A Reply to My Critics

I

I first want to thank the contributors to this symposium on my book, Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism organized by Prof. Lauren Langman for taking the time to read my work and engage it with such depth and critical scrutiny. There is no higher honor in scholarly work to have such a chance to dive deeply into one’s ideas with others.

But before dealing with each of the critics in this symposium individually I would like to offer a brief précis of my book in order to highlight what I see to me its most salient ideas but also to clarify what I see to be its most important normative message. My basic hypothesis is that the historicity of modern forms of instrumental and technical reason have intermingled with the development of capitalism as a form of life to create a qualitatively new and distinct phase or model of society. The move from a proprietary form of capitalism that dominated much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave way to corporate capitalism in the twentieth century. But the integration of the state, more elaborate forms of systematic technological developments in the natural sciences but also new management techniques stemming from the social sciences (economics, psychology and psychoanalysis, and other disciplines) began to give rise, after WWII to a new form of capitalism as a form of life. My term for this is “cybernetic society” by which I mean that norms practices and social processes that are necessary for large scale forms of socio-economic coordination have been internalized at deeper levels of consciousness and earlier levels of psychic development than in prior manifestations of capitalism.

Cybernetic society is distinct in the sense that it not only compels individuals to coordinate their own desires and activities in accordance with the normative regimes of society as a whole but it also has been able to engineer a deeper form of legitimacy and desire based on independent and individual forms of satisfaction which has left human beings bereft of the thicker forms of relatedness that nourished prior political and cultural forms of civic life. It is the new phase of capitalist society that has emerged from the wreckage on the social-democratic social model wrought by neoliberalism signaling a shift from a society of surplus, an ”affluent society,” to an age of oligarchic wealth, democratic decline, false scarcity and austerity.

The effects of these changes on the psychic dynamics and structure of the modern self have been severe. Neoliberalism was, at its base, a project for re-ordering society as a response to slow growth rates and stalled accumulation. The reassertion of capital’s power over social and cultural life has resulted in a new form of reification of consciousness as the logics of economic imperatives invade and transform society, culture and polity, organizing them in accordance with the norms of consumption and economic hierarchy. The ego, under these new circumstances, withers and loses its core capacities for both psychic and moral autonomy. As a result, what Karl Polanyi referred to as a “double movement” where society engenders a reaction formation to the tendencies of market logics that seek to undermine and pulverize it, has been neutered. A central reason for this is that our culture undermines the character structure requisite for such movements to emerge and to be sustained in any viable, efficacious sense.

This is what I refer to with the title “twilight of the self”: a degradation of the self-structure, the forms of consciousness, evaluative capacities, and organized desire for solidarism requisite for a democratic form of civic life that can counter the tendencies of oligarchic wealth-defense and extractive logics of capital. What we need is to assert a new understanding of human social ontology as well as a deeper more robust assertion of the value of human autonomy as substrates for a new form of critical theory but also one that can nourish new forms of dissent and articulate more democratic and enlightened forms of society and social institutions.

Cybernetic society differs from the kind of uniform culture that was feared in the 1940s and 1950s as the result of managerialism. Both left and right had this deep fear – expressed by Orwell and Burnham, respectively – that a new managerial elite was imposing a uniform code of conduct, interests, behavior and norms on an otherwise free people via the mechanisms of large-scale institutions rooted in public authority. What cybernetic society actually is differs from this account in that it more correctly, in my view, sees that modern forms of uniformity are to be seen in the patterns of normative values and implicit legitimacy of the capitalist market society and culture that prevails after the neoliberal revolt against the social-democratic welfare state. Whereas the latter allowed for a cleavage between state/public authority on the one hand and civil society on the other, cybernetic society is defined by the elimination of these barriers and the absorption of their institutional and normative logics by economic imperatives mediated by technical forms of control, efficiency and management techniques. It is not public authority and an elitist cadre of experts that is the source of cybernetic society, but the controllers of capital and the institutional infrastructure around it.

