Domination, Weirdness, and Art: On Michael Thompson’s Twilight of the Self

Introduction: The Problem of the Cybernetic Society

Michael Thompson, over the past ten or so years, has created a considerable corpus of significant work which has established him as a leading next generation critical theorist. In The Domestication of Critical Theory, Thompson offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth for abandoning a Marxist analysis for one that privileges interpersonal recognition over power (2016). He has written extensively on the ontological dimension of the concepts of the social and society in works by Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Hegel, and Adorno. In The Specter of Babel, Thompson further develops a critical social ontology that goes beyond a limited intersubjectivity, and instead arises from given social structures with their inherent telos (2020). His current work builds upon the literature of critical theory, with an emphasis on the fate of the self as a concept and as a lived experience under neo-liberal regimes. The key concepts in The Twilight of the Self are domination and the ego in its relation to the possibility of an emancipatory politics. 

Is human character determined by the society in which we live? If so, to what extent and under what conditions? In The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills raised this question about the emerging American character structure: 

What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of `human nature’ are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for ‘human nature’ of each and every feature of the society we are examining (Mills 1976:3)

Here, Mills asks us to consider the average conduct and character of citizens when we analyze institutions, social structures, and the historical conditions and outcomes of “this society” in “this period.” 

Earlier, in the 1950s, David Riesman, et al, in their popular book, The Lonely Crowd, addressed this question by tracing the historical development of three characterological types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. They trace the evolution of society from a tradition-directed culture, followed by one that moved in a direction defined with the notion of inner-directedness, derived from Max Weber’s notion of a “Protestant Ethic” (Weber, 1930) or, in Reisman’s image, a “gyroscope.” The last of these is “other-directedness,” which they see as emerging after World War Two, with the explosion of norm-based patterns of consumption, the influence of mass media, and secularized peer group pressures. The characterological problem posed by other-directedness is that the individual becomes a mere reflection of social forces, a “radar dish,” in the book’s pithy term, and loses the sense of personal autonomy and self-knowledge (Reisman, et al, 1963:15;22). Each type Reisman presents is a societally based tendency. However, Reisman and his co-authors were critical of the idea that social structures “over-determine” individuality. 

Consequently, Reisman was also critical of grand, causal concepts, such as Mill’s notion of the importance of “power.’” As well as Hannah Arendt’s idea of totalitarianism, Reisman wrote that she “overinterprets specific actions in terms of long-range goals, and does not allow for any more or less accidental … bureaucratic forces, slip-ups, careerisms, as explanatory factors” (as cited in Menand, 2021:118-121). Similarly, in “The Role of Business in ‘Executive Suite,’” Larabee and Reisman write that “The inability of the managers to manage is ironically… underlined…” (1964 :334). In fact, and despite the reception of his book, Reisman is a classic liberal, critical of determinism in society.

Michael Thompson’s contribution to the question raised by Mills and Reisman places the idea of institutions and their functions with the concept of domination and its implication not of tendencies but of limitations that narrow the expressive and critical potentials of human personality. To this end, he describes what has been theorized as the social system as a projected system of domination, that he refers to as the cybernetic society, which has become massive and all-encompassing. Thompson provides a theory of the ego that qualifies domination from below, tying critical thinking to a critical capacity of the human psyche. The “twilight of the self” is still “light.” There are precedents to Thompson’s account of domination, but he goes further than they do in showing the element of power when they were conceptualized as institutions and legitimating authority. 

Thompson’s Part I is aptly titled “Our Steely Encasement,” which is a more accurate translation than Talcott Parson’s well-known “iron cage.” In this section Thompson traces the development of this concept from Weber and beyond. He notes that Max Weber believed that the iron cage of societal rationalization might extend to all forms of social life, not just economic forms. Thompson describes this as inexorable, but Weber himself was alert to countertendencies, such as the strength of tradition, not yet erased by rationalization. Rationalization produces unintended consequences, which lead to forms of resistance, even to a possible “re-enchantment of the world.” 

Weber points to the power of the erotic and the esthetic to resist rationalization, although he was pessimistic as to the outcome of these efforts. (Weber, 1958:155; 341; 342; 347; and cf. Halley 1991:229.) At the end of his life, he was fascinated by the potential of the Russian revolution as a new departure in history (Mommsen 1997). 

