosophy and theory conceptualize the self, the individual, and sociality itself. As the cybernetic features of modernity become ever more ingrained in our institutions, our culture, and the inner dimensions of the self, it is all the more crucial that we rethink the paradigms on which modern practical and political philosophy stands. I have tried to show that the reification problem is the most important pathology of modern consciousness, no less than the problems of alienation, the weakening of the ego, and the temptations of the group mind. These are the primary impediments for, as well as expressions of the failure of, autonomy as critical agency. Human beings may be social beings, all of us constituted by our relations to others, but we are also individuals capable of reflection, engagement, and choice. And as the modern individual is increasingly smothered by the omnipresence of organization, as well as the alienating separation of self from world, so, too, does the social world become stagnant and lose its capacity to generate meaning. For now it seems clear to me that should the modern Leviathan swallow the individual whole, a new dark age will rapidly be upon us.

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Notes

preface 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1974), 34. 2. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128, 128. introduction 1. Robert Pippin aptly describes the nature of the ideal of autonomy seen from the vantage point of the eighteenth century: “Most generally construed, such an ideal simply expresses the oldest classical philosophical ideal: the possibility that human beings can regulate and evaluate their beliefs by rational self-reflection, that they can free themselves from interest, passion, tradition, prejudice and autonomously ‘rule’ their own thoughts, and that they can determine their actions as a result of self-reflection and rational evaluation, an evaluation the conclusions of which ought to bind any rational agent.” Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 12. 2. Elsewhere, I have tried to flesh out and formalize Rousseau’s important insight into the cultural and psychological dimensions of domination for contemporary theory. See Michael J. Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 3. Søren Kierkegaard, A Literary Review (1846; London: Penguin, 2001), 54. 4. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. Tom Bottomore (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 97 (translation modified). 5. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 92. 6. As Charles Thorpe has pointed out: “The isolation and powerlessness of individuals is a corollary of the autonomous power of systems: financial, technological, and military.” Charles Thorpe, Necroculture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 10 and passim.

  Notes 7. Philip Cushman makes a similar argument: “The postwar era has been deeply influenced by psychology, oriented toward youth, focused on liberation, and obsessed with consumption. It has been driven by the culmination of two quintessentially American trends: the promise of individual salvation through the liberation of the self and a twentieth-century strategy based on the avoidance of economic stagnation (and thus a second depression) through the manipulation of consumption. The two trends joined forces to create a new dynamic, a striving for self-liberation through the compulsive purchase and consumption of goods, experiences, and celebrities. . . . The predominant self of the era, the empty self, is the engine that makes is all run.” Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 210–11. 8. Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Penguin, 2014), 238 and passim; Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1944), 81–103. Also see the important philosophical discussion in Volker Gerhardt, Selbstbestimmung: Das Prinzip der Individualität (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 120–30; and Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 60ff. 9. J. B. Schneewind points out that “the new outlook that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century centered on the belief that all normal individuals are equally able to live together in a morality of self-governance. All of us, on this view, have an equal ability to see for ourselves what morality calls for and are in principle equally able to move ourselves to act accordingly, regardless of threats or rewards from others.” J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. 10. It should be emphasized that this trend culminated in Protestant liberalism. But in this development, it became obvious that the construction of the individual was to serve communal ends rather than generate its own purposes in the world. As such, a seed of heteronomy already existed at the origins of the liberal project. As James E. Block insightfully points out: “The very task of modernity, of Protestantism and liberalism, was to constitute entirely novel—largely majoritarian and participatory—forms of collective authority and legitimate process by which inclusive ends were to be formulated, societally institutionalized, and individually integrated. These were to take the form . . . of the open economic market, participatory political processes, voluntarist religious institutions, and community social norms. The result, which shattered traditional hierarchical civilization, was the Protestant-liberal civilization of modernity with its distinctive agency forms of authority, selfhood, and institutional organization.” James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23–24.

Notes    11. Hans W. Loewald, Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 15. 12. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994), 44–45. 13. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009), 9. 14. Even the ideals and values of the bourgeoisie have themselves been gutted by the intensification of capitalist dynamics. As T. W. Adorno observed at the dawn of the cybernetic society: “Whatever was once good and decent in bourgeois values, independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspection, has been corrupted utterly. For while bourgeois forms of existence are truculently conserved, their economic precondition has fallen away. Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better.” Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1974), 34. 15. As James O’Connor observed from the vantage point of the early 1980s, when this phenomenon was first emerging: “Object fetishism included invidious distinction, emulation, symbolic determinations, and the ‘ceremonial character,’ but also that specialized ‘ceremonial needs’ were ‘naturally’ construed in terms of their capacity to be satisfied in the form of commodities. Needs acquired a ‘naturalness,’ which belied their social origins in capitalist accumulation, uneven and combined development, and, above all, class and social struggles.” James O’Connor, Accumulation Crisis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 160. Also see the discussion in Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: An Anthropology of Consumption (New York: Routledge, 1979). 16. T. W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 270–99, 280. 17. See Joseph Stiglitz’s discussion of rent-seeking for a non-Marxian, yet critical, account of modern capitalist logics in his The Price of Inequality (New York: Norton, 2012). For a more trenchant discussion of the origins of these logics, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1975), 377. 18. Cf. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 219ff. 19. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7, 6. 20. Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 109. 21. Mandel, Late Capitalism, 504. 22. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1960), 10.

  Notes 23. See the important discussion in Samir Gandesha, “‘Identifying with the Aggressor’: From the Authoritarian to Neoliberal Personality,” Constellations 25, no. 1 (2018): 147–64. 24. Anita Chari has pointed out in her study of reification that “the dominance of immaterial labor in contemporary capitalism points to a change in the position of subjectivity within the capitalist mode of production. As immaterial labor has become dominant within production, the production of subjectivity has taken on a direct role in the processes of capitalist accumulation. More and more features of social life become productive for capital: styles, forms of communication (Twitter, Facebook, smartphones), communities, affects, and desires.” Anita Chari, A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 133. 25. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 47. 26. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (London: Penguin, 1989). 27. See Georg Simmel, “On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture” (1911), in The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. K. Peter Etzkorn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), 27–46. Note also the popular work of Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 28. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 3. 29. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. 30. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1021 and passim. 31. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri gesture toward what they call the “subsumption of society” by capital. As they see it, from the vantage point of the 1990s: Postmodern capitalism should be understood first, or as a first approximation, in terms of what Marx called the phase of the real subsumption of society under capital. In the previous phase (that of the formal subsumption), capital operated a hegemony over social production, but there still remained numerous production processes that originated outside of capital as leftovers from the pre­capitalist era. Capital subsumes these foreign processes formally, bringing them under the reign of capitalist relations. In the phase of the real subsumption, capital no longer has an outside in the sense that these foreign processes of production have disappeared. All productive processes arise within capital itself and thus the production and reproduction of the entire social world take place within capital. The specifically capitalist rules of productive relations and capitalist exploitation that were developed in the factory have now seeped outside the factory

Notes    walls to permeate and define all social relations—this is the sense in which we insist that contemporary society should now be recognized as a factory-society. (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], 15) Also see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 255ff. But this view is insufficient to explain the richness of the transformation of the social and self-structures of the cybernetic society rather than a “factory-society.” As I will show, we need a more expanded grasp of the ways that social rationality, capitalist production, consumption regimes, and intrapsychic self-states are organized to fully explicate the pathologies of the present. 32. As Cornelius Castoriadis observes: A new anthropological type of individual emerges, defined by greediness, frustration, generalized conformism. . . . All this is materialized in structures of massive weight: the mad and potentially lethal race of an autonomized technoscience, consumeristic, televisual, and advertising onanism, the atomization of society, the rapid technical and “moral” obsolescence of all “products,” “wealth” that, growing nonstop, melts between one’s fingers. Capitalism finally seems to have succeeded in fabricating the type of individual that “corresponds” to it: perpetually distracted, zapping from one “pleasure” to another, without memory or project, ready to respond to every solicitation of an economic machine that is increasingly destroying the planet’s biosphere in order to produce illusions called commodities. (Cornelius Castoriadis, “Done and to Be Done,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis [Oxford: Blackwell, 1997], 361–417, 415) 33. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Viking, 1952), 132. chapter 1 1. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1995), 3–4. 2. Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xvi. 3. Paul Verhaeghe, What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014), 173–74. 4. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), 23. 5. For more on the impact of the counter-Renaissance, see Toulmin, 24–44; Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan,

  Notes Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125–37; and Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Charles Scribners, 1950), 176–292. 6. As Toulmin argues: If we compare the research agenda of philosophy after the 1640s with what it was a century before, however, we find notable changes. Before 1600, theoretical inquiries were balanced against discussions of concrete, practical issues, such as the specific conditions on which it is morally acceptable for a sovereign to launch a war, or for a subject to kill a tyrant. From 1600 on, by contrast, most philosophers are committed to questions of abstract, universal theory, to the exclusion of such concrete issues. There is a shift from a style of philosophy that keeps equally in view issues of local, timebound practice, and universal, timeless theory, to one that accepts matters of universal, timeless theory as being entitled to an exclusive place on the agenda of “philosophy.” (Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 24) 7. Haydn notes that “in opposition to the medieval idea of the return to God and the contemplation of his Truth as man’s final good, these men would find that good primarily in man’s increasing capacity to harness nature and thus enrich substantially the quality of his life on earth—in progress, in something like our modern sense” (The Counter-Renaissance, 29). 8. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 228. 9. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 146 and passim. Also see the discussion by Owen Chadwick in his The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 229ff. 10. Carl Schmitt argues insightfully on this point: The decisive metaphysical step in the construction of the theory of the state occurred with the conception of the state as a mechanism. All that followed—as, for example, the development from the clock mechanism to the steam engine, to the electric motor, to chemical or to biological processes—resulted in the further development of technology and scientific thinking, which did not need any new metaphysical determination. Through the mechanization of the “huge man,” the μάκρος ἄνθροπος, Hobbes leapt decisively ahead of Descartes and made a significant anthropological interpretation of man. . . . The mechanization of the concept of a state thus completed the mechanization of the anthropological image of man. (Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes:

Notes    Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 99) Earlier, Otto Gierke noted the mechanistic implications of Hobbes’s theory, arguing that although he employed the concept of the state as the body of a giant, it nevertheless “ended by transforming his supposed organism into a mechanism . . . an artfully devised and cunningly constructed automaton.” Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 52 and passim. Otto Mayr also notes that “Hobbes introduced this state-automaton analogy explicitly only at the beginning of the Leviathan, but in method and spirit it was present throughout the book. . . . The purpose of Hobbes’s analysis was to synthesize an artificial state of great structural stability, a state, that is, equipped above all to maintain its civic peace. His result was a centralistic, hierarchical form of government, where the actions of the lower members were controlled through rigid administrative linkages by sovereign above. It was an authoritarian state in which individual citizens had no choice and no vote.” Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 104. 11. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1934), 4. 12. Karl Polanyi, “The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land, and Money,” in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, ed. George Dalton (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 26–37, 35. Bertalanffy makes a parallel argument on the origin of systems and cybernetic theory: “The roots of this development are complex. One aspect is the development from power engineering—that is, release of large amounts of energy as in steam or electric machines—to control engineering, which directs processes by low-power devices and has led to computers and automation. . . . Technology has been led to think not in terms of single machines but in those of ‘systems.’” Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1960), 3–4. 13. Polanyi, “The Self-Regulating Market,” 35. This idea of self-regulation was mirrored in the new technical metaphor that came to dominate the late eighteenth century, that of the self-regulating system as opposed to the centralized clockwork pattern of the early Enlightenment. As Otto Mayr notes: “The notion of the self-regulating system, applicable to the most diverse fields, splendidly matched the needs of the liberal concept of order and was well on its way to broad acceptance in Britain by the mid-eighteenth century.” Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery, 139.

