The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory by Beverley Best Werner Bonefeld Chris O'Kane & Werner Bonefeld & Chris O’Kane & Jacob Blumenfeld

Author:Beverley Best,Werner Bonefeld,Chris O'Kane & Werner Bonefeld & Chris O’Kane & Jacob Blumenfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Published: 2018-05-30T13:30:09.784116+00:00

Self-Reification, AUTHORITARIANISM and the Atrophy of Responsibility

The administered world’s sense of totality is demonstrated with particular clarity by its imprint on the individual. The administration of human beings amounts to their objectification and reification. This mechanism is internalized, which leads to the self-reification of those compelled to accommodate themselves to the administered world. This was already the subject matter of Adorno’s aphorism ‘Novissimum Organon’ in Minima Moralia. As he put it in 1950, ‘everyone is their own clerical case worker, as it were’.57 In his essay of 1967, ‘Erziehung nach Auschwitz’ [Education after Auschwitz], he offered a condensed account of the kind of person calibrated for reification whom he also identified with the manipulative character previously introduced in The Authoritarian Personality. A manic dedication to organizational activity and efficiency, a fetish for technology, and emotional frigidity were among the characteristics of this kind of person. ‘People of this kind first make themselves resemble objects and then, if they can, others too’.58 Developments in the decades since have only confirmed the acuity of this diagnosis of self-reification. One engages in time management, learns to deal with one’s feelings, holds ‘emotional bank accounts’, and crafts the identity one needs in any given context. The term adaptation no longer refers merely to one aspect of the natural process of evolution or to one aspect of the socialization into human society that transpires instinctively through mimetic behaviour. Instead, it has taken centre stage and become a commandment and creed. One has to, and wants to, conform and this strategy boils down to a principled willingness to engage in self-reification and self-instrumentalization. ‘The process of adjustment has now become deliberate and therefore total’.59

Since human beings in the modern world are not merely the proverbial cogs in the machine but also subjects that bear responsibility for themselves in the market place, the desire of subjectivity for emotions and identification has to be taken into account. Consequently, the administered world is also the world of the cult of personality, of the principle of individuality. Preoccupation with oneself plays a considerable role. Yet the much vaunted act of taking care of oneself frequently seems lifeless – as Adorno put it, ‘the idea of a passionate human being today seems almost anachronistic’60 – and attaches itself to superficial issues, even when psychological concepts are invoked. For this phenomenon he coined the term pseudo-individualization.61 In the radio discussion in 1950, Horkheimer uttered a harsh critique of psychoanalysis, which applies with even greater justification today to its cognitive-behavioural competitors: ‘In psychoanalysis the process of administration is continued within the human being itself’.62 On the one hand, the rise of psychology and therapy demonstrated that for many, the process of adaptation was not, after all, as seamless as the functioning of the social machine would require. On the other hand, (psychoanalytic) therapy itself played an integral role in the process of alienation. In the form ‘in which it is currently practised’, Horkheimer argued, it implied ‘that human beings should feel well under the general pressure’.

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