The Frankfurt School
Politics of Perversion
The political Left has long mutated away from caring about the livelihood of workers, towards a struggle for all sorts of supposedly oppressed social collectives. This is by now cliché to say.
But it goes further. Supposed political radicalism of the sort promoted by mainstream discourse, (media, large corporations) imagines itself as championing the oppressed, but more than this it is hostile to traditional institutions, morality, canons of beauty.
The motivation here is a belief that older identities and institutions are inherently oppressive, so that things can only be celebrated if they are a weapon against those older identities. Yes to the “girl boss,” but as a weapon against the patriarchy, yes to “alternative sexuality,” but as a weapon against stogie conservative norms. Always as a sort of hostile gesture.
The clearest justification for this hatred of the wholesome might be found in the work of certain Frankfurt School intellectuals—the Frankfurt School was a school of thought with its roots in the 1920s, founded in the Weimar Republic. Its most developed critiques of modern society, however, emerged after WWII, and are basically a synthesis of Freud and Marx, a psycho-analytical neo-Communism.
I don’t mean that their ideas were directly taken on board by modern so-called “woke” activists, only that they provide a thorough understanding of the psychology and rationale of what we see today (more thorough even than what you might read in Derrida or Foucault, and at times).
One of the Frankfurt School’s greatest thinkers, Theodore Adorno, wrote that the point of social theory is to “demonstrate the disjointedness, the untruth, of totality,” – totality is any general truth statement, here—and “totality is to be opposed by convicting it of non-identity with itself:” He goes on in Negative Dialectics:
The totality of identical definitions would correspond to the wish-fulfilment picture of traditional philosophy: to the a priori structure and to its archaistic late form, ontology. Yet before any specific content, this structure … is spiritualized coercion.
- Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics
In other words, definitions imply some view of reality, and this view, whatever it might be, is secretly “coercion,” all traditional philosophy is a cover for social oppression.
Adorno’s aesthetic theory basically holds that art ends up presenting such visions of reality and so perpetuates oppression—therefore, as he famously said, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Because poetry, positive art, transmits an idea of truth and victimizes what is considered to lie outside that idea.
Poetry—beauty—may lead to genocide.
What this means is that anything that presents itself as a whole, as healthy, as harmonious, as beautiful, as true, is threatening, is oppressing whatever falls outside it (if this is beautiful, something that falls short of it is ugly, if this is true, something that contradicts it is a lie, etc.). To avoid oppression, anything that seems beautiful, therefore, as to be engaged critically, negatively.
Adorno’s rejection of positive definitions—traditional philosophy, accounts of reality from first principles, and so on—produces a kind of mental habit of always lashing out against what he calls “spiritualized coercion,” against, that is, any image or idea that seems whole, harmonious, self-satisfied, against beauty, coherence, wholesomeness.
This habit leads to the contemporary suspicion that any beautiful art, stories with a moral, and the like, are quote “fascist.” The modern critic’s instincts are jaded, his heart is flaccid. He hates glory, power, and beauty and strength and confidence. He has to intrude on any morality with scepticism. This filter prevents us from seeing a beautiful form as independent of our problem-solving mental chatter, our suspicion that it must be hiding something, some oppression.
So-called woke activism is like this. It has to make beautiful things ugly, accusing them of oppression, embedding them in an invented, terrible context of violence that they supposedly perpetuate, imputing on them the guilt of lulling the masses into conformity. You get a virtue-signalling death-spiral of puritan histrionics.
Now, Adorno would not have been kind to modern woke activists. He was more radical than them, he rejected linear storytelling in cinema or tonality in music. He was also not into sexual liberation as it came about in the 1960s. But the core of his philosophy defines a lot of the psychology that the political establishment promotes—because it’s useful to break down old structures and replace them with new systems of control. That’s my claim: Radical Freudian and Marxist critique has actually served the power elite, not resisted it.