Of course, this does not mean a uniform consciousness, a collectivity of drones operating in some kind of perverse Platonic techno-Republic. Rather, cybernetic society degrades authentic, critical forms of individuality and instead places emphasis on uniform conformity as well as subjective particularism. What results is a postmodern culture that allows for the venting of the cultural and psychic contradictions and forces that hold the accumulation process together as well as the persistence of traditional forms of value systems and belief that can serve to offset the psychic tensions that result from the nihilism of the system’s imperatives. Neoliberalism’s project was the undermining of social relations for the purpose of extending market logics and commodification to the fullest extent possible. Time, space, work, leisure, psyche and world have been the central domains colonized by the renewed forces of capital unleashed from the democratic layers of redistribution and regulatory frameworks that defined the post-WWII period of capitalist development. The alienation that cybernetic society fosters is of such a magnitude because these civic and social forms of relatedness have thinned out and, in many instances, disappeared entirely.

The particular self is left with the burden of creating meaning and finding some sense of security. But my thesis is that the kind of self created by such a socio-cultural situation is one that lacks the capacity for autonomous critical agency. It undermines the possibility for democratic rationality and instead the self seeks out group forms of identity and belonging that result in anti-democratic attitudes and values. On the right, this finds familiar form in religious identity and a new vigor in racialized, hierarchical identities and beliefs. Sado-masochism makes a return to public life in the new wave of authoritarian populism and neo-fascist politics. On the left, the need to compensate for the withering of the ego is provided for by incorporation into group forms of identity that serve to protect the self. Identity now becomes a psychic and political pole of organization for the ego as it finds a form of rootedness in group belonging. In both instances, right and left forms of group narcissism, rational, democratic forms of agency are weakened and the possibility for a more robust form of democratic civic agency is compromised.

II

It seems to me that in different ways each respondent in this symposium has grappled with different aspects of this argument from very different positions. But I believe a core line of criticism that unites the different respondents is that of praxis: how can we turn the critical exploration IN provide of the new character structure created by cybernetic society into something with political promise or transformational potential? Prof. Thorpe comments that my theory of autonomy as critical agency: “raises the problem of how autonomy as critical agency can, in this hyper-alienated post-industrial context, be more than distance, withdrawal, or individual forms of refusal and disobedience.” He continues: “The disordering of this metabolism by capitalism threatens the future existence of human life itself. The perpetuation of war also threatens human survival. Imperialism, unless its dynamic is halted by mass action, appears set on a path toward another world war, which would be the last.  Can these material conditions of our common survival provide a basis for the galvanizing of critical agency into solidarity? Can growing material hardship make the level of inequality today, as society’s resources are hoarded by a narrow elite, come to be experienced as simply intolerable? Is participation of students and young people in Palestine solidarity demonstrations across the US and around the world indicative of new solidarities forming and new forms of consciousness breaking out of institutions that are so clearly not only hollow but venal? Is there dialectical potential in the internet, social media, and communication technologies to galvanize and coordinate protest rather than be merely a distraction machine?”

First, I think it would be prudent to clarify what I mean by reconstructing the concept of autonomy as “critical agency.” As I see it, cybernetic society does not nullify the desire for protest or reaction to the system, but it does disable the rationalistic and solidaristic character of social movements. All too often, autonomy is seen as a pole opposite to that of group relations. But this is only when we look at the pathological forms of group-belonging and needs for relatedness that are rooted in the withered ego’s need for surplus recognition  or its need to fill more primitive needs for belonging and identity. But if we recast autonomy in a relational sense, that is, if we see autonomy as the capacity to see oneself as a member of cooperative forms of life and that those forms of life are implicitly authorized by my participation in them, critique places me in the position where I must interrogate the norms, the character of the relations of that form of life as well as the purposes toward which it is organized. Autonomy now emphasizes the need for the subject’s power of critique: to self-authorize the forms of life – the norms, relations, purposes – that generate the social world. Solidarity, in this sense, is a distinct kind of relatedness: it occurs between autonomously self-authorizing members of a group. What binds them together is the commitment to principle, and this commitment is one that is the result of bringing desire and emotion into dialectical contact with principle and interest. It is this that creates the basis for a rational-democratic group dynamic.

This is what I mean to develop in the last chapter of the book. It is not only a theory of autonomy, it is a theory of what a democratic self would look like, what kinds of psychic and intellectual powers it would be capable of manifesting. Central here is the capacity to articulate democratic relations and ends, to scrutinize the norms that cybernetic society cloaks in popular culture, in managerial logics, and the institutions that we passively accept as part of our world. The democratic self is a relational self and, ex hypothesi, it is also a theory of a new form of group affiliation that can serve as the foundation for truly democratic forms of solidarity and group formation. By outlining a new theory of the autonomous, relational individual, we are also able to grasp the basis for the kind of democratic character that is requisite for radical political change. This model of autonomy is not some ideal, some kind of product of philosophy. As I see it, it is a product of immanent critique, of a push toward critical reflection of everyday life. We are confronted every day with contradictions and irrationalities of our social system. The theory of critical agency I endorse is a means to push this toward a new form of consciousness and, with hope, praxis as well.