Following Thompson’s outline of the development of what he calls “the cybernetic society, in the 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno spoke of the “totally administered society” as a practical likelihood of an increasingly technologically driven culture (1972). Debord and the Situationists, as well as Deleuze, wrote about the extension of commodification to all forms of life (Debord 1994; Deleuze 1992). And, of course, Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man contributed to this line of analysis (1964).] Thompson explores the nooks and crannies of domination under capitalist conditions, through his examination and systematic elaboration of the notion of our increasingly cybernetic society, but with an eye toward the possibility of societal change, and a theory of radical agency as a human possibility. He extends Lukács’ account of the increasing reification or thingification of everyday life and qualifies it by an application of a psychoanalytic dialectic of the ego as mediator between the internalization of external domination and the assertiveness of the self even in its apparent twilight. 

But how exactly does character structure arise from society? Can it be predicted? If not, how are social progressive and societal change to be understood as possible? While nothing in the writings of Mills, Reisman, and the Frankfurt School entails that character structure will be compliant, it is the possibility of non-compliance that Thompson considers crucial to a humanly practical theory of societal change, from an irrational formation to an aesthetic and rational society. In this regard the relation of “self” to “ego,” is of special importance to an attempt to establish a noncompliant aspect to the human psyche.

What models available in the literature contribute to the problem Thompson sets out that would point the way to a plausible solution? Two examples come to mind. 

Mobilization and Action: Dewey, Sartre, and Thompson

There is a long history in philosophy and the social sciences of social theorists trying to avoid determinism while sustaining the critique of domination. I consider two philosophers who address this as a control issue for a theory of social change in the Twentieth Century, John Dewey and Jean-Paul Sartre. In Individualism Old and New (1999), Dewey presents a picture of critical agency, and considers what type of person would not be compliant and would, at the same time, be a kind of herald of social progress as radical change. Presumably, such a type would reflect a general human disposition able, in certain cases, to express itself under conditions in which it would be reasonable to do so. 

One problem with this solution is that it begs the question of mobilization, therefore of organization as struggle, and the possibility of violence. Dewey’s individualism, as conceived by pragmatism, begs the question of collective action, necessary for the idea of social change. 

Sartre addresses this very question in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One (2004). There, he develops Hegel’s concept of “unhappy consciousness”. For Hegel, this attitude begins with a certainty about oneself, and therefore without a realizable concern with the world at large: such a certainty must be surpassed in any theory of societal transformation (Desan, 1966:44; Sartre, 1968:13-30.) For Sartre, the feeling of discontent, tied to alienation, is a lived experience for people not happy with their situation not being more than it is. They are unhappy in being caught up in a situation of exploitation. The very alienation that constitutes the basis of discontent both sustains compliance but, at the same time, destabilizes the situation and gives it a degree of mobility and, thus, the possibility of change through collective action and its possible modes of organization.

 For Sartre, the “unhappy consciousness” is not something that remains static but is immanently mobilizable. It can grasp the irrationality of things in a way that is at least open to, and available for, a movement for change. The lived experience demands that the person extends beyond the boundaries of compliance. Given the possibility of association and organization, mobilization is possible and likely. In realizing itself, lived experience realizes itself in a consciousness that gets into the world through action. How is it possible to turn this into political action shared with others? It needs to be projected into the world as an association on the way to organization and struggle.

There is, then, a combative aspect to organization, in that it coalesces “against” and therefore raises the specter of violence and a need for rationalization in the face of conflict. 

Thompson, throughout his book, and especially in the last chapter entitled “Autonomy as Critical Agency,” deserves credit for raising the question of exactly what kind of consciousness would be needed to be at least ready for action. Such a readiness is already a movement towards others, and this book sets the stage for understanding the awareness of that process. 

A utopian perspective on the problem of domination would make the case that domination can be overcome. A simple and idealistic formulation of this utopian belief would be as follows: if only we can convince people to acknowledge their feelings, we can change the world. This appears as an ideal to ascribe to. A more complex, but no less idealistic utopian perspective was espoused by Ernst Bloch. Aside from being orthodox in other aspects of his Marxism, he emphasized the notion of the “not-yet.” By this Bloch means images of social change that belong to our history and that are retrievable. They are practical possibilities that depend on what he calls the “hope principal” (Bloch, 1995). This view is more social and historical, and sees reality as something unfinished, as “…a real possibility, not yet frozen” (Bloch, 1977:485, my translation). But, still, this analysis appears to ignore the prospects of resistance and struggle. Terry Eagleton has characterized this attitude, which glosses over the catastrophes of his age, as “hope without optimism” (2015). 