  Notes 14. Karl Polanyi, “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, ed. George Dalton (New York: Doubleday, 1968): 59–77, 59. 15. See the classic discussion in E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–97. A key theme here is how the move toward increased social efficiency had deleterious effects on the sphere of the individual. As Christopher Hill has pointed out: “The advantages of concentration leading to specialized division of labour are obvious. Discipline was hard to learn, but—as in any backward economy—was essential to rising productivity. Wages were paid more regularly by factories—though still not always punctually. Crises of overproduction were thought to be less likely. Economies of large-scale production were as obvious in industry as in agriculture. What was lost by factories and enclosure was the independence, variety and freedom which small producers had enjoyed: an enforced asceticism, the Webbs called it.” Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (London: Pelican, 1967), 264. 16. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels in Manchester, 1863.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), 448. 17. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 199. 18. Mumford, 189. 19. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 422. 20. Simmel, 422. 21. Christopher Hill describes this: A number of important if gradual changes were taking place in the ways of life of the middling groups of the population. Higher incomes and technical improvements in building led to much more comfortable houses, with greater privacy, for all but the poorest classes. Houses began to have stairs, more rooms, including bedrooms, chairs instead of benches, brick chimneys, glass windows, locks on doors, mirrors; paper and books were cheaper; citizens moved out of London’s smoke to the suburbs. . . . The individual family, the voluntary societies, whether dissenting chapels, coffee-houses or political clubs, began to replace the geographical communities of the Middle Ages, in which the church was everywhere the community center. Something was lost of neighborliness by this combination of suburban privacy with voluntary association: something was gained in intellectual stimulus by the congregation of large numbers, especially in and around London; men and women could find others who shared their

Notes    interests and were ready to discuss them. (Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 206) 22. See Arnold Gehlen, Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter: Sozialpsychologische Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), 20ff; and Hans Blumenberg, “The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 40, no. 1 (2019): 19–30. 23. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo, 1954), 16–17. 24. Mumford, Myth of the Machine, 3. Also see the discussion on 188ff. 25. Schmitt, Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 34. 26. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 54. 27. The blurring of the line between machine and human was precisely one of the goals of cybernetic research. As Andrew Pickering notes: “The world, understood cybernetically, was a world of goal-oriented feedback systems with learning. It is interesting that cybernetics even trumped the servomechanisms line of feedback thought by turning itself into a universal metaphysics, a Theory of Everything . . . with no respect for traditional human and nonhuman boundaries, as an umbrella for the proliferation of individual cyborg sciences it claimed to embrace.” Andrew Pickering, “Cyborg History and the WWII Regime,” Perspectives in Science 3 (1995): 1–45, 31. 28. Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 54. 29. See note 27 above. 30. For a discussion of the emergence of this system-oriented thinking in social policy and government management, see Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 31. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 398. 32. André Gorz argues that “through mathematization, a specific project has been incorporated into a particular method guaranteeing conformity to the original intention, and this method, formalized and autonomous, has definitively insulated the project against any reflexive self-examination. Subjects no longer think of themselves and lead their lives as the subjects of a certain intentional relationship to reality but as if they are operators putting a set of mathematical procedures to work.” André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (London: Verso, 1989), 122. 33. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964), 79–80. 34. See Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 232.

  Notes 35. As Harry Liebersohn argues: “Modern society isolated the individual from collective sources of meaning. Just this circumstance, however, gave modernity its special dignity, compelling the individual who wished to be anything at all to find his values within himself and challenging him to realize them in an otherwise meaningless world.” Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–1923 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 79. 36. See the discussion in Christian Lenhardt, “Max Weber and the Legacy of Critical Idealism,” in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 21–48. 37. Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 416. 38. Compare this description to Adriano Tilgher’s: “One of the blackest shadows is the existence of an appalling number of men condemned to work which has no connection with their inner lives, no spiritual meaning for them whatever. . . . A large number of human beings are forced into the monotonous existence of inanimate objects, fated to repeat the same gestures, the same movements, over and over as if they were machines and not human beings.” Adriano Tilgher, Homo Faber: Work through the Ages (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1930), 149. Of course, this is not meant to imply that modern working life for most people is meaningful, only that it continues the systemic logic of instrumentality in more subtle and more pernicious ways. 39. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 450. Tilgher points out that “Karl Marx had a profound intuition of the truth that the essence of capitalistic civilization lies in the transcendency of the brain over the arm, of the intelligence over the hand; of executive activity over actual labor. . . . Today the great captain of industry, directing from his office the far-flung net of his affairs as a king directs his nation, lives at an interplanetary distance from one of his working-men, slave of the machine he operates.” Tilgher, Homo Faber, 153–54. 40. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1909), 451 and passim. 41. John Patrick Diggins rightly argues that, for Weber, “authority, as opposed to power, implies consent to being governed, whereas Weber suggested that compliance may be other than consent, and imply submission without resistance.” John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 76. 42. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1972), 532 and passim (my tranlsation). 43. On the relationship between domination and alienation in Weber’s thought, Diggins notes that “the concept of domination may be seen as Weber’s liberal version of alienation: obedience breeds weakness and people settle for an amiable ‘adaptation to the possible.’” Diggins, Max Weber, 77.

Notes    44. For an important discussion, see Wolfgang Schluchter, Wertfreiheit und Verantwortungsethik: Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Politik bei Max Weber (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1971), 18–27, 34–48. 45. As Gilbert G. Germain has argued: “Weber maintains that calculative reasoning and valuing are fundamentally incommensurable operations. It follows then that no matter how well entrenched the technological order becomes, there lies beneath its well-oiled surface the multiform and protean realm of ends, enfeebled to be sure, but not beyond revitalization, in Weber’s estimation. Importantly, Weber assumes that any prospect for the revitalization of the kingdom of ends must originate from within individual actors, since institutions are by definition functional machines given over to the means-ends mentality and thus not likely sources of newly emerging values.” Gilbert G. Germain, “The Revenge of the Sacred: Technology and Re-enchantment,” in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 248–66, 254. Also see H. T. Wilson, The Vocation of Reason: Studies in Critical Theory and Social Science in the Age of Max Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 145–73. 46. Gorz correctly points out that “economic rationality has never, therefore, in essence, been in the service of any determinate goal. Its object is . . . the maximization of the type of efficiency that it knows how to measure arithmetically. The main indicator of this efficiency is the rate of profit.” Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, 114. 47. Jeffrey C. Alexander notes that Weber saw this transformation happening much earlier than the onset of modern bureaucratic institutions with the Puritans themselves and their economic motives: “But economic coercion should not be neglected. Because the Puritans made themselves into tools they were able to organize others in depersonalized struggle and work.” Jeffrey C. Alexander, “The Dialectic of Individuation and Domination: Weber’s Rationalization Theory and Beyond,” in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 185–206, 193–94. Also see the extended discussion in Gilbert G. Germain, A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984). 48. Marx, Capital, 3:454. 49. In his comments on Orwell’s 1984, Erich Fromm gives us a more complete picture of this cybernetic model of society and social power: “Orwell . . . is simply implying that the new form of managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines which act like men and develops men who act like machines, is conducive to an era of dehumanization and complete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption.” Erich Fromm, afterword to George Orwell’s 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1977), 325.

  Notes 50. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 14. 51. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 278. 52. See Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951), 321– 25. Also see the insightful discussion in Robert J. Antonio, “Weber vs. Parsons: Domination or Technocratic Models of Social Organization,” in Max Weber’s Political Sociology: A Pessimistic Vision of a Rationalized World, ed. Ronald Glassman and Vatro Murvar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 155–74. 53. Although Parsons and other structural functionalists emphasize the centrality of moral integration for the achievement of system maintenance, I think the essence of the story is that the expansion of the systemic imperatives of administrative capitalist logics requires an increasing moral integration of individuals. Both system and social integration come under the same constitutive logics. See my more elaborate discussion in Michael J. Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 123–50. 54. Against Bell’s thesis of modern capitalism’s divergence into different realms, Ernest Mandel argues that “late capitalism, far from representing a ‘postindustrial society,’ thus appears as the period in which all branches of the economy are fully industrialized for the first time; to which one could further add the increasing mechanization of the sphere of circulation . . . and the increasing mechanization of the superstructure.” Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1975), 191. 55. Mumford, Myth of the Machine, 232 and passim. Taylor refers to a similar impulse, that of “the need for anti-structure” that accompanies any cosmological scheme, see Taylor, A Secular Age, 50ff. 56. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 479. 57. Bell, 84. 58. James O’Connor, Accumulation Crisis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 243. 59. Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 2016), 100. 60. See O’Connor, Accumulation Crisis, 160 and passim. 61. Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?, 102. 62. Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014), 61. 63. Dennis Wrong, “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology,” American Sociological Review 26, no. 2 (1961): 183–93, 190–91. 64. Herbert Hendin insightfully remarks, from the vantage point of the 1970s, on the historicity of psychopathologies: “Twenty years ago detachment, impaired ability to feel pleasure, and fragmentation were considered signs of schizophrenia. That adaptive measures that were considered extreme twenty years ago are

