Childhood Experience and the image of Utopia:
The broken promise of Adorno's Proustian sublimations

Matt F. Connell

At least since Aristotle, various conceptions of culture have valorized its pacifying role as an outlet for dangerous impulses and tensions. Sigmund Freud belongs to this culture-as-catharsis tradition, and accordingly radical intellectuals and artists have often been uneasy with his concept of sublimation, nervous lest their work be reduced to the drives channelled into it, and worried that the domestication of explosive impulses renders art conformist. For this reason, Joel Whitebook suggests, `Adorno is led to reject the notion of sublimation.'1 Certainly, Adorno does not mince his words: `Artists do not sublimate.... Rather, artists display violent instincts, free-floating and yet colliding with reality, marked by neurosis.'2 As in the later Aesthetic Theory,3 Adorno prefers here the concept of expression to that of sublimation. But Whitebook casts Adorno's rejection of the concept of sublimation as polemic, for Adorno still uses it, providing an eloquent aphoristic version: `Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.'4 Perhaps every work of Adorno's is an unthrown Molotov cocktail, for he tries to turn righteous anger into the thought of what it would take to escape it: `Whoever thinks is without anger in all criticism: thinking sublimates anger. Because the thinking person does not have to inflict anger on himself, he furthermore has no desire to inflict it upon others.'5

So, Adorno does sublimate, channelling the painful emotion which is the mark of genuine psychological openness in the direction of socially critical thought. Looking for something to blame instead of the victim, Adorno turns Freud's critique of the neurotic self into a critique of society. Adorno's rather caricatured early image of a repressive Freud has it that psychoanalysis champions a pseudo-rational logic of adjustment, amounting to an uncritical internalization of the reality which insists that the infant must only enjoy that which is socially sanctioned. Children must progressively give up earlier forms of happiness and pleasure, which demand everything in an unsustainable blurring of the boundaries between subject and object, infant and adult, and male and female. Polymorphous pleasure gives way to reality, and, broken, we must learn to love it. Any remnants are disparaged as a perverse wrong turn, and the dashing of the promise of a more universal happiness is dressed up as normal maturation. Gratification is not only deferred and altered, it is distorted and denied, for under advanced capitalism aim-inhibition becomes total, and `the diner must be satisfied with the menu'.6

Psychoanalysis reduces pleasure to a mere trick of the species deployed for its own reproduction, allowing the adjustment of the client to enjoy whatever is deemed compatible with the reproduction of a given society. The adjustment orientation of conformist psychoanalysis is supposedly dedicated to producing `[t]he regular guy' and `the popular girl',7 who purge their socially provoked tensions with sport, weepies and a healthy sex life.8 Adorno instead puritanically insists that

a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and - inseparable from it - personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold on life inside them, as if it did not already have them firmly enough in its power from outside.9

Adorno's concern with these repressed, negative erotics of existence is a distinctive feature of his work. He even goes so far as to allow fleetingly a positive extrapolation from them, hinting that something about pleasure could transcend its `subservience to nature',10 which, in a reality replete with a socially sedimented second nature, is always in fact subservience to society: `He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure, which, satisfying the ultimate intention, is intentionless, has a stable and valid idea of truth.'11 This materialistic theory of truth consciously sublimates yearnings unknowingly repressed in the austere forms of philosophy which seek to purify thought from its infantile and somatic roots. The derivation of theoretical impulses from infantile demands for total satisfaction does not have to be a wholly regressive phenomenon. The perverse search for a pleasure beyond that currently available could be a source of resistance to existing society: `Whatever qualities at present genuinely anticipate a more human existence are always simultaneously, in the eyes of the existing order, damaged rather than harmonious things.'12

Although the pull is there, Adorno's condemnation of socially functional gratifications should not therefore lead to the direct celebration of more subterranean yearnings, for `what slips through the net is filtered by the net'.13 Adorno's exaggerated critique of psychotechnics tries to avoid the celebration of a perverse resistance to cultural norms as a true other to repressive reason: `In adjusting to the mad whole the cured patient becomes really sick - which is not to imply that the uncured are any healthier.'14 Normality may be awful, but perversity and neurosis are not in themselves the promised land. All three are distorted adult organizations of repressed infantile material. Adorno resists the course of championing the flowers of evil which may spring from the adult persistence of infantile impulse: `So much is true in psycho-analysis that the ontology of Baudelairian modernity, like all those that followed it, answers the description of infantile partial-instincts.'15 Baudelaire tries to capture the potential energy of these drives, and is crucial in the history of modernism, but his addiction to the `intoxication'16 produced by his violent images bears witness to the danger of attempting a direct appropriation of the seemingly unsocialized force of dark sexual impulses.17

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