Subject to Ourselves

An Introduction to Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Social Theory

Anthony Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317251217
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The revised edition of Subject to Ourselves, a lively and provocative book that was a leader on its topic in England, uses psychoanalytic theory as the basis for a fresh reassessment of the nature of modernity and postmodernism. Analyzing changing experiences of selfhood, desire, interpersonal relations, culture and globalization, the author develops a novel account of postmodernity that supplants current understandings of "fragmented selves." Subject to Ourselves includes a diverse set of case studies, including the power of fantasy in military violence and war, the debate over sexual seduction in psychoanalysis, and the cultural uses of media and new information technologies. The book will be essential reading for students and professionals of social and political theory, psychoanalytic studies, psychology and cultural studies, as well as those with an interest in the modernity/postmodernity debate. Praise for the First Edition: 'This book not only fills an important gap in the literature, for it summarises a debate that is scattered across a decade of rather difficult texts, but also offers a resolution that is sensible and grounded in the best current thinking. It will be widely read by graduate students, faculty, and professionals in the humanities and social sciences.' Choice 'This is an informative and enjoyable book, which will be of use to students and academics...It is accessibly written and provides useful summaries of the different theories and debates in cultural and psychoanalytic theory. Recommended.' Radical Philosophy

1

The Ambivalence of Identity

Between Modernity and Postmodernity

Postmodernity is modernity coming of age: modernity looking at itself at a distance rather than from the inside, making a full inventory of its gains and its losses, psychoanalysing itself, discovering the intentions it never before spelled out, finding them mutually cancelling and incongruous. Postmodernity is modernity coming to terms with its own impossibility; a self-monitoring modernity, one that consciously discards what it was once unconsciously doing.

Zygmunt Bauman

Contradiction, conflict, spiraling, reconciliation, a dissolving of achieved reconciliations, new resolutions of dissonances – these are at the center of life and the mind’s life.

Hans Loewald

Imagine a global pain map. In crude form, we might designate on this map pockets of collective rage, hate and negativity (describing polities from the Middle East to Bosnia), emotionally charged fields of gender domination and oppression (from the asymmetry of sexual difference to child sexual abuse), the uncertainty and fear that comes into play when considering our possible collective futures (including anxieties which focus upon ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and overpopulation), the personal and ethical problems about the present plight of sexual relationships and family life (such as the risk of AIDS), as well as the broader emotional dislocations of identity and selfhood in contemporary society (such as disturbances in creating personal meaning and self-continuity). Dread, fear, anxiety – it is easy enough to recognize such emotional states of pain on this map, even if the concerns listed are somewhat selective.

Nevertheless, I make this inventory of personal and cultural problems to underscore the deep strains of modern living. I emphasize discontinuities and negativities within the psychological roots of social, cultural and political life because it is precisely here that we confront the furthest extremities, or disturbances, of today’s world. Under contemporary social conditions, our innermost hopes and longings are in ongoing dialogue with our most fearful anxieties and gripping terrors. Yet the ambivalences of modern living – expectant hopes and fearful anxieties – are certainly not closed in upon themselves, sealed off from the social-historical world. On the contrary, society enters fully into the construction of our most personal hopes and dreads. Social phenomena or trends are not just incidental to the forging of personal identity; they in some part constitute the inner texture of self-experience (as can be gleaned from the foregoing account of contemporary anxieties and fears). That is to say, there is a mutual penetration of inner and outer worlds, from which the criss-crossings of fantasy and culture are fabricated and sustained.

At a broader level still, this brings us to issues concerning the ‘emotional agenda’ of our times. What is truly contemporary about the links between selfhood and society, personality and culture? According to many, from newspaper commentators to academic theorists, our era is one of radical transition. Changes in social organization that have occurred in recent decades are said to be incomprehensible within existing general theories and conceptual frameworks. A dazzling variety of social, political and cultural transformations are highlighted in this regard. Globalization, transnational communication systems, new information technologies, the industrialization of war, the collapse of Soviet-style socialism, universal consumerism: these are the core dimensions of modern institutions and social affairs. Yet what are the connections between changes at the level of social institutions and those in everyday life, the domains of personal and aesthetic reflection? How do contemporary social processes affect the personal domain?