Notes    now found necessary by vast numbers of people is a measure of our social difficulties. People increasingly see life in terms of emotionless behavior. More and more people are coming to believe that human problems are insoluble in traditional human terms. Increasingly what united people in this culture is a sense of shared misfortune and depression, a feeling of impotence in the face of forces they feel they cannot shape or control.” Herbert Hendin, The Age of Sensation: A Psychoanalytic Exploration (New York: Norton, 1975), 334. 65. Cornelius Castoriadis observes that “on the level of individuals, a new closure is in the process of being established, which takes the form of a generalized conformism. It is my claim that we are living the most conformist phase in modern history. People say each individual is ‘free’—but in fact all people passively receive the sole meaning the institution and the social field propose to them and in fact impose on them: teleconsumption, which is made up of consumption, television, and consumption via television.” Cornelius Castoriadis, “Culture in a Democratic Society,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 338–48, 346. One need only see how this argument anticipates the internet as an exponent for patterns of consumption. 66. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 67. Lockwood defines this as the “institutional structure of a social system.” See David Lockwood, “Social Integration and System Integration,” in Explorations in Social Change, ed. George K. Zollschan and Walter Hirsch (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 244–57, 244. 68. Lockwood explains this: “For, given the power structure, the nature of the value system is of signal importance for the genesis, intensity, and direction of potential conflict. Particularly crucial is the way in which it structures the level of aspiration of different social strata.” Lockwood, 248. 69. For Luhmann, the essential feature of human social systems, of society itself, is the “communication media” that separate social systems from their environments. The problem is that there is no real theory of power in Luhmann’s grand systems theory. As he puts it: “society cannot be conceived without communication, nor can communication be conceived without society. Questions of genesis and morphogenesis cannot be answered by any hypothesis of origin and are obscured rather than resolved by the thesis that ‘the human being’ is genuinely social in nature.” Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), xiii, as well as 113–250. Also see Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 137– 75. The problem here is that although communication and information systems are essential for understanding the postindustrial cybernetic society, more essential are the forms of power that control and shape the systems and forms of

  Notes communication and information itself. Social morphogenesis can only be really grasped via a theory of power, of social dominance, not merely by a theory of society that lacks a central role for social power and authority. 70. See the discussion in David Lockwood, “Civic Integration and Class Formation,” British Journal of Sociology 47, no. 3 (1996): 531–50. 71. For a more extended discussion of “constitutive domination,” see Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory; and Michael J. Thompson, “The Two Faces of Domination in Republican Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 17, no. 1 (2018): 44–64. 72. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974), 128. chapter 2 1. David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 32. 2. Quentin Skinner, “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 293–309; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3. This element of a functionalist explanation of domination is therefore distinct from the structuralist view, where individuals come simply to internalize norms that produce “real interests” in the norms and practices they perform. For this view, see Jeffrey C. Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 72ff. Louis Althusser, who refers to this process as “interpellation,” also misses this element of what happens to the value orientations of individuals, providing instead a more mechanistic conception of the relation between subjects and their institutional contexts. The functionalist account sees the norms as originating in the institutional framework but also as shaping and adapting the agency of individuals, as well as their own justification of those institutional goals and norms, even if they are against their more object interests. In the end, this creates a more general predisposition to authority and even, in some spheres, an investment in forms of hierarchical relations. 4. See Pettit, Republicanism, 51ff. 5. See Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism; Quentin Skinner, “Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power,” in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. C. Laborde and J. Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Philip Pettit, “Freedom as Anti-Power,” Ethics 106, no. 3 (1996): 576–604; John Maynor, Republicanism in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); Frank Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Eric

Notes    MacGilvray, The Invention of Market Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 6. Pettit, Republicanism, 53. 7. Pettit, 59. 8. Weber states that “a minimum of voluntary compliance, or an interest in obedience (whether external or internal), is implied by any genuine domination relationship (Herrschaftsverhältnis).” Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1972), 122. Pettit’s account of domination therefore seems to me to capture more of an informal, premodern form of domination than the rationalized and institutionalized forms of control and subordination that pervade modern societies since, on his account, the dominated agent has his or her interests and preferences knowingly interfered with arbitrarily by another. For a discussion of this weakness in Pettit’s theory, see M. Costa, “Freedom as Non-domination, Normativity, and Indeterminacy,” Journal of Value Inquiry 41, nos. 2–4 (2007): 291–307. 9. Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,1957). 10. C. Nadeau, “Non-domination as a Moral Ideal,” in Republicanism: History, Theory and Practice, ed. D. Weinstock and C. Nadeau (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 123. 11. Others have pointed to this problematic in Pettit’s work. Sharon Krause argues that “the requirement that interference must be ‘arbitrary’ if it is to count as domination means that the non-arbitrary constraints on individual choice imposed by legitimate laws do not entail domination but are consistent with liberty.” Sharon Krause, “Beyond Non-domination: Agency, Inequality and the Meaning of Freedom,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39, no. 2 (2013): 187–208, 189. 12. Lovett, General Theory of Domination, 89. 13. I borrow these terms, although not the concepts attached to them, from Andrews Reath, who uses them in a very different way and within a very different context. See his “Self-Legislation and Duties to Oneself,” in Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory (New York: Oxford University Press), 231–49. Robert Dahl also uses similar language, but his typology of power relations leaves no room for the functionalist view of power that I am suggesting here. More specifically, the concept of a “source” in my account will be rooted in the value systems that are used to secure power relations, and these value systems come to inhere themselves within the consciousness of subjects making power relations valid in some basic sense—basic enough to allow the relation of authority to sustain itself. For Dahl, power is still formulated differently: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2, no. 3 (1957): 201–15, 202–3. But this still leaves open the problem of the capacity of social institutions

  Notes to shape subjects and their values to see as valid forms of authority to the extent that B would not otherwise tend to do what A commands, at least in some minimal and basic sense. 14. Cf. Dahl, “The Concept of Power.” 15. In this sense, theories of oppression or domination that require all agents to be cognizant of their oppressive or dominating actions miss the ways that superordinates and subordinates are parts of rationalized systems that can obscure the power relations. For instance, Ann E. Cudd argues that “for every social group that is oppressed there are correlative social groups whose members benefit, materially or psychologically, from this oppression. . . . To be an oppressor . . . one needs to be a member of a privileged group, to gain from oppression of another social group, to intend to so gain, and to act to realize that intention by contributing to the oppression of the oppressed group from whose oppression one gains.” Ann E. Cudd, Analyzing Oppression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 25. But this seems to me too strong a condition for understanding the systemic nature of domination in modern societies, as I will show through the remainder of this chapter. 16. Cf. James Coleman, Power and the Structure of Society (New York: Norton, 1974). 17. Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970). 18. Effectively, when the source of domination no longer has potency, the domination relationship will dissolve, unless the subject is able to resort to force, coercion, or violence to maintain it. In premodern forms of domination, when the master no longer has legal authority to own his slaves, or the wife is allowed to divorce the abusive husband, the source of domination weakens and the object of domination is no longer under the power of the subject. But in modern domination, the source is the value or norm of legitimacy that both subject and object utilize to maintain the authority relation. But once that belief or that norm breaks down, the systemic nature of control will also disintegrate. I think this counters Lovett’s argument: “the claim that beliefs themselves can literally dominate persons or groups should also be rejected because it is naive. It tempts us to think that by merely sweeping away some false beliefs or other we can, by that act alone, liberate people from domination.” Lovett, General Theory of Domination, 89. Modern forms of domination, I am arguing here, require the maintenance of such values, norms, and beliefs that allow modern hierarchical authority relations to sustain themselves. Resisting modern domination relations must therefore begin with the erosion of those sources of domination. 19. See Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), 209–10. 20. Cecile Laborde, “Republicanism and Global Justice: A Sketch,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 1 (2010): 48–69, 57.

Notes    21. Clarissa Hayward, “What Can Political Freedom Mean in a Multicultural Democracy?,” Political Theory 39, no. 4 (2011): 468–97, 483. 22. Jeffrey Isaac, for instance, correctly states that “the concept of domination thus refers neither to a contingent regularity nor to a mere social difference; it refers to a structurally asymmetrical relationship, whereby one element of the relationship has power over another in virtue of its structural power to direct the practices of the other.” Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory, 84. But Isaac then goes on to quote Weber’s thesis that the ruler has power over a subordinate only when “the ruled had made the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake” (85). This seems difficult to reconcile with the structuralist thesis that Isaac espouses, since Weber is referring to the neo-Kantian problem of the agent’s value orientations in coming to see the domination relation as valid and legitimate. It is not the case that the agent performs the practices and adopts the norms because they are simply repeated; rather, it is because they come to have a certain legitimacy that goes beyond merely following rules and norms. Indeed, these norms and practices, as well as the institutional contexts within which they are embedded, cease to be viewed as objects in need of justification or worthy of critique. In other words, they result from the fact that the agent comes to see them as legitimate. 23. For the former view, see Pettit, Republicanism, as well as the more derivative discussion in Lovett, General Theory of Domination, 119ff. 24. For a neglected discussion of this phenomenon, see Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 91ff; Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern Social Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1940), 45–51; and Michael J. Thompson, “Rethinking Republican Freedom: A Critique of the Concept of Freedom as Non-domination,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39, no. 3 (2013): 277–98. 25. Lovett, General Theory of Domination, 111. 26. Mary Douglas comments on this dimension of institutions and subject formation: “institutions systematically direct individual memory and channel our perceptions into forms compatible with the relations they authorize. They fix processes that are essentially dynamic, they hide their influence, and they rouse our emotions to a standardized pitch on standardized issues. Add to this that they endow themselves with rightness and send their mutual corroboration cascading through all the levels of our information system. No wonder they easily recruit us into joining their narcissistic self-contemplation.” Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 92. 27. Arthur Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 80. 28. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), 91.