One reason for this is that, as I see it, the concept of autonomy needs to be understood in ontological terms, not in transcendental terms as in Kantian models of rational autonomy. What this means is that we grasp ourselves as relational and practical beings; that is, as beings that have intrinsic needs for relatedness to others as well as the capacity to express what is internal to us in the realm of ideas or affects into the world through objectifying them, whether through language, labor or other means of manipulating the objective and material world to realize some end or purpose. This I see as an extension of the later ideas of Lukács and his ontology of social being, as Prof. Thorpe aptly points out. But I think what this further means is that the relations, practices, norms, ends and purposes that ensconce me – my social ontology, in other words – must be seen as a collective product. As a result, the object of radical politics should be the transformation of this social ontology via a critical engagement with the norms, practices, relations and ends that I am a part of constituting. Idealism and materialism merge here to become a critical social ontology – and it is the very manifold of the social and political itself.

The problem is that alienation, reification and false consciousness – all effects of cybernetic society – isolate our affects from our capacities for rational reflection. The withered ego’s need for identity and group-belonging is meant to satisfy primitive emotional needs that take precedence over the reflective, rational aspects of the mind. Social movements therefore can still exist, but they are increasingly incoherent in terms of their demands; they become more and more defined by emotional outrage and less by principled demands for change. We can see this in the Occupy Wall Street protests. These were defined more by a carnival atmosphere, an attempt to generate a different aesthetic of sociality, and a place for venting and the narcissistic exploration of self, it had no concrete demands for political change, no program for organizing and coordinating power, and no clear cut statement of principles. This is no less true for Black Lives Matter or other recent protest movements. It is not that they are not responding to real forms of power and injustice, it is that the reaction is experienced by a character structure that has been disabled from fomenting real, lasting political and social change.

Of course, this is celebrated in our postmodern times as what social movements should be – and we can see the ineffectuality of this position prevail all around us. Today, neo-fascism is growing, authoritarianism continues to transform social and political life, and an oligarchy is more deeply entrenched now than in any time in the post-WWII era. Prof. Thorpe inquires: “Has protest itself been domesticated as an intense experience or as a form of symbolic communication without causal power?” The answer is, “yes.” Until critical theory can hold these movements to critical account, until left intellectuals can foster a more mature, more rational foundation for political critique, until a rational form of autonomy is restored to our theories of political reflection and moral consciousness – until these things are put back at the center of what postmodern theorists and their critique of the Enlightenment, of reason, of humanism tore asunder, until then these reactions will remain emotionally charged but politically ineffectual.

III

On a similar note, Prof. Halley asks: “it is difficult to understand and conceptualize how capitalist society can be resisted in the face of the damaged subjectivity that Thompson describes.” It is perhaps important to quote his criticism in full:

We can posit that no particular individual can bring about societal change when society is conceived of as a totality that determines and does not merely receive or take its particularities. In addressing the problem of change posed by the cybersociety being conceived as such a totality, Thompson seems to assume that, even if every person, or self, is potentially critical, what is at issue for a theory of change from one totality to another is not the effort of an aggregate of selves but the counter-mobilization of a population already mobilized as determined by the existing totality. It will not do, as Thompson does, to assume that it is sufficient to explain societal change by conditions that primarily motivate dominated persons whose aggregated anger somehow envisions a future society and its possible attainment.

The problem of the particular, of particularity (Besonderheit) is here important, specifically in terms of its relation to the totality. My argument is that autonomy needs to be understood in a dialectical, Hegelian sense. That is, as the mediation of universality, particularity, and individuality. Hegel’s logical idea is that individuality is a dialectical sublation of particularity and universality. When taken too far, either of these poles leads to abstraction. Particularity no longer has universality in view and can no longer have rational grasp of the concept, and universality crushes the singularity of any existent thing. The totality, in both cases, becomes not a rational whole, but either a thing from which my particularity is alienated, thereby undermining my capacity for achieving rational self-consciousness, or universality becomes abstract and there is no place for the self to feel at home in the world. Both are expressions of irrationality in that they no longer meet the standard of the concept which has as its apex internal relations of reciprocity. My point here is that this is at play in my understanding of autonomy as a relational and ontological category. Only when we see ourselves as individuals that can create and sustain relations that express equality, reciprocity and interdependence, only then am I acting in a truly social, solidaristic way.