There are two very different ways of thinking about the relations between contemporary institutional transformations on the one hand and personal and cultural experience on the other, in recent social theory. These discussions concern the ideas of modernity and post-modernity – as a diagnosis of the contemporary epoch – and both offer powerful and compelling frameworks for social and cultural analysis.

The modernist argument is that personal and cultural experience in the contemporary world involves various tensions and ambiguities, the distinctive characteristics of which involve contradiction, fluidity and fragmentation. These instabilities are directly connected to processes of modernization. Modernity is a post-traditional social order, involving the continual overturning of previous collective assumptions, traditions and customs. The globalized world of institutional interconnectedness in which we now live, marked as it is by rapid technological and industrial change, is experienced by people ambivalently – as exciting opportunity and threatening risk. An openness to the social world can mean the opportunity for experimentation and renewal, personal transformation and autonomy. Equally, however, it can mean the risk of personal and cultural turmoil, the disintegration of things thought solid and secure. Hence, the central modernist dilemma: to attempt to reach some kind of personal balance between security and risk, opportunity and danger.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, recognizes something different in contemporary cultural experience. It reacts against the tiredness of the modernist negotiation of risk and uncertainty by attempting to dissolve the problem altogether. Postmodernism suggests that cultural ambivalence cannot be overcome, that ambiguity and discontinuity cannot be straightened out, that social and cultural organization cannot be rationally ordered and controlled. Postmodernism denies that there is any repressed truth to the paths of modernity, and as such recasts society and history as decentered; there are only images of the past framed from different points of view. From this perspective, the multidimensional, chaotic world of global communication ushers in a plurality of local rationalities and identities – ethnic, religious, sexual, cultural and aesthetic. In a postmodern frame, this giddy proliferation of discourses opens individuals and collectivities to other possibilities and ways of experiencing the world. In short, postmodernity opens the way for a liberation of differences.

It is a commonplace of recent social theory to view contemporary personal and cultural life as increasingly marked by dislocation, dispersal and fragmentation. Yet exisiting social-theoretical discourses about modernity and postmodernity raise important issues about the nature of personal and social experience, issues which are usually neglected, sidestepped, displaced. How can one make sense, psychologically, of recent fragmentations and dislocations of subjectivity whilst also recognizing that people experience their ‘identity’ as something central to the texture of their day-to-day lives? What does selfhood and identity mean today? How are we connected and related to each other in contemporary culture? In this chapter, I consider the problems that emerge – the tensions and reconciliations – when selfhood is viewed against the conceptual backdrop of modernist and postmodernist theory. The chapter will thus draw out the significance of contemporary social transformations in relation to psychic structure and self-identity, and especially of what identity comes to mean. It will draw these things out through an examination of modernity and postmodernity from the standpoint of developments in psychoanalysis – a theoretical hermeneutic which, parallel to much modernist and postmodernist thought, emphasizes the ambivalence of identity, the tension between self and other, desire and lack, life and death, consciousness and the unconscious. It will be argued that psychoanalysis uncovers aspects of contemporary experience as creations of the unconscious imagination. It will also be argued, against fashionable pronouncements on the disintegration of human subjectivity, that postmodernity ushers into existence a radicalization of human imagination. Focusing primarily upon the global opening of self/other boundaries, I argue that postmodernity deals in a wholly new way with psychic containment, turbulence and autonomy.

Modern hopes, modern fears

Broadly speaking, the term ‘modernity’ can be taken as referring to that set of social, political and economic institutions brought into existence in the West some time during the eighteenth century, and which have become worldwide in influence in the twentieth century. Max Weber characterized the emergence of modernity as a process of ‘rationalization’ and ‘disenchantment’.¹ Today, at the turn of the twenty-first century, however, there is a marked and profound disenchantment with the emancipatory promise of modernity itself. The political theorist Claus Offe says of this contemporary disenchantment:

[it] is not so much that the gaze is turned away from either ‘the others’ or from history and toward one’s own contemporary and structural conditions, but rather that the situation of ‘modern’ societies appears just as blocked, just as burdened with myths, rigidities, and developmental constraints, as modernization theory had once diagnosed to be the case for ‘pre-modern’ societies.²

Current debates about modernity focus on the relation between the nature of social rationalization on the one hand, and aspects of cultural reproduction and identity on the other. In this connection, the following issues are raised. How have contemporary social processes of rationalization affected the personal and cultural spheres? What has been the impact of the institutionalization of rational calculation, mastery and control upon human subjectivity?