Another Frankfurt School thinker that shared his core philosophy but took it in a far more mainstream direction is Herbert Marcuse. And we particularly see his influence today – in that his system is as sex-obsessed as modern culture.
In fact, crucially, the ultimate rejection of distinct form and traditional systems—which Adorno articulates—has to end up in the rejection of gender and sexual difference, because that’s the most fundamental distinction into which tradition splits human persons. Marcuse saw this.
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse lays out his vision for erotic energy and political revolution. His view is roughly that sexuality has been repressed because economic systems—labour relations—are oppressive. People have to be forced to work so that someone (the feudal lord, the capitalist industrialist, etc.) can extract surplus value from their labour. They cannot, therefore, be allowed to play freely, which would prominently include pursuing sexuality for pleasure’s sake. This repression means that heterosexual, reproductive, marital relations have been the standard.
But if capitalism is abolished and (his version of non-Soviet) communism takes hold, there will be no need for repressing sexuality. Such repression isn’t a necessary part of all civilization, as Freud thought, Marcuse argues. You can have socially-useful work that keeps up civilization (a neo-Marxist civilization) where such work is play—erotic play.
And the end of repression, crucially, must come by means of radical individualism. We have here one of Marcuse’s major departures from classical Marxism. For him, it is the myth of Narcisus, who fell in love with his own reflection in the water, kissed himself, and drowned, that provides the culture-hero for his future, non-repressive civilization (together with Orpheus).
Why does he claim that “erotic narcissism”—self-love—can be liberating?
Because it begins from an individual who refuses to “perform,” as Marcuse puts it, for society, by conforming to reproductive sexuality. He refuses Freud’s “reality principle”—that is, social norms. From that refusal, a whole new kind of culture can be created. Writes Marcuse:
Reactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat to culture and can itself lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labour but as a subject of self-realization—in other words, if socially useful work is at the same time the transparent satisfaction of an individual need.
- Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
The premise here is Freudian: the idea that the initial experience of life is narcissistic in that the world is not perceived as separate from the infant (like Narcissus seeing himself in the water, as the water), and is erotic:
At this primary stage of the relation between ‘pre-ego’ and reality, the Narcissistic and the maternal Eros seem to be one, and the primary experience of reality is that of a libidinous union.
Marcuse is wanting to recover that sense of unity between individual and world in adults. In a civilization where no repression is required by productive needs and labour relations, he contends, whole body will become erotic, as will all of society.
To understand what this means, we should note that he defends a “polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality,” not merely philosophical “eros” or Freudian “libido”—but, explicitly, “sexuality.” We may describe his vision as a “pornocracy,” a sexual dystopia.
Marcuse describes how, under systems of repression, there had been a “socially necessary desexualisation of the body: the libido becomes concentrated in one part of the body, leaving most of the rest free for use as the instrument of labour.”
Originally, the sex instinct has no extraneous temporal and spatial limitations on its subject and object; sexuality is by nature “polymorphous-perverse” The societal organization of the sex instinct taboos as perversions practically all its manifestations which do not serve or prepare for the procreative function.
Under what he considers repressive conditions,
The sex instincts bear the brunt…Their organization culminates in the subjection of the partial sex instincts to the primacy of genitality, and in their subjugation under the function of procreation. The process involves the diversion of libido from one’s own body toward an alien object of the opposite sex…The gratification of the partial instincts and of non-procreative genitality are…tabooed as perversions…channelled into monogamic institutions.
Future Freudian-Marxism will make every social relation erotic because play will replace work, and play is fundamentally erotic (because Freud said so). In modern slang we would say this is a hopelessly p.o.r.n. brained, gooner fantasy dressed up in intellectual verbiage.
If, “no longer used as a fulltime instrument of labour:”
The body would be resexualized. The regression involved in this spread of the libido would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy.