Prof. Halley notes, in comparing my argument to that of Sartre: “Thompson’s focus is on individuals prior to the social movement from association to organization. While this may be adequate to a theory of the type of character that is immanently open to change, it is necessary to show how the line between the irrational and rational society can be, as a practical matter, crossed.” But I see this differently. For Hegel, essence is to be understood as a phase of the concept. Autonomous beings, in my sense, possess ontological self-consciousness by which I mean they possess the capacity to understand themselves as relational beings and that rational, or freedom-enhancing relations – i.e., those that satisfy Rousseau’s test of being both individual and common at once – are those that achieve the character of reciprocity to accomplish or realize common or universal ends or purposes. Freedom, in this sense, is achieved only socially; only when we can articulate social relations, institutions and processes that realize reciprocity and teleology. That is, only when we as individuals interact with one another in a cooperative, social way in accordance with norms and practices that we can see as rationally valid and which we choose to follow as expressions of our will. But it is my thesis that that defects in modern society lead us toward a kind of character structure that seeks out irrational and pathological forms of relatedness. We have lost autonomy as a critical value and cultural ideal.

Prof. Halley then goes on to argue that avant-garde art is one way of de-familiarizing the world, of breaking up the reified realm of experience and disrupting the centripetal forces of uniformity of consciousness. I think this is true – but only to a certain extent. Again, the importance here of Hegel’s dialectic of the concept – that of the three aspects of particularity, universality, and individuality – enters into the discussion. When taken to its extreme, avant-garde art crosses over into the hyper-valorization of the particular at the expense of the individual and universal. Just as in postmodern theory, the experience of the particular is definitive and not instructive. Indeed, the avant-garde is an essential component of the critical enterprise in that it has the capacity to shatter rigidified experience and open us up to what has been repressed within us, the spontaneity and radical subjectivity that is requisite to accent our existence within the totality. But it also lacks the capacity to grant us ethical coherence, to establish values that need to be used for building an alternative form of ethical life that can displace the nihilism and cultural bankruptcy of late modernity. The avant-garde and “weirdness” cannot, in my view, provide us with this. Rather, it is in forms of engaged critical realism that we find values raised to prominence and to the level of critical scrutiny. It is not that we should choose Thomas Mann over that of Samuel Beckett – both are needed, and this is because we need to bring together the particular and the universal to be able to revivify individuality. Refuge to the particular will simply not do.

In short, what I think is important to emphasize here is that the concept of autonomy I seek to develop in this book to serve as the antidote to the deleterious effects of cybernetic society by laying the foundations for a democratic theory of the self. The totality is more imbued by the logics of efficiency, organizational order and the reification of all forms of life and their reduction to the status of quantified value. But I am adamant that what is needed is for critical theory to move toward a new theory of the self, of the individual. De-reifying consciousness is a matter of changing our relation to self and world from one that is ontic, seen as immutable, immune to alteration, to that which is ontological, that is, to what is alterable, changeable, and subject to a wider scope of freedom and common life.

IV

Prof. Langman’s comments also seem to resonate with the worries of Profs. Thorpe and Halley. In particular, he insists that there is a flowering of movements. Young people are on the move, and there is change in the air. As he puts it:

Thus, for example, many of the environmentalist movements, Greenpeace, 350.org, Earth Justice, or Sierra Club have a strong grassroots orientation and many of the activists tend to be young people. Think only of Greta Thunburg who is now just a little bit over 21. Much the same he said about many of the feminist organizations such as  NOW #Me too pr Slut Walk.  Similarly, newer civil rights movements, especially BLM, consist of younger activists. Following the general shift toward the authoritarian right, young people have flocked to a variety of political organizations and causes.

It hardly needs mentioning that these movements, if they can be called such, are largely reactionary, without political programs, and largely speak to particularist concerns and do not possess the more universal message of the best of the socialistic and labor movements of the early-twentieth century or the depth of the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the US in particular. Prof. Langman falls prey to a common fallacy among those on the left in the wake of neoliberalism. Their experiences were largely based on the anti-war movement and civil rights movement of the 1960s.