As a first approximation, it can be said that the social structures in which contemporary selves are constituted are profoundly different to cultural forms of the premodern world. In contrast to traditional types of social organization, in which tradition, custom and status held a legitimizing force, modernity radically transforms the intensity, dynamism and extensionality of social relations and processes. The development of modernity has involved a rejection of the certainties of tradition and custom – the world-view that there is an essential, internal order to culture. Against the sociological backdrop of capitalist economic development, industrial upheavals, urban expansions, the creation of parliamentary democracy, mass movements and the like, modernity has produced stunning technological transformations in the experience of space and time, the generation of information and knowledge, and the widening of human experience. The culture of modernity is a form of world-construction marked by the rejection of fixed, traditional boundaries.

This dissolution of traditional frameworks of meaning, however, has only been achieved at a substantial psychological cost. In the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, modernity is linked to the ‘decline of the individual’.³ Anticipating current debates about mass society and narcissistic pathology, the Frankfurt School regarded the logic of capitalist economic exploitation as penetrating the deepest recesses of human subjectivity. In this perspective, the psychic costs of modernity are the end of autonomous individuality and the emergence of passive, decentred consumerism. In Fromm’s gloss, capitalist modernity generates ‘individuals wanting to act as they have to act’.

The most influential recent view in social and cultural theory draws attention to the rise of large-scale bureaucratic institutions, and the associated impact of depolitization as it affects the personal domain. In this perspective, the rationalization of public life is said to weaken and drain the personal sphere, such that the individual subject recedes into the shadows. Selfhood and personal identity become increasingly precarious in conditions of modernity, as the individual loses all sense of cultural anchorage as well as inner reference points. Thus Christopher Lasch detects a ‘culture of narcissism’ at the heart of capitalist modernity, a culture in which selfhood contracts to a defensive core.⁴ The result is that personal life turns inward upon itself: a narcissistic preoccupation with self becomes central to psychic survival, a preoccupation which reinforces capitalist consumption and manipulation. Another, more sophisticated, variant on this position is Jürgen Habermas’s thesis of an ‘inner colonization of the life-world’ by technical systems.⁵ Modern social life, according to Habermas, has become increasingly subject to administrative and bureaucratic control, and this has led to a crushing of individual creativity and autonomy.

For many theorists, however, such accounts of modernity appear too one-sided. The critique of social institutions and the public sphere as primarily invasive and destructive of personal life has been interpreted as a kind of conceptual closure in the face of the sheer intensity and scale of contemporary social processes. This closure, as Cornelius Castoriadis has argued, is an instance of the failure of social and political thought to address the imaginative opportunities ushered into existence by modern social institutions and their worldwide spread.⁶

By contrast, Marshall Berman’s treatise, All that is Solid Melts into Air, is representative of another line of thought concerning the cultural possibilities and limits of modernity.⁷ Berman’s book, published in 1982, is a provocative, polemical intervention into the debate concerning modernity and the consequences of modernization. Berman is little concerned with charting the sociological trajectories of Western modernity, and instead traces the divisions in intellectual thought regarding the nature of modern experience itself. The cultural ambivalence of modernity, he says, is echoed throughout social and political thought, with its schizoid splitting of contemporary social life into either pure affirmation and idealization or condemnation and denigration. ‘Modernity’, writes Berman, ‘is either embraced with a blind and uncritical enthusiasm, or else condemned with a neo-Olympian remoteness and contempt.’⁸ In particular, the conceptual contrast between the iron cage of bureaucratic technique, from Max Weber to Herbert Marcuse, and the energetic vitality attributed to modern sensibility, from Walter Benjamin to Marshall McLuhan, parallels a division between constraint and empowerment which is intrinsic to modernity itself. The problem, as Berman sees it, is that contemporary social processes are increasingly portrayed from only one side of this divide. An either/or logic can thus be said to haunt the field of modernity.