  Notes 29. See John Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 79–110. 30. As Hayward argues on this point, “It is, after all, not only the force exerted by other human agents, but also the force exerted by deeply ingrained habits, by unexamined traditions, and by excessive routinization that Habermas and Habermasians oppose to ‘the force of the better argument.’” Hayward, “What Can Political Freedom Mean?,” 484. The functionalist account agrees with this position but holds that there is a deeper, more sustained problem in that forms of consciousness and value orientation come to be routinized internally by the social institutions that seek to secure domination relations. 31. Rousseau famously remarks on this point: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité, in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 164. 32. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 43; see also Anthony Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory (New York: Basic Books. 1977), 100. 33. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 32. 34. As David Easton argues: “If A sends a message to B and B adopts this message as the basis of his own behavior without evaluating it in terms of his own standards of what is desirable under the circumstances, we can say that A has exercised authority over B.” David Easton, “The Perception of Authority and Political Change,” in Authority: Nomos I, ed. Carl Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 179. Also see the discussion in Dennis Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002), 35–64. 35. L. Stein, “The Sociology of Authority,” American Sociological Society 18 (1923): 116–20, 117. 36. Talcott Parsons argues on this point that authority is “an institutionalized complex of norms which do not involve the prescription, permission, or prohibition of particular acts, but which on a general level define the conditions under which, in the given social structure and given statuses and situations within it, acts of others within the same collectivity may be prescribed, permitted, or prohibited.” Talcott Parsons, “Authority, Legitimation, and Political Action,” in Authority: Nomos I, ed. Carl Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 205. This means that modern forms of authority rely on the dominance of certain values that orient individuals toward compliance to others that occupy roles of authority assigned by the structure and function of any given institution.

Notes    37. Mary Douglas notes on this theme that “in most forms of society hidden sequences catch individuals in unforeseen traps and hurl them down paths they never chose.” Douglas, How Institutions Think, 42. 38. Cf., e.g., Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31–57; Robert Lane, “The Fear of Equality,” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1958): 35–51; and John Jost, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo,” Political Psychology 25, no. 6 (2004): 881–919. 39. Simmel, Sociology of Georg Simmel, 250. 40. For the most part, individuals within domination or authority relations are unable to give coherent rationales for why they ought to, and why they ultimately do, obey those authorities. In this sense, the shaping of one’s personality toward the acceptance of authority is most clearly discernible. Hierarchical authority, or domination, is sustained in large part by those subject to domination. As Sidanius and Pratto argue: “within relatively stable group-based hierarchies, most of the activities of subordinates can be characterized as cooperative of, rather than subversive to, the system of group-based domination. Furthermore, we suggest that it is subordinates’ high level of both passive and active cooperation with their own oppression that provides systems of group-based social hierarchy with their remarkable degrees of resiliency, robustness, and stability. Therefore, seen from this perspective, social hierarchy is not maintained primarily by the oppressive behavior of dominants, but by the deferential and obsequious behavior of subordinates.” Sidanius and Pratto, Social Dominance, 44. John Searle posits a parallel argument: “all political power, though exercised from above, comes from below. Because the system of status functions requires collective acceptance, all genuine political power comes from the bottom up.” Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology, 99–100. 41. See Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft; Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Authority: The Efficient Imperative,” in Authority: Nomos I, ed. Carl Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). 42. In particular, Weber’s discussion concerns the move from “charismatic” to “traditional” forms of authority. Weber uses this concept to explain the transformation of religions based on charismatic authority of one person (Jesus, Moses, Muhammed, etc.) toward a stable belief system after their deaths. Routinization of charisma was the means by which authority over religious groups was maintained after the charismatic leaders were no longer there to maintain cohesion of the religious identity of the group. See Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 140–47. 43. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft; see also W. G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 56–63.

  Notes Simmel makes a similar point: “Society confronts the individual with precepts. He becomes habituated to their compulsory character until the cruder and subtler means of compulsion are no longer necessary. His nature may thereby be so formed or deformed that he acts by these precepts as if on impulse, with a consistent and direct will which is not conscious of any law.” Simmel, Sociology of Georg Simmel, 255. 44. In a different fashion, Rousseau also points this out: “For an arbitrary government to be legitimate, it would therefore have to be necessary in each generation for the people to be master of its acceptance or rejection. But in that event this government would no longer be arbitrary.” Rousseau, Du contrat social, 34. 45. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Heinemann, 1947), 148. 46. Isaac, Power and Marxist Theory, 99. An interesting alternative view is put forth by Sharon Krause, who argues, using racial exclusion as an example, that the “biased social cognitions and racial meanings that stigma entails set up a system of social interactions in which unfreedom emerges without any sovereign dominators.” Krause, “Beyond Non-domination,” 194. But this could be reversed in that structural forms of exclusion and power help shape and sustain value systems that orient biased social cognition, such as when residential patterns undersocialize individuals to other races and so on. The biased social cognition therefore comes to secure structural forms of bias and exclusion. 47. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 544. 48. The subjective character and cognitive patterns of individuals must be stressed over the more mechanistic forms of action that seek to explain the domination relation. On this account, it is simply the recognition and following of rules within institutional contexts that grants power of some institutional agents over others. The functionalist account, however, maintains that the very subjective, character-based elements of the personality must be shaped in ways that affect the cognitive and cathectic relations to others in order for power to be granted. It is not enough that we construct others as having status functions; they need to have their values oriented toward that “legitimate” authority behind which lies a hierarchy of extractive social relations. 49. Parsons, “Authority, Legitimation, and Political Action,” 198. Mary Douglas claims correctly on this point that “the shared symbolic universe and the classifications of nature embody the principles of authority and coordination. In such a system, problems of legitimacy are solved because individuals carry the social order around inside their heads and project it out onto nature.” Douglas, How Institutions Think, 13. Of course, taking this in relation to my argument here, this shared symbolic universe is shaped and constructed by the forms of material power that individuals can wield. 50. M. Marini, “Social Values and Norms,” in Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. E. Borgatta and R. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 2828; cf. R.

Notes    Williams, “Change and Stability in Values and Value Systems: A Sociological Perspective,” in Understanding Human Values: Individual and Societal, ed. M. Rokeach (New York: Free Press, 1979). 51. Simmel, Sociology of Georg Simmel, 254. 52. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Power and Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). chapter 3 1. John Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 85, 89, 88. Also see John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1996), 15–29; and John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 42–60. 2. Searle, Making the Social World, 101–2. 3. See the discussions in Åsa Andersson, Power and Social Ontology (Malmö: Bokbox, 2007); and Olimpia G. Loddo, “Background Power in Searle’s Social Ontology” (Mimeo: Università degli Studi di Milano, 2012). 4. Searle, Making the Social World, 160. 5. For an expanded discussion of Searle’s conception of the Background and its relation to Background power, see Loddo, “Background Power in Searle’s Social Ontology.” 6. Max Weber employs the terms domination (Herrschaft) and authority (Autorität) interchangeably in his discussion of social power. See Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1972). 7. Benedict Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1991), 178. 8. Searle, Making the Social World, 151. 9. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Frank Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 10. Frank Hindriks, “Constitutive Rules, Language and Ontology,” Erkenntnis 71, no. 2 (2009): 253–75, 254. 11. Hindriks, 254. 12. Searle, Making the Social World, 158–59. 13. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1947), 148. 14. See Barrington Moore Jr., Political Power and Social Theory (New York: Harper, 1958), 179–96; and Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1986). 15. Cf. Robin Celikates, “Recognition, System Justification and Reconstructive Critique,” in Reconnaissance, identité et intégration sociale, ed. Christian

  Notes Lazzeri and Soraya Nour (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2009); Arto Laitinen, “Recognition, Acknowledgment, and Acceptance,” in Recognition and Social Ontology, ed. Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 309–47; Titus Stahl, “Verdinglichung als Pathologie zweiter Ordnung,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59, no. 5 (2011): 731–46; and Italo Testa, “Social Space and the Ontology of Recognition,” in Recognition and Social Ontology, ed. Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 287–308. 16. See Italo Testa, “Ontology of the False State: On the Relation between Critical Theory, Social Philosophy, and Social Ontology,” Journal of Social Ontology 1, no. 2 (2015): 271–300. 17. See Douglas, How Institutions Think, esp. 9–20. 18. Sally Haslanger, “What Is a Social Practice?,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82 (2018): 231–47, 240. 19. A central limitation of the analytic approach to social ontology characteristic of Searle and others such as Margaret Gilbert is their lack of a historical or developmental perspective of our collective-intentional agency. As Barbara Fultner has pointed out: “Both assume that the agent is a fully formed autonomous individual subject—someone capable of making a joint commitment or of assuming that the other person will do her part. Thus they lack a developmental perspective.” Barbara Fultner, “Collective Agency and Intentionality: A Critical Theory Perspective,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. Michael J. Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 523–45, 528. 20. Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 38. 21. Tomasello, 20. 22. Tomasello, 301. Cf. L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 52–57. 23. Tomasello, Becoming Human, 301. 24. See Tomasello, 254ff. 25. For important discussions on this theme, see Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Marina Oshana, Personal Autonomy in Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and Fultner, “Collective Agency and Intentionality.” 26. Cf. Titus Stahl, “Verdinglichung als Pathologie zweiter Ordnung,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59, no. 5 (2011): 731–46. 27. For some, the neo-Kantian valences of Lukács’s concept of reification are problematic. It seems to me, however, that Lukács counterposes the problem of reification as a neo-Kantian structure of cognition to the dialectical, Hegelian account of nonreified, rational cognition. For more on the neo-Kantian aspects

Notes    of Lukács’s understanding of reification, see George Lichtheim, Georg Lukács (New York: Viking, 1970); and Tom Rockmore, Irrationalism: Lukács and the Marxist View of Reason (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 28. See the important discussion in Rüdiger Dannemann, Das Prinzip Verdinglichung: Studie zur Philosophie Georg Lukács’ (Frankfurt: Sendler, 1987), 131–51; see also the sociological account of the reification of consciousness by Peter L. Berger and Stanley Pullberg, “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness,” History and Theory 4, no. 2 (1965): 198–226. 29. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 89. 30. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 262. 31. As Andrew Feenberg notes: “As a form of objectivity, reification is in the first instance practical rather than theoretical. In constantly buying and selling commodities, including intellectual products, or working in mechanized industries, or engaging with bureaucratic administrations, the members of a capitalist society live the reified relationships that construct that society. The reified form of objectivity of the society gives coherence and meaning to social objects arising from and feeding back into the practical relationship to those objects, and it shapes the corresponding subjectivity of the atomized actors.” Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2014), 76–77. 32. Although he is no doubt unaware of the fact, Searle’s exploration of Background power leads him to touch on the basic principle behind the concept of reification when he writes: “Many people simply go along, unreflectively, with social situations in which they find themselves. But this can amount to a form of inauthenticity or even bad faith, because they are creating desire independent [of] reasons which are rationally binding on them but which they might not have created if they had thought about the question.” Searle, Making the Social World, 132. 33. Hindriks notes that “status rules regulate directly, because their formulations specify powers, rights, and obligations: they explicate the normative attributes that are characteristic of a particular status. Constitutive rules contain the conditions that have to be met in a particular context for a certain status to be instantiated. If a constitutive rule is collectively accepted and its conditions are indeed met, the relevant status will indeed be instantiated.” Hindriks, “Constitutive Rules, Language and Ontology,” 265. 34. This distinction is based on that of Raimo Tuomela, for whom authority in any group context can be either external or internal. He describes the difference: “In the case of internally authorized operatives and leaders for a group, the authority they bear is given by the members, e.g., through their collective