In contrast, materialist analyses address pessimism by identifying a collectively constituted consciousness that is, in its very form, incompatible with exploitation and domination. This possibility is dramatically shown, in Marx’s Capital, by the impossibility of the capitalist mode of production to become a totality and to reproduce the “society of producers” that its own revolution required. This is due to the series of existential contradictions that is the historicizing incompatibility of the forces and the relations of production, and within capital’s reifying instantiation of exchange (the market). Not the least of these constantly decomposing contradictions is the inability to sustain in the relations of production the realization of value essential even for a semblance of a self-sustaining free market. Along with this is the constant increase in the scale of production that undermines the society from which “surplus value” must be extracted, the growth of surplus population in the face of the progressive dehumanization of production by technology, and what Marx saw as the most general contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, namely, the circulation of “fictitious capital” against the ”society of producers” (Marx, 1981:358; Brown, 1986:53). It is in this context that Marxian theory provided a conceptual foundation for a radical consciousness of both the self-destructive aspect of capitalism and the possibility of what Thompson calls a rational society. 

We can consider Thompson’s book in regard to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One. For Sartre, a fragile radical consciousness develops under capitalism within associations not yet coherently organized. In the course of becoming a “class–for-itself,” association becomes more and more societal, always against what Sartre refers to as the possibility of disintegrative “serialization.” It is then that the class requires the organizational form necessary for a class-conscious class-for-itself in the face of the for-itself aspect of capital for which the very possibility of a politicized proletariat posed an existential threat to a mode of production already oriented to the private accumulation of wealth. Thus, Sartre describes the Storming of the Bastille as giving rise to a “fused group,” mobilized for action, but not yet a “pledged group” or an organization. At each stage the collective had to resist disintegration and realize itself through struggle. Awareness does not come first (Sartre, 2004:351-5). In what he calls the “pledged group,” members swear an oath which binds them together in mutuality of suspicion. The continuation of the group depends on sustaining solidarity and becomes an organization in class struggle (Sartre 2004: 430-438). Nothing here is guaranteed, and Sartre points to the fragility of any gains and the possibility of a “serialization,” a disintegration. The pledged group, no less than the other forms, cannot guarantee the continuance of the group. Therefore, mobilization is a necessarily continuing process. 

Consequently , through collective action it is possible to overcome the individual isolation of the unhappy consciousness which finds its purpose in class struggle. Sartre’s theory begins with the concept of association, a coming together with a sense of a problem. This incidental mobilization finds itself transformed into a succession of increasingly rational social formations that give focus to solidarity and increased clarity about class struggle and its stakes. 

The question Thompson raises is how to get from an irrational to a rational society. For Sartre, mobilization precedes essence. People must find themselves in motion, beyond mere criticism, in order to find themselves within the movement towards solidarity and the struggle of class against class. 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. Thompson pushes his analytic towards the possibility of a critical subjectivity that is a necessary condition of a movement against the irrational society, but he allows us to wonder how a situation of struggle becomes visible, and to what sort of generalized consciousness of the possibility of radical change would it appeal.

Particulars and Totalities in Overcoming Domination

In Thompson’s masterful essay, “From Negative Dialectics to Critical Metaphysics: Adorno, Hegel and Marx on the Structure of Critical Reason,” he valorizes the notion of totality in Hegel’s work against Adorno’s negative dialectic (2023). But it can be argued that there is a Hegelian aspect to Adorno’s work not only in his Hegel: Three Studies, but throughout, and even in his Negative Dialectics (written around the same time) (1993; 1973). For Hegel, the concept is always concrete, within a context, and not simply negative. This aspect can be shown in Adorno’s discussion of avant-garde art, and his notion of “particulars.” Although Adorno focused on the works of Samuel Beckett (1991), he also wrote about expressionist artists such as Anton von Webern, synthetic cubism, and instances of the Dada soirees, in which each work, as presented, was “one-off,” not repeated or repeatable. This particularity preserved the monadic power of an “entity,” a performance in its own right:

…by allowing expression to present itself as directly as possible, without mediation… for this type of sensitivity, which really forbids repetition and must modify itself, it transpires very quickly, very early on, [so] that it is impossible to stay at the sheer point of expression. The pure ‘this-here,’ the art that seeks to present the pure ‘this -here,’ the pure moment of expression, the absolute sound, so to speak, as absolute nature – this art approaches in an almost literal sense, one could say, the threshold of silence. It cannot unfold in time or in space and cannot actually objectify itself at all. In fact, all it could do would be what Dada– which is rigorous on this point -utters in its name, namely to say ‘Da’ [there], really just take a breath. For everything beyond would be a betrayal of this pure sound… (Adorno 2018:60)

Adorno goes on to link this immediacy to mediation, in that “consequently the need is aroused… to go beyond this pure ‘there,’” as in Webern’s works and in synthetic cubism. This is what he calls the “dialectic of expressionism,” in that, after cleansing the material, it leads to the construction of new forms (Adorno, 2018:60-64). 

This suggests that on the one hand, particulars are always linked up and intensional: therefore, not simply particular, and are related to large entities – totalities. But the idea of particularity does not support the distinction between part and whole, since the particular, to be intelligible as such, must be a particular of something beyond itself. One of my graduate teachers always asked, “what are they against,” in the sense of what is the larger context of this apparent particular?

Sartre, in polemizing against the traditional Marxism of his time, argues for a more dialectical or reciprocal notion between part and whole, and warns that the “totalizing investigation has given way to a Scholasticism of the totality. The heuristic principal – ‘to search for the whole in its parts ‘– has become the terrorist practice of ‘liquidating the particularity’” (Sartre, 1968:28). He further notes that, whereas …Hegel at least allowed the particular to continue to exist as a surpassed particularly” …the aim of Marxist formalism “is not to integrate what is different as such, while preserving for it a relative autonomy, but rather to suppress it… and, under this pretext, replace particularly by a universal (Sartre, 1968:48).    

Reflecting upon the part-whole relation, the musician Pierre Boulez asks, “Is the work as we know it a genuine totality, or is it rather the restricted fragment of a much larger project, without boundaries, but without which this fragment could not exist or give the illusion of wholeness” He uses the analogy of book versus album, where the album is flexible and detachable, linked to something larger, yet resisting “connectedness and single ordering” (Boulez, 2019: 592; 631). The effect on the listener of this fragmentary reception of non-repeating sections is “the grasp of the instant as such,” but the fragment is never absolute, in that memory reconnects the fragments (Boulez, 2019: 603-4.) Boulez concludes that “…having no reality but the fragment, the whole is nothing but an endlessly renewed, endlessly sought-after illusion (Boulez, 2019:631).

The immediacy of a particular Dada moment presupposes a “horizon” within which it finds itself and possibly in contention with other entities. To underscore the immediacy and particularity of events in the Dada soirees, I have called Dada a “moment,” not a movement (Halley 1991:241). The parts are moments in a larger organic flow or totality. If, as Hegel explains, the concept is thought in activity, there is therefore no dualism of part and whole, form and content. This movement is dialectical and presupposes a link between every particularity and a larger social environment. Thus, I see Adorno’s negative dialectics as a corrective “moment” of Hegel’s organic totality, and I see the two philosophers as actually closer to each other than they might appear. For Hegel, “… the particular contradicts the universal, so that the latter does not fulfill itself in the former” (Marcuse, 1960:37). In speaking of “life” in the Theologische Jungendschriften, Hegel remarks that … In life, “…the particular … is at the same time a branch of the infinite tree of Life; every part outside the whole is at the same time the whole, Life” (Theologische Jungendschriften, p. 307, as cited in Marcuse, 1960: 37). Eventually, dialectically, the totality “wins out,” but it should not be prematurely foreclosing: as organic, it must allow for movement. 

So, we must preserve this principle of movement, of dialectics. This is why I would argue that there is no such thing as “relativism” in itself — each moment is always linked polemically against something else, and therefore standing as a denial of hegemony. Conversely, the totality can easily appear to relativize everything, subsuming each particular to itself. In this sense, the idea of totality dictates that all art is relative to conditions beyond its control. This subsumption of the merely momentary diminishes the critical aspect of the moment. But, at the same time, the attempted subsumption itself, as power, reinstates what it was intended to neutralize: e. g., Dada begets Dada in one way or another. Thus, the particular, in art or politics, can stand as a weapon against a totality that has inadvertently denied the very moment on which it depends for its own organic constitution, against a false or dominating totality. In art and politics, critique can be denied, but it cannot be negated. This is its power and its de-reifying power. 

