Childhood Experience and the Image of Utopia the Broken Promise of Adorno’S Proustian Sublimations

Childhood experience and the image of utopia The broken promise of Adorno’s Proustian sublimations Matt F. Connell At least since Aristotle, various conceptions of culture adjustment, amounting to an uncritical internalization have valorized its pacifying role as an outlet for dan- of the reality which insists that the infant must only gerous impulses and tensions. Sigmund Freud belongs enjoy that which is socially sanctioned. Children must to this culture-as-catharsis tradition, and accordingly progressively give up earlier forms of happiness and radical intellectuals and artists have often been uneasy pleasure, which demand everything in an unsustainable with his concept of sublimation, nervous lest their blurring of the boundaries between subject and object, work be reduced to the drives channelled into it, and infant and adult, and male and female. Polymorphous worried that the domestication of explosive impulses pleasure gives way to reality, and, broken, we must renders art conformist. For this reason, Joel Whitebook learn to love it. Any remnants are disparaged as a suggests, ʻAdorno is led to reject the notion of sublim- perverse wrong turn, and the dashing of the promise ation.ʼ1 Certainly, Adorno does not mince his words: of a more universal happiness is dressed up as normal ʻArtists do not sublimate.… Rather, artists display maturation. Gratification is not only deferred and violent instincts, free-floating and yet colliding with altered, it is distorted and denied, for under advanced reality, marked by neurosis.ʼ2 As in the later Aesthetic capitalism aim-inhibition becomes total, and ʻthe diner Theory,3 Adorno prefers here the concept of expression must be satisfied with the menuʼ.6 to that of sublimation. But Whitebook casts Adornoʼs Psychoanalysis reduces pleasure to a mere trick of rejection of the concept of sublimation as polemic, for the species deployed for its own reproduction, allow- Adorno still uses it, providing an eloquent aphoristic ing the adjustment of the client to enjoy whatever is version: ʻEvery work of art is an uncommitted crime.ʼ4 deemed compatible with the reproduction of a given Perhaps every work of Adornoʼs is an unthrown Molo- society. The adjustment orientation of conformist tov cocktail, for he tries to turn righteous anger into psychoanalysis is supposedly dedicated to producing the thought of what it would take to escape it: ʻWho- ʻ[t]he regular guyʼ and ʻthe popular girlʼ,7 who purge ever thinks is without anger in all criticism: thinking their socially provoked tensions with sport, weepies sublimates anger. Because the thinking person does and a healthy sex life.8 Adorno instead puritanically not have to inflict anger on himself, he furthermore insists that has no desire to inflict it upon others.ʼ5 So, Adorno does sublimate, channelling the painful a cathartic method with a standard other than suc- cessful adaptation and economic success would emotion which is the mark of genuine psychological have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness openness in the direction of socially critical thought. of unhappiness both general and – inseparable from Looking for something to blame instead of the victim, it – personal, and at depriving them of the illusory Adorno turns Freudʼs critique of the neurotic self gratifications by which the abominable order keeps into a critique of society. Adornoʼs rather carica- a second hold on life inside them, as if it did not tured early image of a repressive Freud has it that already have them firmly enough in its power from outside.9 psychoanalysis champions a pseudo-rational logic of Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) 19 Adornoʼs concern with these repressed, negative cuseʼs, Adornoʼs immanent critique of psychoanalysis erotics of existence is a distinctive feature of his refines Freudʼs shaky division between repression work. He even goes so far as to allow fleetingly a and sublimation. According to Freudʼs remarks on positive extrapolation from them, hinting that some- the topic, repression problematically dams up uncivi- thing about pleasure could transcend its ʻsubservi- lized impulses, leading to their return in the form of ence to natureʼ,10 which, in a reality replete with a symptoms, whereas sublimation supposedly puts those socially sedimented second nature, is always in fact impulses into the service of civilization through their subservience to society: ʻHe alone who could situate aim-inhibited discharge in art and science. Adorno has utopia in blind somatic pleasure, which, satisfying it that Freud merely ʻvacillates, devoid of theory and the ultimate intention, is intentionless, has a stable swaying with prejudice, between negating the renunci- and valid idea of truth.