︎ The Antinomies of Progress: Adorno and Marcuse

May 27, 2021

Capitalist ideologues equate progress with technological advancement. Anticapitalists retort that this advancement serves only the accumulation of capital, whose cost is exploitation and immiseration. The identification of progress with the domination of nature provokes the counter-identification of nature with non-domination, which becomes antithetical to progress. At one extreme, progressives identify civilization with freedom from nature; at the other, primitivists identify nature with freedom from civilization. Freedom is either progressing independence; or the regression to dependence. In either case, freedom’s negative definition vitiates its positive substantiation. Freud subverts this attempted demarcation of positive from negative, as well as the antithesis of dependence and independence. He does so on two counts. First, through his suggestion that hominization is repression; second, with his discovery of the return of the repressed. Just as culture can never rid itself of nature, nature can never be purged of culture – not because both share a common ontological substance, as postmodern monism would have it, but because each can only be grasped as the negation of the other. If all repression entails the return of the repressed, repression is what makes human freedom at once possible and impossible. Thus the progress of freedom is inseparable from the progress of repression. This antinomy plays a fundamental role for two Marxist thinkers heavily indebted to Freud, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. But each tries to resolve it differently. In his 1961 essay ‘Progress’, Adorno suggests that progress is not cumulative advancement but the perpetually reiterated resistance to regression. By way of contrast, in ‘Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’ (1970), Marcuse maintains that repressive progress culminates in the sublimation of repression, releasing creative spontaneity from blind compulsion. The question is how, in the case of Adorno, resistance breaks with repetition, and how, in the case of Marcuse, repression sublimates itself. These are the two questions we propose to investigate.

(Ray Brassier)