  Notes acceptance. . . . The authorization concerns group-central matters and the authoritative powers are over the group members qua members. The case of externally authorized leaders is similar, but its source is group-external, e.g., based on another group’s dominance.” Raimo Tuomela, Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 160. 35. George Gabel argues on this point that reification can be seen to occur when any social value “ceases to be a matter of personal achievement and becomes dependent on ‘participation’ in a valuing factor ‘external to the person.’” Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: A Study on Reification (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 76. This means that the normative and evaluative powers of the reified subject are tied to an externally authored and structured set of norms and values that are simply internalized by the subject instead of being spontaneously created by him or her. In a sense, this adds an importance valence to the concept of reification insofar as it can be shown to affect not only cognitive but also evaluative and cathectic layers of the personality and self. Nevertheless, the main structural point remains the same: that we are dealing with a situation wherein the subject is gradually socialized by external, heteronomously structured values and norms. 36. Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 283. 37. I have discussed the concept of constitutive power and constitutive domination, respectively, in Michael J. Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Also see my essay “The Two Faces of Domination in Republican Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 17 no. 1 (2018): 44–64. 38. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 178–79. 39. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 180. 40. Lukács writes that this is an insight implicit already in Marx, whose “method always operates with concepts of existence graduated according to the various levels of praxis.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 127–28. 41. Cf. David-Hillel Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). 42. For some recent treatments of Lukács’s approach to ontology, see Guido Oldrini, “Die ethische Perspektive von Lukács’ Ontologie,” Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft 12/13 (2012): 147–66; and Titus Stahl, “Praxis und Totalität: Lukács’ Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins im Lichte aktueller sozialontologischer Debatten,” Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft 14/15 (2015): 123–50. Also see Michael Bratman, “Shared Cooperative Activity,” Philosophical Review 101, no. 2 (1992): 327–41; and Lucien Goldmann, “Reflections on History and Class Consciousness,” in Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, ed. István Mészáros (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971).

Notes    43. See the broader discussions in Pettit, Republicanism; and Lovett, General Theory of Domination. chapter 4 1. Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 12. 2. See, e.g., Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Michael Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984): 81–96; Bruce Ackerman, “Why Dialogue?,” Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 1 (1989): 5–22; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 3. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Heinemann, 1941). 4. Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York: Anchor, 1970), 259. 5. See Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986). 6. Melvin Seeman, “Powerlessness and Knowledge: A Comparative Study of Alienation and Learning,” Sociometry 30, no. 2 (1967): 105–23, 106. 7. See Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). 8. See, e.g., Franz Pappenheim, The Alienation of Modern Man (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959); Melvin Seeman, “The Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review 24, no. 6 (1959): 783–91; Gaylord LeRoy, “The Concept of Alienation: An Attempt at a Definition,” in Marxism and Alienation, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965); Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. Tom Bottomore (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961); and Bertell Ollman, Alienation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 9. Rahel Jaeggi has attempted to reconstruct the concept of alienation as a problem of “appropriation” (Aneignung), which she sees as a practical relation to oneself and to the world, a relation of “working-through, of assimilating, of interiorizing, in which that which is appropriated is similarly stamped, shaped and formed.” Rahel Jaeggi, Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005), 57. Alienation therefore becomes the lack of these kinds of self- and world-relations, resulting in an inability to have any ownership or to be able to dispose of that which is your own (Über-sich-nichtverfügen-Können). But this analysis glosses over the more concrete problem of the mechanisms of how alienated forms of consciousness are formed. The move to intersubjectivity that thinkers such as Jaeggi promote moves us away from the

  Notes problem of the actual cognitive mechanisms that are affected and how this can lead to an alienation from moral and political concerns. 10. See, e.g., Lauren Langman, “Globalization, Alienation, and Identity: A Critical Approach,” in The Evolution of Alienation, ed. Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 11. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization,” in Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, ed. D. Goslin (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969); Lawrence Kohlberg, Charles Levine, and Alexandra Hewer, Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics (Basel: Karger, 1983); Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 12. M. Marini, “Social Values and Norms,” in Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. E. Borgatta and R. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 2828. 13. Richard Williams, “Change and Stability in Values and Value Systems: A Sociological Perspective,” in Understanding Human Values: Individual and Societal, ed. M. Rokeach (New York: Free Press, 1979), 16. 14. This can be explicitly linked to the problem of reification of consciousness and, in a sense, is another way of saying the same thing. As Joseph Gabel has argued, “Value is essentially a corollary of dereification; for its part, reification also entails a devaluation.” Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: A Study on Reification (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 69. 15. This idea has been raised earlier, but in a somewhat different form, by Gabel, who refers to it as “axiological alienation.” Gabel argues that “we can speak of axiological alienation when the value ceases to be a matter of personal achievement and becomes dependent ‘participation’ in a valuing factor ‘external to the person,’ such as the racial factor.” Gabel, False Consciousness, 76. But Gabel does not explore the mechanisms of this kind of reification, a burden that I take on here. 16. See. e.g., Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 17. More specifically, Rousseau argues that it is the “conventions” (moers) that we adopt, rather than any manifestation of raw power or violence, that are responsible for the inequality of power found in any social order: “Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow man, and since force does not give rise to any right, conventions therefore remain the basis of all legitimate authority among men.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 33. 18. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1951), 468.

Notes    19. In this sense, I take Luhmann’s interesting thesis about the relation between “morality,” which he sees as “a special kind of communication that carries with it indications of approval or disapproval,” and “ethics,” which he sees as a “reflection on morality.” Niklas Luhmann, “Paradigm Lost: On the Ethical Reflection of Morality,” Thesis Eleven 29 (1991): 82–94, 84. What results, according to Luhmann, is “the victory of law over morality” (86) in order to overcome the crisis in modern societies that are unable to achieve moral integration owing to its differentiation into functional systems. 20. Cf. James S. Coleman, Power and the Structure of Society (New York: Norton, 1974). 21. Seeman, “Powerlessness and Knowledge.” 22. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 89. 23. Lukács further notes on this theme that “the atomization of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that—for the first time in history—the whole of society is subjected to, or tends to be subjected to, a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 92. 24. Cf. Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (London: Verso, 1989). 25. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89. 26. See Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814–34. 27. S. Chaiken, R. Giner-Sorolla, and S. Chen, “Beyond Accuracy: Defense and Impression Motives in Heuristic and Systemic Information Processing,” in The Psychology of Action: Linking Cognition and Motivation to Behavior, ed. P. Gollwitzer and J. Bargh (New York: Guilford, 1996), 553–78. 28. See Philip Tetlock, “Cognitive Style and Political Belief Systems in the British House of Commons,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (1986): 365–75. 29. This is a central element of false-consciousness in that, as Marx explained with commodity fetishism, the individual is unable to grasp the ontological totality of the commodity, seeing only its immediate exchange value rather than the complex social relations that make it a manifestation of social power. In the problem of alienated moral cognition, “analytic concepts” break the world up and isolate its elements in ways that render its true character inaccessible. 30. This becomes the real backbone of the phenomenon of reification: the inability actively to assess the validity of the norms and institutions that constitute my subjectivity and my social context more broadly.

  Notes 31. Jody L. Davis and Caryl E. Rusbult, “Attitude Alignment in Close Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 65–84. 32. H. Simon, “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition,” Psychological Review 74 (1967): 29–39; S. Chaiken, “The Heuristic Model of Persuasion,” in Social Influence: The Ontario Symposium, ed. M. Zanna, J. Olson, and C. Herman (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987). 33. See Harry Dahms, “Does Alienation Have a Future? Recapturing the Core of Critical Theory,” in The Evolution of Alienation, ed. Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 34. Jules Henry observed on this point that “it is only when he has a family that a man can fully come into his pseudo-self, the high-rising standard of living, for on whom but his family does a man shower the house, the car, clothes, refrigerator, etc. . . . But in addition to this, autonomy, peace, contentment, security, relaxation, co-operation, freedom, self-respect, recognition, even challenge and creativity must be sought in the family. . . . American family life is shaped in large part by the industrial system. The economic system prevents involvement; it is within the family that people struggle to become involved with one another.” Jules Henry, Culture against Man (New York: Vintage, 1963), 128. This magnifies the problem of the turn away from civic life and the very different value system that public reason requires for it to be an effective tool in democratic life. The slide in emphasis from the latter to the former means an increasing weakening of moral-cognitive capacities. Also see R. Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); and Roger Salerno, “Alienated Communities: Between Aloneness and Connectedness,” in The Evolution of Alienation, ed. Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 35. See Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980). 36. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan. 1960), 254. 37. Sebastian de Grazia, The Political Community: A Study in Anomie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). chapter 5 1. Friedrich Engels, “Letter from Engels to Franz Mehring,” in Marx and Engels Correspondence (New York: International Publishers, 1968). 2. See, e.g., John Jost, “Negative Illusions: Conceptual Clarification and Psychological Evidence Concerning False Consciousness,” Political Psychology 16, no. 2 (1995): 397–424; and W. G. Runciman, “False Consciousness,” Philosophy 44, no. 170 (1970): 303–13.