In place of such ‘rigid polarities and flat totalizations’, Berman attempts to recover a sense of the ambivalence of modernity. To move beyond the barren binary impasse in theories of modernity, Berman considers the intrinsic ambiguities of modern city life. In this cultural field, he locates the simultaneous fragmented and liberated sense of contemporary urban living, its bizarre blending of personal isolation and loneliness on the one hand and intense social proximity and cultural interconnectedness on the other. Turning to the great modernists of the early twentieth century, in particular Goethe, Baudelaire and Marx, Berman argues that the very dislocations of the social process which modernity brings into existence, such as isolation and the loss of connection, paradoxically serve to create a new world of cultural possibilities and pleasures. That is to say, Berman theorizes the ambivalence of modernity positively. As he observes:

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.⁹

Modernity, according to Berman, is a double-edged phenomenon. Instead of assigning persons to preordained social roles, as in premodern cultures, modernity succeeds in leading human subjects into a creative and dynamic making of self-identity and the fashioning of life-styles according to personal preference. Such a transformation in the social fabric leads to vastly greater opportunities as concerns freedom and autonomy. But the modern way of life also has a darker side. Attempts to legislate rational order this century have regularly been at the cost of destroying individual particularity and human life. In the wake of Nazism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Stalinism and other social-historical catastrophes this century, the veil of illusions which underpin the moral and political practice of modernity has been lifted for all to see.

Central to modernity is the abandonment of any fixed social status and rigid hierarchy of power relations. This dissolution of communal traditions and customs, says Berman, carries major implications for the individual self, and especially the expression of personal identity. In brief, modernity opens up spaces for continuous individualization, it opens up positive possibilities for self-modification in regard to our emotions, desires, needs and capabilities. In this way, anxiety comes to replace the certainties of tradition and of habit. This is an anxiety that is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating, an anxiety that frames the freedom of the self in its dealings with the social world. The premodern world, the ordered world of role-hierarchy and local tradition, has dissolved, leaving uncertainty and ambiguity. Self-definition begins anew, this time more in step with the hopes and dreads of emotional life.

Seen from this angle, modernity is about the celebration of dynamism, an ever-expanding acceleration of personal and cultural life. This acceleration is expressed as a multiplication of the possibilities of the self on the one hand, and of self-dislocation by global social processes on the other. Construction and deconstruction, assembly and disassembly: these processes interweave in contemporary societies in a manner which has become self-propelling.

The account of selfhood implicit in the work of Berman is one that suggests that individuals develop an emotional framework for handling the troubled waters of the culture of late modernity. In a post-traditional society, identity – as a forging of self-continuity – becomes something that has to be ‘worked at’, intersubjectively negotiated, reflected upon and thought about. This necessarily brings the self into an engagement with the wider world, and the ravages operating within modernity. But self-experience and interpersonal relations, in this reading, are nevertheless of meaning and value. Individuals more or less are involved in the recognition of the difficulty of creating meaningful experience, and of building relationships based on trust, intimacy and love, against the backdrop of the terrors and anxieties of modernity. The fashioning of self-identity is therefore intimately related to wider social processes that are worldwide in their impact: person-planet/planet-person, as Theodore Roszak has argued.¹⁰ People handle risks, and the fears and anxieties associated with them, in terms of the expansion or compression of i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Foreword by Zygmunt Bauman
• Introduction to the Second Edition: Psychoanalysis, Modernity, Postmodernism: Theorizing For a New Era
• Introduction to the First Edition: Fantasy, Modern and Postmodern
• 1 The Ambivalence of Identity Between Modernity and Postmodernity
• 2 Contradictions of the Imagination Freud in the Stream of Modernity
• 3 The Epic of Mastery Modernist Edges of Fantasy
• 4 Postmodern Contexts, Plural Worlds The Possibilities and Pressures of Social Change
• 5 Postmodernity, or Modernity in Reverse Reflexive Scanning, Strangeness, Imagination
• Notes
• Index