In one of his most “utopian” passages, we read:
The erotic aim of sustaining the entire body as subject/object of pleasure calls for the continual refinement of the organism, the intensification of its receptivity, the growth of its sensuousness. The aim generates its own projects of realization: the abolition of toil, the amelioration of the environment, the conquest of disease and decay, the creation of luxury. All these activities flow directly from the pleasure principle, and, at the same time, they constitute work which associates individuals to “greater unities”; no longer confined within the mutilating dominion of the performance principle, they modify the impulse without deflecting it from its aim. There is sublimation and, consequently, culture; but this sublimation proceeds in a system of expanding and enduring libidinal relations, which are in themselves work relations. The idea of an erotic tendency toward work is not foreign to psychoanalysis. Freud himself remarked that work provides an opportunity for a “very considerable discharge of libidinal component impulses, narcissistic, aggressive and even erotic.”
I’ve quoted this in full because, again, it’s important to understand this kind of libertine, pornographic utopianism’s resonance today.
One key vector for achieving this future is (his version of) the environmentalist movement, because in a non-repressive civilization, humans will feel themselves at one with their environment even as the infant feels at one with its mother.
Marcuse develops this this in his key essay on environmental activism, Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society, maintaining that environmentalism can be a “political and psychological movement of liberation.”
We may ask, how can environmentalism represent psychological liberation? Marcuse begins his discussion in terms of Freud’s dichotomy between death and life drives, Thanatos and Eros:
The primary drive toward destructiveness resides in individuals themselves, as does the other primary drive, Eros. The balance between these two drives also is found within individuals…the balance between their will and wish to live, and their will and wish to destroy life…Both drives, according to Freud, are constantly fused within the individual. If one drive is increased, this comes at the expense of the other drive. In other words, any increase in destructive energy in the organism leads, mechanically and necessarily, to a weakening of Eros, to a weakening of the life instinct. This is an extremely important notion.
- Herbert Marcuse, Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society
He begins with Freud’s category of the death-drive—a desire to destroy life in order to return to the womb, that is, to a state before the diversity, the confusion and the pain of life, a state of peace. But Marcuse wonders whether we might pursue this same desire for peace—for the end of pain—not as death, not as destruction (death of self; destruction of the world), but through the life-drive, Freud’s eros—as erotic energy.
Marcusian environmentalism is the pursuit of the “pacification of external nature,” which, in turn, will pacify “nature within men and women.” Environmentalism would shift the balance within individuals towards life, the erotic, over death, subordinating destructive energy to "erotic energy.”
The idea that peace can be pursued not by escaping life and the world, but by maturing and pacifying it, seems laudable.
Recall, however, that Marcuse’s concept of Freudian eros and its political weaponization entails the “reactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality” where the repressive focusing of eroticism on the “genitals” (what he describes as “genital supremacy”) is de-localized to encompass the whole body and the whole society.
By taking Freud’s framing of the death-instinct as a desire to escape pain as his starting point, what you get in Marcuse is the making of painlessness into the priority of politics, not the integrity of different entities and proper order between them, not justice and flourishing—not strong persons who do not want to hurt each other, but weak persons who cannot hurt one another. Weak because they don’t distinguish between self and world any longer. They have melted in a perverted universal eroticism—the search for erotic union and orgasm moves one away from pain, in physical terms, but it also implies an inappropriate merging of distinct forms.
In fact, Marcuse dislikes distinct forms, as comes through in his opposition to traditional European representational art. It is very much a feature of modern—supposedly radical—politics that every struggle gets joined to the push for non-traditional sexuality or gender-expression.
Let’s switch gears and look at some recent, contemporary environmental activism which may reflect some of this. There was something symbolic about the vandalizing of famous art pieces by the Just Stop Oil ‘environmentalist’ group, including da Vinci’s Last Supper, a year or two ago.
What did the destruction of art, especially representational, culturally significant art, European art, have to do with saving the planet? True, people travel to see these pieces and burn fossil fuels in so doing. But folks travel for other reasons too.