Notes    3. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970). 4. Cf. Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); M. Augoustinos, “Ideology, False Consciousness, and Psychology,” Theory and Psychology 9, no. 3 (1999): 295–312. 5. George Lichtheim summarizes this viewpoint: “Alienated social activity is to Marx what alienated mental activity is to Hegel. For both, the distinction between Reality and Appearance is involved in the manner in which real processes are transformed into apparently fixed and stable characters. Reality is process, appearance has the form of isolated objects. The task of critical thinking is to grasp the relations which constitute these apparent objects.” George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), 19. 6. Joseph Gabel argues on this point that “false consciousness and ideology are two forms of non-dialectical (reified) perception of dialectical realities, in other words, two aspects (or better: two degrees) of the rejection of the dialectic. . . . False consciousness is a diffused state of mind; ideology is a theoretical crystallization.” Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: A Study in Reification (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 11. I will come back to this formulation of false consciousness as “diffused thinking” as the argument proceeds below. 7. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, 48. 8. See Richard Eyerman, “False Consciousness and Ideology in Marxist Theory,” Acta Sociologica 24, nos. 1–2 (1981): 43–56. 9. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin, 1980), 97. 10. Lukács claims that “irrationalism begins with this (necessary, irrevocable, but always relative) discrepancy between the intellectual reflection and the objective original. The source of the discrepancy lies in the fact that the tasks directly presented to thought in a given instance, as long as they are still tasks, still unresolved problems, appear in a form which at first gives the impression that thought, the forming of concepts, breaks down in the face of reality, that the reality confronting thought represents an area beyond reason” (Lukács, 99). 11. Lukács, 97–98. By “supra-rational” Lukács means intuition or some other nonrational mode of thinking. 12. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 323–24. 13. Gramsci sees that there is a kind of dual consciousness on the part of subordinate groups, where they work under the dominant concepts and ways of thought of the dominating group but also work through the subordinate status in the real world in everyday life. For an extension of this idea into ideology, see

  Notes D. Cheal, “Hegemony, Ideology and Contradictory Consciousness,” Sociological Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1979): 109–17. 14. Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 327. 15. By focusing on cognitive mechanisms and defective epistemic frames, I am distinguishing my approach from the empirically based research that places emphasis on attitudes to identify and define the features of false consciousness. See John Jost and M. R. Banaji, “The Role of Stereotyping in Systems-Justification and the Production of False Consciousness,” British Journal of Social Psychology 33 (1994): 1–27. This is not to say that attitudes are not also crucial in mapping the structures of false consciousness but that, in my view, the defective cognitive mechanisms are in fact responsible for the production and maintenance of these attitudes and opinion structures. 16. I agree with Ann E. Cudd that any account of false consciousness must be challenged “on three grounds: (1) its falsity, (2) its origin, (3) its implications for oppressive social relations.” See her Analyzing Oppression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 178 and passim. 17. See Adorno’s critique of Durkheim in this regard, where the notion of the conscience collective is seen as little more than the reproduction of the broader dominant ideas of society at large and, as a result, essentially false consciousness. For further discussion see T. W. Adorno “Einleitung zum ‘Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie,’” in Soziologische Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 280–353; and Tobias Hagens, “Conscience Collective or False Consciousness? Adorno’s Critique of Durkheim’s Sociology of Morals,” Journal of Classical Sociology 6, no. 2 (2006): 215–37. 18. The distinction obviously stems from Kant, but it can be seen through both Hegel and Marx. In Hegel, it comes through in the exploration of the defective forms of consciousness that make up the first five chapters of the Phenomenology of Mind; in Marx, it is at the center of his conception of “commodity fetishism” in Capital. 19. This concept of “automaticity” can be integrated into my discussion of false consciousness. See John A. Bargh, M. Chen, and L. Burrows, “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, no. 2 (1996): 230–44. 20. M. Lerner, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion (New York: Plenum, 1980). 21. Jon Elster, “Belief, Bias, and Ideology,” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis and S. Lukes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982): 123–48. 22. A. Greenwald, “The Totalitarian Ego: Fabrication and Revision of Personal History,” American Psychologist 35 (1980): 603–18. 23. Robert Lane, “The Fear of Equality,” American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 35–51.

Notes    24. Herbert Marcuse, “The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man,” in Five Lectures (Boston: Beacon. 1970), 47. 25. See Titus Stahl, “Verdinglichung als Pathologie zweiter Ordnung,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59, no. 5 (2011): 731–46; and Titus Stahl, “Ideologiekritik als Kritik Sozialer Praktiken: Eine expressivistische Rekonstruktion der Kritik Falschen Bewusstseins,” in Nach Marx: Philosophie, Kritik, Praxis, ed. R. Jaeggi and D. Loick (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2015). chapter 6 1. Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” in Critical Theory in Critical Times, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 153. 2. See Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: A Constructivist Theory of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 3. Andrew Feenberg, Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 133. 4. Max Weber, “The Sociology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1970), 293. 5. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 89. 6. Lukács, 89. 7. Lukács, 89. 8. Lukács, 112. 9. Lukács, 116. 10. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 1139b1 (my translation). Lukács will seek to develop this idea more fully in his Ontology, but even in History and Class Consciousness we can see he has this insight in view: “In his doctoral thesis Marx, more concrete and logical than Hegel, effected the transition from the question of existence and its hierarchy of meanings to the plane of historical reality and concrete praxis. ‘Didn’t the Moloch of the Ancients hold sway? Wasn’t the Delphic Apollo a real power in the life of the Greeks? In this context Kant’s criticism is meaningless.’ Unfortunately, Marx did not develop this idea to its logical conclusion although in his mature works his method always operates with concepts of existence graduated according to the various levels of praxis.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 127–28. 11. As Michael E. Brown notes: “the fact that capitalist political economy defines and therefore can be said to operate hegemonically across the entire terrain of economically relevant and economically dependent social life makes it difficult to speak sensibly in ways that are inconsistent with it. . . . The comprehensiveness of capitalist production, and the inevitable moral vacuum in the

  Notes local settings it inevitably leaves behind, are findings of the Marxian critique of ideology.” Michael E. Brown, The Production of Society: A Marxian Foundation for Social Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985), 101, 103. This is one reason to accept the implications of Lukács’s thesis that the totality is repatterned around the imperatives of capital once it penetrates the domain of culture. Andrew Feenberg notes, “‘Culture’ now refers to the unifying pattern of an entire society, including its typical artifacts, rituals, customs, and beliefs. The concept of culture points toward the common structures of social life. It assigns the researcher the problem of discovering the overarching paradigms of meaning and value that shape all the various spheres of society.” Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2014), 65. 12. Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 99. 13. Raz, 99. 14. For a more expanded treatment of this argument, see my previous discussion in Michael J. Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 27–36. 15. Andrew Feenberg notes, on this point, the common avenue of departure for both Lukács and Heidegger: “it inspired Heidegger and Lukács, who both accepted Lask’s breakthrough to a new kind of transcendental account of meaning that borders on ontology. Meaning is the ‘being’ of the phenomena through which we gain access to them as what they ‘are.’ Heidegger and Lukács went on to attempt to ground being on practice rather than subjectivity.” Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis, 75. I think the key idea here is that we need to move into the next stage, to that of a social ontology where meaning, as structured by normative frames of cognition, is the nexus of consciousness, which is infiltrated by social practices and the norms that ground them, thereby serving as the location of reification since that is the meeting point between fact and value, as well as thought and being. 16. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951), 228. 17. Herbert Marcuse, “The Obsolescence of the Freudian Conception of Man,” in Five Lectures (Boston: Beacon, 1970): 44–61, 47. 18. Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis, 66. 19. As Raz notes: “Statements of facts which are reasons for the performance of a certain action by a certain agent are the premises of an argument the conclusion of which is that there is a reason for the agent to perform the action or that he ought to do it.” Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 28. 20. See John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Michael J. Thompson, “Autonomy and Common Good: Interpreting Rousseau’s General Will,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25, no. 2 (2017): 266–85.

Notes    21. By background conditions, I mean, as Searle does: “The Background consists of all of those abilities, capacities, dispositions, ways of doing things, and general know-how that enable us to carry out our intentions and apply our intentional states.” Searle, Making the Social World, 31 and passim. 22. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1972), 532. 23. See my discussion of the implicit validity of norms and its application to the theory of reification in Michael J. Thompson, The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 114–26. 24. Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 61. 25. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 202. 26. Georg Lukács, “Literature and Democracy II,” in The Culture of People’s Democracy, ed. Tyrus Miller and Erik Bachman (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 75. 27. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 178. 28. Lukács, 198. 29. Lukács, 198. 30. Lukács, 262. chapter 7 1. John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 17. Also see the important essay by Frederick Solt, “The Social Origins of Authoritarianism,” Political Research Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2012): 703–13. 2. Paul Verhaeghe, What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014), 155. 3. Herbert Marcuse, “The Obsolescence of the Freudian Conception of Man,” in Five Lectures (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 50. 4. Maurice Stein pointed to this phenomenon in the 1950s in his studies of suburbia: “The secondary institutions thus emphatically affect the rhythms and patterns of family life, and the family with its generalized function is hardly in a position to resist the outside institution with its specific function, which, within limits, permits it to demand the individual’s participation.” Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 215 and passim. 5. Verhaeghe, What About Me?, 153–54. 6. Although these ideas of anabolic and katabolic were introduced by Freud in his The Ego and the Id in order to discuss the nature of drives within the intrapsychic structure of the ego, I have expanded them into categories of social

  Notes relations in order to understand the nature of social pathology more generally. See Michael J. Thompson, “An Ontological Account of Social Pathology,” in Social Pathology Diagnosis and Critical Theory: New Perspectives and Explorations, ed. Neal Harris (New York: Palgrave, 2021), 113–40. 7. See especially Axel Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundriß der demokratischen Sittlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011), 233–320. 8. Heinz Kohut points out that “the increasing frequency of self pathology, in particular, may be explained by the fact that the relevant psychotropic social factors—small families, absence of parents from the home, frequent change of servants, as well as decreasing use of servants in the home—promote either the creation of an understimulating, lonely environment for the child, and/or expose the child, without the opportunity for effective relief, to the pathogenic influence of a parent suffering from self pathology.” Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1977), 277. One of the core features of the modern means of molding a more docile social consciousness has been the capacity of mass media to downplay the nature of conflict in modern society. As Herbert I. Schiller has argued: “As presented by the national message-making apparatus, conflict is almost always an individual matter, in its manifestations and in its origin. The social roots of conflict just do not exist for the cultural-informational managers.” Herbert I. Schiller, The Mind Managers (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 17. It should be emphasized that this is seen most prevalently in the omnipresence of violence in news coverage without the social contexts that shape and cause them. 9. Kohut, Restoration of the Self, 269–70. 10. Kohut’s idea of the nuclear self is an endopsychic structure that “is the basis for or sense of being an independent center of initiative and perception, integrated with our most central ambitions and ideals and with our experience that our body and mind form a unit in space and a continuum in time. This cohesive and enduring psychic configuration, in connection with a correlated set of talents and skills that it attracts to itself or that develops in response to the demands of the ambitions and ideals of the nuclear self, forms the central sector of the personality.” Kohut, Restoration of the Self, 177–78. 11. Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle toward Self-Realization (New York: Norton, 1950), 159. 12. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 349–60, 356. 13. See my discussion of this thesis in Michael J. Thompson, The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 221–66; see also Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 14. See Philip Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Process Trauma and Dissociation (New York: Routledge, 2001). Also see the important discussion by

