Subjectivity in Adorno and Lacan
Perspectives on Ideology:
Conditions of Subjectivity in Adorno and Lacan
Theodor Adorno's "Messages in a Bottle" and Jacques Lacan's "The Mirror-phase" each display a concern over manifestations of reified ideology in society, and the effects of such ideological formations on the individual. And while they begin from different theoretical perspectives, the authors come to similar conclusions about the nature of society, the effects of ideology, and the constitution of the subject in a social context.
Adorno begins from a Marxist perspective-a theory based upon the relationship between social classes, and outlines in "Messages in a Bottle" how the human individual becomes interpellated in the "reified formations" of capitalist ideology. Though his perspective is largely social, however, Adorno is concerned throughout "Messages in a Bottle" with the workings of affect in the human subject, a topic of central interest to Lacan's psychoanalytic perspective. Adorno's analysis of the concept of alienation-a concept central to both Marxist and psychoanalytic theories-are thus often phrased in a manner more psychological than social: "That passion, which breaches the context of rational utility and seems to help the self to escape its monadic prison," Adorno writes, "should itself be something relative to be fitted back into individual life by ignominious reason, is the ultimate blasphemy (38)." The alienation of the individual's desire by society to which psychoanalysis addresses itself could be stated in very similar terms. Likewise, Lacan's notion of subjectivity, though fundamentally psychological, nevertheless is concerned with the relationship of the individual to society at large; the Lacanian $ubject is always defined within a social context, in a process of "social determination." The similarities of Adorno and Lacan thus outweigh the seeming difference of perspective between the two, and they arrive at a comparable analysis of subjectivity in relation to the ideologies of society.
Adorno displays a Marxist perspective on the nature of the individual subject. "Powerless in an overwhelming society," he writes, "the individual experiences himself only as socially mediated (34)." Society, rather than a defence against the individual, as it purports itself to be, fetishises the individual. Thus do social institutions ostensibly based on the dissolution of the individual within a group, become the very institutions that manufacture individual identity; they "have acquired the aspect of something divinely ordained (35)."
But the malicious effect of society-at least the society of the market commodity-is to alienate the subject from his or her real, material conditions of existence. In the "reified formations" of bourgeois society, the "consciousness" of social identity "become truth (35)," but the "functional sense [of] the social division of labour" has dissolved, and the result is a false consciousness that bears with it the fruit of alienation. The social relations of commodity society are reified because "you become again in consciousness what you are in your being in any case_--but when the "functional sense" of being-the material conditions of being-have become veiled in social ideology, the consciousness is false, and the subject is alienated from his or her functional relationship to the mode of production, the foundation of material existence.
The Lacanian notion of subjectivity operates by a similar process of analysis. If in the Marxist examination of the subject within bourgeois capitalist society the subject is alienated from his her or her real functional relationship to material existence-the mode of production-the Lacanian $ubject is similarly alienated. For Lacan, however, the Real is not in the realm of material culture and use-values, but in the domain of unconscious desire. "The I as we experience it in psychoanalysis" is not the Cogito, the thinking self, but the $subject who exists as it is constituted by desire.
The "social determination" of the $ubject within language is central to Lacanian theory; it is Lacan's particular reading of the Freudian concept of socialisation. In simplest terms, this socialisation means that the desire of the individual (the Real constitution of the self) must be made to conform to the symbolic order of society-desire becomes dialectised into the signifiers of language. This dialectisation, which is anchored by what Lacan calls a 'master signifier,' results in a 'splitting' of the $ubject, represented in Lacanian terms by the matheme '$,' the 'split subject.' The bar signifies the barrier constructed between the conscious and the unconscious, the alienation of the individual from his or her own desire. Thus the social construction of the individual $ubject, necessary for the functioning of society itself, actually results in a false consciousness of a sort similar to that outlined by Adorno in the Marxist perspective of subjectivity: in both cases a fundamental difference exists between the real conditions of individual existence and the social environment in which the individual subject must exist.
In his essay on the 'mirror phase,' Lacan explains how the $ubject is constituted "in a primordial form,...before language restores to it...its function as a subject (94)." In the mirror phase, the self identifies itself as such "in a fictional direction" as the infans perceives its own body as a Gestalt, a unified whole. The 'direction' is fictional-the consciousness is false-in that the infans identifies with only the image of the body in the mirror, an image which is actually exterior to the body itself. In the same way that Adorno's self only experiences itself as such in a socially-mediated way as a "doctor's wife...or religious expert (35)," the mirror-stage Lacanian I achieves a "mental permanence" only within an "alienating destination," a false unity located exterior to the actual self of the body.
Even before the "social dialectic" of language (the symbolic order), the Lacanian $ubject exhibits "an inorganic insufficiency in his [or her] natural reality (96)," just as from the Marxist perspective the individual is alienated from its real conditions of existence-its relationship to the material conditions of production-by the "reified formations" of bourgeois society.
In both Adorno and in Lacan, we see a notion of subjectivity that pre-supposes a fundamental alienation of the self. And this alienation seems inescapable. If in Adorno we see that "you become...in consciousness what you are in your being," despite the fact that our "being" in commodity society has lost the "functional sense" of material existence itself, Lacan shows us how, in Freud's language, "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" ('Where it [the Id, unconscious desire]) was, I (the Self) must come to be'), despite the fact that the social self is fundamentally alienated from its real existence in the realm of desire, for the symbolic order of society is a "system for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation (97)."
From neither the Marxist nor the psychoanalytic perspective does escape seem possible from the false consciousness of socially-imposed ideology. Unlike Marx and Engels, Adorno seems no longer to emphasise the necessity of the proletarian revolution. Whether the proletariat per se has dissolved, or the market has simply become too pervasive is unclear, but "what the rescuers [of alienated humanity] would be like [nevertheless] cannot be prophesied (43);" the best, it seems, that humanity can achieve is to make an attempt "to strip the veil from the eyes of the [bourgeois capitalist] wise guys" through a process of an enlightened critical approach (94). Likewise in Lacan, though "psychoanalysis...recognises [the] knot of imaginary servitude" to the symbolic order of society, Lacan, insists that "it is not in our mere power as practitioners" of analysis to solve the fundamental alienation of human existence, only to study the "passions of the soul" and attempt to untangle "the sufferings of neurosis and psychosis" in their most emphatic and damaging instances (99).
The Marxist critical approach can bring to light the conflictual nature of the relationship of the subject in commodity society to the real conditions of production, and the psychoanalytic perspective can untangle to some degree the symbolic conflicts of the $ubject, but neither theory can truly touch upon the Real; neither theory proposes to deliver completely from the trap of false consciousness, the snare of ideology, and they should not be thought of as being capable of such a feat. "Even theories of utmost dignity," Adorno writes, "are prone at least to reified interpretation. The seem in this to comply secretly with a demand of...society (40)."
Citations from Adorno, Theodor W. "Messages in a Bottle" and Lacan, Jacques "The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I," in Zizek, Slavoj. Mapping Ideology. London:Verso, 1994.
6 August, 1998