In fact, the pursuit of environmentalism and the attack on traditional art is very much consistent with Marcuse. On his opposition to “the representational art of Europe,” he writes:
This art represented the world as a world of things to be dominated and owned by men and thereby falsified it. The consequence: the task of art in this situation is to supplement and correct this false image—to portray the truth, but in a way that is possible for art and art alone … The rebellion against traditional art succeeded, [first] because this art was conformist; it remained under the spell of a world shaped by domination.
- Herbert Marcuse, Art and Liberation
Marcuse’s identification of representational and traditional art with oppression tells us he shares Adorno’s premise that any positive statement, any coherent form, implies repression. Beautiful art, a linear story with a morale, even a musical harmony (for Adorno), puts forward an ideal and so offends and oppresses whatever doesn’t fall in line with that ideal.
The underlying logic of Marcuse’s argument here, as I read him, agrees with the core of Theodore Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and runs as follows:
When a thing is beautiful, it implies that whatever is outside it is ugly; if something is attractive something else might be unattractive, if something is normal, normative, something else is abnormal, not normative.
Any standard therefore implicitly justifies hierarchy (of the beautiful over the ugly, for example) and oppression (to conform the ugly to the standards of the beautiful);
It is therefore moral to reject beauty; to be ever-critical of beauty, to deconstruct it;
This rejection is actually the Freudian death-drive, an inherent desire to escape pain, to leave behind life, including its complexities, its injustices, its hierarchies and oppressiveness (but also, necessarily, its harmony, its order, its beauty), and to return to the unconscious, blissful sleep of the womb;
But, says Marcuse, the more fruitful and politically powerful way to pursue this drive to escape the pain of life is through “polymorphous and Narcissistic sexuality:” melting the distinction between things, erasing hierarchy, oppression, beauty, and ultimately all categories, until we are all one (this is the crux and centre of a Marcusian environmentalism);
Representational art and traditional forms, the distinct nature of things in themselves, implies domination, because Marcuse’s concept of liberation is a version of Freud’s death drive, but as the search for erotic release. It is the perverted desire to destroy distinction, to merge together.
Revolutionary art, in contrast, “must be shaped in such a manner that it reveals the negative system in its totality and, at the same time, the absolute necessity of liberation,” which is to say that art should be negative, critical, opposed to traditional canons of beauty, in a word: ugly. Marcuse continues:
The work of art must, at its breaking point, expose the ultimate nakedness of man’s (and nature’s) existence, stripped of all the paraphernalia of monopolistic mass culture, completely and utterly alone, in the abyss of destruction, despair and freedom. The most revolutionary work of art will be, at the same time, the most esoteric, the most anti-collectivist one, for the goal of the revolution is the free individual.
Again, Marcusian Marxism ends up in perfect individualism (Narcissistic sexuality). An individualism so complete that the individual is alone, un-defined by any inherited identity, any particular loyalty to this or that group.
In fact, such an individual would be completely naked and vulnerable to top-down control. The end point of the libertarian is the end point of the communist. As is often the case with these sorts of attempts at liberation, they lead to increased control on the part of government and corporate structures. While it was attacking art, Just Stop Oil was calling for governments to invest more in renewable technologies: if representational art is part of the problem, technology is the solution.
Technocracy replaces culture and identity.
Just as the individual’s ultimate right to determine his gender identity requires a strong medical establishment and state to guarantee hormone treatments, surgery and hate speech laws to give you and protect your new identity. Total individualism (conceiving as the individual as self-determining atom) leads to total dependence on external systems.
Far from resisting coercion, the rejection of healthy community and identity and authority, precisely leads to pathological, tyrannical authority.
The environmentalist critique of systems of thought that reduce nature to a mere reservoir of resources for humans to use—just wood to burn and fuel to burn—is itself perfectly valid. But this should entail a celebration of distinction, the differences between species and human vocations, the patterns that give forms their unique place within a hierarchy, within an order, a tapestry of icons. Things go badly wrong when we reject the traditional idea of the world as manifesting stable, transcendent truths, nature as a stage, as beautiful, as a Divine work of art, as the manifestation of the angelic, the “gods,” the names of God.