Notes    Donnel B. Stern, Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic, 1997). 15. Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces, 274. 16. Richard Sennett, Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974), 219. There is a real structural component to this psychosocial shift in that public life is constituted by specific kinds of relations-to-others. What liberal researchers tend to call “social capital,” or the density of social ties with others and the kinds of trust that emerge from them, can also be seen in this way—that is, as a distinctive sociorelational structure that encourages nonintimate but rather solidaristic forms of selfhood. For a more extended discussion, see Michael J. Thompson, “What Is Antiurbanism? A Theoretical Perspective,” in Fleeing the City: Studies in the Culture and Politics of Antiurbanism, ed. Michael J. Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 9–33. 17. For an important discussion, see Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 18. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 14. 19. Erich Fromm notes on this that “narcissism is the essence of all severe psychic pathology. For the narcissistically involved person, there is only one reality, that of his own thought processes, feelings and needs. The world outside is not experienced or perceived objectively, i.e., as existing in its own terms, conditions and needs.” Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart, 1955), 35–36. 20. Franz Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 293. 21. Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” 277. 22. See the interesting discussion of anxiety as a category of “socioanalysis”— i.e., as a shared pathology of psychic and sociorelational structures—in Joel Crombez, Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method: Toward a Theory and Practice of Critical Socioanalysis (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 238–53. 23. For an important discussion of the relation between early childhood attachments and anxiety and broader social manifestations of anomie, see Sebastian de Grazia, The Political Community: A Study in Anomie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 24. Richard Sennett observes on the pervasiveness of anxiety in the “new capitalist” economy: “Anxiety arises in ill-defined conditions, dread when pain or ill-fortune is well defined. Failure in the old pyramid was grounded in dread; failure in the new institution is shaped by anxiety. When firms are reengineered, employees frequently have no idea of what will happen to them, since modern forms of corporate restructuring are driven by issues of debt and stock-price value generated in financial markets, rather than by the internal workings of the firm.” Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 53.

  Notes 25. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009), 24. 26. William Davies, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason (New York: Norton, 2018), 113. 27. For this reworking of Freud’s theory of narcissism, see Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph M. Loewenstein, “Comments on the Formation of Psychic Structure,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2 (1946): 11–38. 28. See Arnold M. Cooper, “Narcissism in Normal Development,” in Character Pathology: Theory and Treatment, ed. M. R. Zales (New York: Brunner/ Mazel, 1984), 36–56. 29. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 14:102. 30. Freud, 102. 31. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Henry Holt, 1973), 230. 32. The culture of postindustrial capitalism not only creates but intensifies this trend. As Eli Zaretsky has observed: “As it turned out, the validation of narcissism helped facilitate the shift to the ‘dense interpersonal environment’ of postindustrial society, an environment that produces relationaships (‘networks’), not things, and in which image, personality, and interpersonal skills, not autonomy or knowledge, have the highest commercial value.” Eli Zaretsky, Political Freud: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 35. 33. In many ways, this Hegelian argument is already present in Rousseau’s theory of individual moral development and the development of civic consciousness in his Émile. See my discussion of this in Michael J. Thompson, “Rousseau’s Post-Liberal Self: Emile and the Formation of Republican Citizenship,” European Legacy 26, no. 1 (2021): 39–53. Rousseau rightly saw that a mature, civic form of selfhood (one capable of generating the “general will”) was only possible once the self was able to absorb a concept of itself as social and relational and, just as important, to change the structure of the self from being the center of its own attention (i.e., narcissism) and instead be able to extend one’s intentions and ethical strivings toward others. As he puts it in Émile: “The less the object of our care is immediately involved with ourselves, the less the illusion of particular interest is to be feared; the more one generalizes this interest, the more it becomes equitable, and the love of humanity is nothing other than the love of justice. . . . The more his cares are devoted to the happiness of others, the more they will be enlightened and wise and the less he will be deceived about what is good or bad.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’ éducation, in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 547–48.

Notes    34. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 12. 35. Zaretsky notes that historically, “the most immediate source of the shift away from psychoanalysis and toward a digital conception of mental life lay in the cybernetics movement of the 1940s–1950s, which bracketed questions of subjectivity and interiority to generate instead what we today call data: behavioral probabilities subject to prediction and control.” Zaretsky, Political Freud, 192. 36. Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 260. 37. Theories of recognition have proliferated in recent decades in social and political theory into something resembling an academic industry. They all too often fail to grasp their own neo-Idealist premises, however. It needs to be emphasized that what these theories assume is that recognitive relations are themselves necessary and sufficient conditions for healthy ego development. What they overlook, as astonishing as it may sound, is the extent to which these recognitive relations occur within, and themselves can express, defective, katabolic relations. I explore this problem of embeddedness in Michael J. Thompson, “Hierarchy, Social Pathology and the Failure of Recognition Theory,” European Journal of Social Theory 22, no. 1 (2019): 10–26. 38. Hans Loewald argues on this point that “in mature object relations, ideally the self engages in a return movement with objects that are differently organized and experienced by the self thanks to its own richer organization. It is this richer self-organization that can lead to novel ways of relating to objects while being enriched by their novelty. In some sense that novel way of relating with objects—most obvious in mature love relations—creatively destroys and reconstitutes, in a sea-change on the plane of object love, the old oedipal relations.” Hans Loewald, “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 384–404, 394. 39. Kohut, Restoration of the Self, 275. 40. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 23. 41. Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 5. 42. For an interesting discussion of healthy relations in groups, or what he refers to as “good group spirit,” see W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups (London: Tavistock, 1961). Specifically, Bion describes good group behavior as when members of a group possess (1) a common purpose; (2) common recognition of the group’s boundaries; (3) capacity to absorb new members; (4) freedom from internal subgroups developing rigid boundaries that exclude others; (5) recognition of value for each individual’s contribution; and (6) means to cope with discontent (25–26). 43. See Robert Pfaller, Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

  Notes 44. Barry Sanders, The Private Death of Public Discourse (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 39. 45. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London: Verso, 1998), 19. 46. As Joel Whitebook has argued: “Far from being opposed to autonomous individuality, decentration can be understood as an essential moment in its formation. This would mean that, rather than subverting the Enlightenment, the decentration of the subject is an essential moment in a product of enlightenment that is consistent with its own concept.” Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 92. chapter 8 1. See Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 475–90. 2. James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 539. 3. Jonathan Lear, “The Fundamental Rule and Fundamental Value of Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 63, no. 3 (2015): 510–27, 516. 4. Erich Fromm notes that “critical thinking is the only weapon and defense which man has against the dangers in life. If I do not think critically then indeed I am subject to all influences, to all suggestions, to all errors, to all lies which are spread out, with which I am indoctrinated from the first day on. One cannot be free, one cannot be one’s own, one cannot have one’s center in oneself unless one is able to think critically and—if you like—cynically.” Erich Fromm, The Art of Listening (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), 168. 5. For an interesting counterargument, see the discussion in Jennifer A. Frey, “Against Autonomy: Why Practical Reason Cannot Be Pure,” Manuscrito 41, no. 1 (2018): 159–93. 6. R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 34. 7. Hare, 89–90. 8. Charles Taylor, “The Motivation behind a Procedural Ethics,” in Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 337–60, 341. 9. Gerald Dworkin, “The Concept of Autonomy,” in The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 54–62, 61. 10. See Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): 5–20.

Notes    11. William James Booth, “The Limits of Autonomy: Marx’s Kant Critique,” in Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993): 245–75, 257. 12. Andrew Sayer, Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 128. 13. Sayer, 128. 14. Sayer, 129. 15. Beate Rössler, “Problems with Autonomy,” Hypatia 17, no. 4 (2002): 143– 62, 147. This view is echoed by Andrea C. Westlund: “an autonomous person is one who has the capacities that are exercised in autonomous choice and action, and an autonomous life is one led by an agent who successfully exercises these capacities to a significant extent over time.” Andrea C. Westlund, “Rethinking Relational Autonomy,” Hypatia 24, no. 4 (2009): 26–49, 28. 16. Rössler, “Problems with Autonomy,” 149. Elsewhere, Rössler argues that “Denn individuelle Freiheit kann nicht auf ihre sozialen Bedingungen reduziert werden. Autonomie bedeutet gerade, sich aus bestimmen sozialen Kontexten und Bedingungen befreien, sich von ihnen emanzipieren zu können.” Beate Rössler, Autonomie: Ein Versuch über das gelungene Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2017), 322. 17. Catriona Mackenzie, “Relational Autonomy, Normative Authority and Perfectionism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 39, no. 4 (2008): 512–33, 527. 18. Mackenzie, 527. 19. Westlund, “Rethinking Relational Autonomy,” 42. 20. Also see the important discussion in Paul Verhaeghe, What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014), 145–80. 21. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 290–318, 310. 22. T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1974), 132. 23. John Christman, The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Sociohistorical Selves (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 136. 24. John MacMurray argues on this point that “as subject the Self stands ‘over against’ the world, which is its object. The Self as subject then is not part of the world it knows, but withdrawn from it, and so, in conception, outside it or other than its object. But to be part of the world is to exist, while to be excluded from the world is to be non-existent. It follows that the Self exists as agent but not as subject.” John MacMurray, The Self as Agent (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 91 and passim. 25. This idea of self-consciousness owes much to Ernst Tugendhat’s formulation of the problem of self-consciousness. See Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 200–236.