But as I have been trying to show, there is a very different culture, economy and character structure at work here. Cybernetic society has withered the ego, it has thinned out the self, it has left us with a relativistic sense of value even as it has organized our inner subjectivity via a uniform culture industry that has shaped the desires and aspirations of young people. They no longer are in search for a transvaluation of values and are increasingly unable to develop a committed form of action and principle. Instead, affective response to political and economic pathologies becomes more prevalent and solidarism gives way to forms of group-belonging, further weakening the political efficacy of “movements.” Indeed, we should refer to what occurs on the left less as a movement, which conveys the idea of a coherent set of principles and goals coordinated by many different strata of society over a long period of time for social and political change, and more as political theater that grants participants a release valve for moral catharsis.

Undeterred, Prof. Langman continues: “in many ways it becomes clear the generational status has a major influence in the general trend, as shown that younger cohorts tend to be more progressive. It is not so much that people change, but older people, born in different economic, cultural, and political moments tend to consider that time as ‘normal.’” But why should we assume this to be the case? If anything, younger people are more susceptible to the manipulation by new forms of media such as podcasts and video games. Younger men and boys are regressing, embracing more toxic-masculine self-objects (think Tate brothers, Jordan Peterson and others). Feminism has been effectively metabolized by its incorporation into the mainstream of society by changing its focus for how women can be included in capitalistic and commodifying society. No longer interested in the transformation of social relations into less hierarchical, less sado-masochistic form, the new feminism seeks to include women as CEO’s, as entrepreneurs, empowered by turning themselves into sex objects, and so on, merely re-producing the system of power that already exists, domesticating a movement that once sought its transformation.

In fact what is perhaps most problematic now is the utter depth of ignorance about public affairs and public life that young people generally display. The more that cybernetic society increases its hold on the social totality, the more that non- and anti-capitalist institutions, norms, and values shrivel and die off. The system tolerates only what does not threaten its capacities for efficiency, wealth-defense, and accumulation. The cultural epiphenomena of gender, sexuality, race and other dimensions of identity that are at the core of contemporary political consciousness matter little if at all to these imperatives. All the while, the culture of cybernetic society looks like a playground for the withered ego. Education has been dissolving, aesthetic production and reception has been regressing and increasingly commodified, and ethical value is no longer a concern as group belonging takes hold of the deeper needs of the withered ego.

We should not fool ourselves on this essential point: that our civic life is petering out, that spaces for democratic experience, civic learning and democratic consciousness-building are vanishing. They are being replaced with non- and anti-democratic spaces where either hierarchy, atomism or the incestuousness of filial ties dominate. We are left with frustration and ressentiment – things that can be fed by anti-democratic attitudes and movements far more easily than by the supposed progressive renaissance to which Prof. Langman alludes. Indeed, I would suggest that this is just what we are witnessing. And if we do not recover the importance of autonomy, of reason of the Enlightenment, of ethical value and solidarism, all values and concepts that postmodern critics and traditional conservatives alike have sought to destroy, then we will witness the twilight of the democratic self, and democratic society as a whole.

V

It has been my intention to respond to what I see to be important criticisms of my book. The three respondents have raised crucial points about my book. But I must affirm that what looks like my diagnosis of a totally administered society with no space for resistance or transformation is the opposite of what I wish to stress. Rather, I believe we need to look for, to construct a political theory that will be able to meet the higher needs of human social life. A political vision that emphasizes common goods and purposes, reciprocal relations of cooperative life, a sense of personal purpose and meaning as well as authentic self-expression – in short, a life that, both at the individual and social level, can be grasped as a self-authorized world rather than one that overpowers the individual, where power and domination underwrite the norms and life courses of others.

Such a political theory will need to take seriously these higher needs and goods, one that places emphasis on the de-alienation of our will and powers of reflection in order to be able to shape a truly self-determining world. My book shows us the inverse of this course; it shows how modern forms of power and the the model of institutional reality and collective life that has taken form since the neoliberal counter-revolt are gradually eroding the individual, which is the central font for such a new kind of politics. Perhaps we will be able to cultivate a new form of critical agency, a renewal of autonomy and critical judgment that will be able to pierce through the veil of reification. Until this happens, critical theory and aspirations for truly democratic ethical life will remain out of reach.