There are some particulars that are not relativist, which seem to escape this net. 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. This theoretical lapse, at the point at which the totality at issue is shown as “irrational,” gives the impression of pessimism: his totality appears too much of a totality. In order to imagine a change from absolute domination to the humanly rational totality envisioned by Thompson as both emancipatory and self-reproducing, it seems necessary to weaken the idea of domination as absolute determination, and to shift from individuality as effective in the aggregate to a concept of “self” that is already socially mobilized toward a critical subjectivity that is oriented by its own collective aspect as both a present and possible future. 

Domination, Weirdness, and Art

There is a radical dimension to art. Art, culture, and the term “avant-garde” is used when a work or performance cannot be assimilated to convention and to the world in which actions are made interpretable in advance. It is that aspect of “new art” that stands for and encourages resistance to domination. Such art must be recognized as mobilizing audiences, which explains why authorities are wary of it and do all that they can to suppress it. 

It is generally understood by social psychologists who have noted that systems of control cannot avoid producing weird outcomes often referred to, misleadingly, as deviance. This capacity to mobilize can be conceived of as part of what is missing in Thompson’s account of radical consciousness. Art is one example, and recent currents in the theory of culture recognize this same dynamic in culture itself. 

Domination aims to produce conformity. Its hidden assumption is that conformity points to the mean and not to a curve in which “deviations” often account for more than the normative force of the rule, providing something like a subversive background to what is meant to be controlled. 

Thus, domination is often described as “non-culture or anti-culture” in the sense of the statement that the Nazi playwright Hanns Johst, misattributed to Joseph Goebbels: “when I hear the word culture… I release the safety on my Browning” (Johst, 1984, Act 1, Scene 1). The role of culture in history has often been seen by both sides in political struggles as resisting domination. 

In Reason and Revolution, Marcuse notes:

Reality is other and more than codified in the logic and language of facts. Here is the inner link between dialectical thought and the effort of avant-garde literature: the effort to break the power of facts over the word, and to speak a language which is not the language of those who establish, enforce, and benefit from the facts (Marcuse, 1960:x). 

For Marcuse, the power of facts has a tendency to become totalitarian, and this reference to facts is what Sartre vividly called the “inert. “Art offers the possibility of an authentic language, a “Great Refusal“ to accept the rules of the game in which the dice are loaded” (Marcuse, 1960:x). 

There is a convergence of Thompson’s notion of autonomy as critical agency and Russian Futurist avant-garde practices described by Roman Jacobson, in My Futurist Years (1994). In Thompson’s discussion of false consciousness and heteronomy – internalizing, uncritically, external “knowledge” — he notes that the demand for conformity affects “the ways that individuals come to bypass attempts at rational thinking and instead rely automatically on the normative concepts that they have internalized” (Thompson 2022:162) In this manner, he integrates the concept of “automaticity” into his analysis of false consciousness (Thompson 2022:162; 302, n. 19. For Thompson, it is both necessary and possible to move from the taken-for granted, unreflected ontic world to the ontological one, which involves critique of the existing structures, a political will that is both critical of the irrational totality and positively oriented to a rational future: 

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 (Thompson 2022:245).

In his essay, “What is Poetry,” Roman Jacobson describes the very same socio-cultural process as “de- automatization.” He notes that the distance between sign and object sharpens our perception and arrests the automatization of our perception. The relation of sign and object is contradictory, which allows for the mobility of signs and objects. If this does not happen, the relation between them “becomes automatized” (Jacobson, 1934, as cited in Jacobson, 1994: xx) Jacobson’s focus is on the irreducibly dynamic relationship between signifier and signified, and sign and object. This provides a theoretical underpinning for a critical consciousness and guarantees some degree of mobilization in the very uncertainties of language and speech. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is difficult to understand and conceptualize how capitalist society can be resisted in the face of the damaged subjectivity that Thompson describes. His book, The Twilight of the Self, goes a long way toward helping us think through the first part of this problem, though he does not address the fragilities of totalities. In focusing on these totalities and an overarching character structure, we lose the importance of their instability and the effect of cultural innovation in the direction of social change. The relative indeterminacy of culture is bound to be a factor, since it is not an easily managed part of any larger “system.” This can defer our discussion of the immanence of change to totalistic formations, and can place the emphasis on the role of organization and power in the very course of change. 

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