  Notes 26. Hare, Freedom and Reason, 88. 27. Catriona Mackenzie, “Three Dimensions of Autonomy: A Relational Analysis,” in Autonomy, Oppression and Gender, ed. A. Veltman and M. Piper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15–42, 17–18. 28. Sayer, Why Things Matter to People, 6. 29. Volker Gerhardt rightly points out that “Alle teilen sich in den Grundbestand des von der eigenen Population erschlossenen Daseins. Das die physische Wirklichkeit durchgängig machende Prinzip der Entsprechung von actio und reactio gilt auch unter den Bedingungen der Sozialität: Wo man miteinander in Berührung, in sozialer Verbindung its, tangiert jede Bewegung des einen die des Anderen.” Volker Gerhardt, Selbstbestimmung: Das Prinzip der Individualität (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 435. 30. I have developed this thesis in more depth in Michael J. Thompson, “Erich Fromm and the Ontology of Social Relations,” in Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism and the Future, ed. Kieran Durkin and Joan Braun (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 21–39. 31. I have developed the categories of anabolic and katabolic structures of social relations as a theory of social pathology in Michael J. Thompson, “An Ontological Account of Social Pathology,” in Social Pathology Diagnosis and Critical Theory: New Perspectives and Explorations, ed. Neal Harris (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 32. I provide a more elaborate discussion of ontological coherence in Michael J. Thompson, The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 302–8. 33. Contrast this view with Lucas Swain’s idea of “ethical autonomy” in his Ethical Autonomy: The Rise of Self-Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 34. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 168. 35. Tugendhat, 171.

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Index

Adorno, T. W., 13, 223, 246 alienated moral consciousness, 130, 139, 141–142, 147–148 alienation, 2, 5, 12, 21, 23, 27, 36, 55, 57– 58, 62, 129–139, 141, 143, 145–151, 169, 193, 200, 202, 206, 208–210, 214, 218, 221, 224, 248, 252, 269, 271 anabolic relations, 199, 201–202, 210, 217, 261 anaclitic self, 216–217, 226 anxiety, 15, 18, 138, 194–197, 199, 207– 212, 218, 220–221, 223–224 apraxia, 147 Arendt, Hannah, 191 Aristotle, 177, 181, 224, 240 atrophied moral cognition, 131–132, 134– 135, 149 authenticity, 236, 239, 241–243, 245– 247, 253, 255, 267 authority, 1, 4, 15–16, 19, 33, 35, 38, 41, 47–49, 51–52, 54–55, 58, 61, 66–67, 69, 72, 74, 76–77, 79–85, 87–94, 96, 102–103, 107–108, 113, 116, 119, 131, 133, 135, 138, 140, 149, 163, 165–166, 175, 185–186, 188, 193, 196, 198, 201, 205, 218–219, 235–236, 240, 255 automaton conformity, 132, 164 autonomy, 2–3, 10–11, 13, 16, 21, 23–26, 31–32, 34–37, 41, 45, 52, 62, 68–69, 71–73, 75, 125, 129–130, 133, 136–138, 146, 176, 193, 195, 198, 201–202, 209, 212, 215–216, 219–220, 222–224, 226, 229–263, 265–271

Bell, Daniel, 57–60, 65, 230 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 17 Bromberg, Philip, 203–204 capital, 4–5, 8, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 21, 23– 24, 54, 57–58, 61–64, 66–67, 69–70, 110, 120, 123, 139, 153, 178, 194, 217 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 202–203, 244 collective intentionality, 99–102, 106– 113, 115, 117–122, 124–125, 173, 183, 265 compliance, 16–17, 20, 22, 34, 46, 48, 59, 63, 72, 74–75, 80–81, 83–84, 88– 89, 91, 96, 131, 133, 138–139, 154, 162, 165, 167, 193, 196–197, 206, 254 conformity, 4, 26, 34, 55, 65, 71, 113, 132, 138, 140, 158, 164–165, 185, 202, 206, 217 conscience, 8, 25, 32, 36, 52–53, 55, 81, 94–95, 107, 130, 230 constitutive domination, 71–72, 229 constitutive rules, 64, 99–103, 106–110, 115, 117–119, 121, 123 counter-Renaissance, 38 critical agency, 25, 73, 129, 193–195, 207, 220, 223, 229, 231–235, 237, 239, 241, 243–247, 249–257, 259–263, 265– 267, 269, 271 critical cognition, 25, 164–165, 173, 187 cybernetic society, 6, 11–12, 15–19, 21– 25, 27, 31, 33–37, 39, 41–43, 45–51, 53, 55–73, 75, 77, 112, 115, 129, 145, 192– 199, 202–206, 208, 210, 215, 217–

  Index 220, 222–224, 229, 231–232, 234, 236, 242, 245, 266 cybernetics, 23, 46, 48–49, 69 Debord, Guy, 11, 225 defamilialization, 214–215 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 22 deontic commitment, 238, 245, 249– 254, 256–257, 262, 270–271 deontic power, 68, 101, 103–104, 106– 110, 117, 119, 121, 185 dereification, 231 domination, 4, 11–12, 14–16, 20, 23–24, 32, 50, 54–57, 64, 66–67, 69–101, 104–109, 111, 115–122, 124–125, 129, 133, 149, 153, 158, 161, 165–166, 169, 173, 184, 186, 193–194, 229– 230, 241–242, 248, 250, 256–257, 265 Durkheim, Emile, 129 Dworkin, Gerald, 236 Enlightenment, 1–3, 32, 35–39, 42, 47– 48, 55–56, 71–72, 130, 168, 184, 191, 247 expanded autonomy, 257, 262, 268 expanded self, 214, 258, 267, 270 false consciousness, 147, 151–168, 237, 249, 252 Feenberg, Andrew, 173, 182 feudalism, 16, 66–67 Fisher, Mark, 11, 209 Foucault, Michel, 22, 48, 83, 221 Frankfurt, Harry, 236 Fraser, Nancy, 170 Freud, Sigmund, 208, 211 Fromm, Erich, 94, 107, 132, 164, 211–212 Gramsci, Antonio, 157, 159–161 group narcissism, 207, 211–213, 218, 222, 224, 270 Habermas, Jürgen, 191 Hare, R. M., 235, 238, 251 Haslanger, Sally, 111

Hegel, G. W. F., 26, 177–178, 213–214, 222, 258, 268 Heidegger, Martin, 264 Hobbes, Thomas, 40–42, 47 Honneth, Axel, 191 Horkheimer, Max, 71–72 Horney, Karen, 201 Hume, David, 74–75 Husserl, Edmund, 57 hyperreification, 7, 14, 206 implicit validity, 171, 187 internalization, 48, 65, 75–76, 85, 91–92, 94–95, 98, 106–109, 111–112, 114, 117, 120, 137, 142, 151, 179, 182–183, 185, 196, 200, 241 irrationalism, 15, 153–159, 166 Kant, Immanuel, 53, 184, 235, 243, 247 katabolic relations, 199–201, 207–208, 210, 220, 261 Kierkegaard, Søren, 5, 19, 130 Kohut, Heinz, 200, 219–220 legitimacy, 10, 16, 52, 55–57, 60–64, 69, 75, 77, 79–80, 82–88, 91, 93–94, 101, 106, 109, 115, 117, 122, 131, 136–137, 140–141, 146, 149, 158, 165–166, 170, 172, 175–176, 182, 184, 191, 234, 240, 243, 249, 260, 266 Lockwood, David, 69 Loewald, Hans, 9 Luhmann, Niklas, 70 Lukács, Georg, 6–7, 112, 116–117, 120– 124, 141, 146, 157, 160, 170, 173–179, 182, 184, 188–191 Mackenzie, Catriona, 240, 254 Mandel, Ernest, 15 Marcuse, Herbert, 163, 182, 198, 219 Marx, Karl, 5, 13, 23–24, 26, 43, 53–54, 56–58, 69, 83, 117, 120, 122, 170, 174– 175, 177, 181 megamachine, 7, 18, 44–47, 56, 59, 229 Merton, Robert, 79

Index    Mirowski, Philip, 48–49 Mumford, Lewis, 18, 42, 44, 46–47, 59 Musil, Robert, 33 narcissistic empathy, 212 neo-Kantianism, 173, 174–175, 179, 257 neoliberalism, 14, 17, 60–62, 64–65 Neumann, Franz, 208–209 normative entanglement, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109–115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 245 O’Connor, James, 61 ontic, 232, 238, 244–245, 252–253, 255– 256, 265, 269 ontological coherence, 234, 243, 254, 257, 259–260, 262, 265, 269–270 ontological ground, 247 Parsons, Talcott, 58–59, 65, 181–183 Pettit, Philip, 78, 80, 82, 96–97, 106 Polanyi, Karl, 42–43 postindustrial society, 58, 62–63, 183, 205, 221, 225 powerlessness, 2, 132–134, 137, 142, 193– 196, 224 primitivization (of the ego), 194, 209, 219–220, 223 psychological integration, 69, 71 rationalization, 37, 52–53, 55, 66–67, 69, 75, 91–94, 100, 106, 132–133, 140–141, 149–150, 162, 174–175, 182, 184–186, 230

Raz, Joseph, 179–180 reification, 2, 6–7, 13–15, 25–26, 35–36, 46, 52, 55, 98–101, 103, 105, 107–125, 141, 146–147, 163–165, 167–191, 193, 200, 202, 206, 219, 229, 231–233, 236–239, 242, 244–250, 252, 255, 257, 262, 265, 269, 271 reification problem, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 237, 255, 257, 262, 271 Renaissance, 9, 38 Rokeach, Milton, 187 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 26, 88–89, 120, 122, 137, 201, 243, 268 routinization, 51, 55, 57, 90–94, 99–100, 108, 111, 121, 140–141, 149, 162, 185, 219–220, 290–291 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 130 Sayer, Andrew, 238–239, 258 Schmitt, Carl, 47 Searle, John, 86, 102–107, 113, 115, 117– 119, 121–124, 173, 183 self-command, 235, 238–239, 242, 253, 255 self-determination, 27, 32, 34, 77, 231, 234, 241–242, 244, 249–250, 254, 256–257, 259, 262–263, 265, 268 subsumption of the self, 12, 23-25, 36, 57, 71, 77, 163, 195, Taylor, Charles, 39, 235, Tugendhat, Ernst, 264-265 Wrong, Dennis, 64, 239

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