ʼ11 This materialistic theory of ation of instinct as repression contrary to reality, and 19 truth consciously sublimates yearnings unknowingly applauding it as sublimation beneficial to cultureʼ. repressed in the austere forms of philosophy which Adorno theorizes the two concepts in a manner seek to purify thought from its infantile and somatic befitting our sexually saturated age, discussing the roots. The derivation of theoretical impulses from different attitudes towards sexuality of autonomous art, infantile demands for total satisfaction does not have which sublimates, and of the culture industry, which to be a wholly regressive phenomenon. The perverse represses: ʻWorks of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.ʼ20 search for a pleasure beyond that currently available Direct representations of sexuality usually defuse the could be a source of resistance to existing society: deeper meanings of desire, and reflection on Marcel ʻWhatever qualities at present genuinely anticipate a Proustʼs restrained yet explicit account of the dark more human existence are always simultaneously, in decay of love leads Adorno to conclude that ʻde- the eyes of the existing order, damaged rather than inhibited sex is itself de-sexualizedʼ.21 harmonious things.ʼ12 Against both normative prescriptions for a healthy Although the pull is there, Adornoʼs condemnation sex life (or the sublimated aesthetic equivalent in of socially functional gratifications should not therefore pleasantly sensual art) and their naked reversal lead to the direct celebration of more subterranean (unreflectively Satanic modernism), Adorno suggests yearnings, for ʻwhat slips through the net is filtered that Proustʼs literary sublimation does not ameliorate by the netʼ.13 Adornoʼs exaggerated critique of psycho- our childish desire for something other to the social technics tries to avoid the celebration of a perverse norm; it actually heightens the pain of renunciation, resistance to cultural norms as a true other to repressive without forgoing it.22 Proustʼs expressive power both reason: ʻIn adjusting to the mad whole the cured patient endorses a Freudian interest in the uncanny echoes of becomes really sick – which is not to imply that the infantile desires which can decentre adult conscious- 14 uncured are any healthier.ʼ Normality may be awful, ness, and acts as a critique of Freudʼs reification of the but perversity and neurosis are not in themselves the childhood experiences he so doggedly uncovered. promised land. All three are distorted adult organiza- Freudʼs neglect of vital nuances of experience tions of repressed infantile material. Adorno resists the emerges whenever he betrays his respect for the par- course of championing the flowers of evil which may ticularities of the different modalities of childhood spring from the adult persistence of infantile impulse: perception, which he overeagerly converts into a norm- ʻSo much is true in psycho-analysis that the ontology of ative developmental theory. The hasty condemnation of Baudelairian modernity, like all those that followed it, vestiges of infancy as either regressions or perversions 15 answers the description of infantile partial-instincts.ʼ sometimes works against Freudʼs goal of using those Baudelaire tries to capture the potential energy of these vestiges to criticize adult repressions. Theoretically drives, and is crucial in the history of modernism, but conserving the alien character of early experiences his addiction to the ʻintoxicationʼ16 produced by his of pleasure and disappointment through nonconform- violent images bears witness to the danger of attempt- ist sublimation is therefore an important project for ing a direct appropriation of the seemingly unsocialized Adorno. force of dark sexual impulses.17 Rather than becoming a substitute gratification, such sublimation reminds the ego what it has lost in Regression, perversion and utopia gaining itself. This concern is crucial in Adornoʼs In Herbert Marcuseʼs terms: de-repression is not critical theory. Grown-ups promise children that the the good negation of bad sublimation.18 Like Mar- painful sacrifices demanded by socialization will be 20 Radical Philosophy 99 (January/February 2000) redeemed by their initiation into the mysteries of rather than fighting wars of colonization. Mental health adulthood; mysteries they long to share, but which would then be a psychological togetherness through seldom yield the hoped-for satisfaction. We do not diversity, rather than a hierarchical system with the understand when we grow up. The failures of matu- ego dominating the id. rity, glimpsed by Adorno in the childlike content Freud does fleetingly concede the theoretical pos- of Proustʼs regressive utopias,23 are one concern of sibility of such a utopia, and

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