Adorno, Theodor - Sociology and Psychology - I.pdf - Adorno - MKTK

Theodor Adorno

Sociology and Psychology

For more than 30 years,the tendency has been emerging among the masses of the

advanced industrial countries to surrender themselves to the politics of disaster

instead of pursuing their rational interests and, chief of all, that of their own

survival. While they are promised benefits, the idea of personal happiness is at

the same time emphatically replaced by threat and violence; inordinate sacrifices

are imposed on them, their existence is directly endangered, and an appeal made

to latent death-wishes. Much of this is so obvious to its victims that in endeav-

ouring to understand its workings one finds it difficult to rest content with the

decisive task of establishing the objective conditions of mass movements, and

not to be tempted into believing that objective laws no longer obtain.

The Failure of Social Psychology

By itself the old explanation that all the media of public opinion are

controlled by groups will not do. For the masses would hardly succumb

to the brazen wink of untrue propaganda if something within them did

not respond to the rhetoric of sacrifice and the dangerous life. To be

able to come to terms with fascism it was, therefore, considered neces-

sary to complete social theory by psychology, and particularly by

analytically oriented social psychology. The interplay of studies into

both social determinants and the prevailing instinctual structures was to

provide a full account of the inter-connecting totality. While on the

other side of the iron curtain docile scholarship exorcized analytical

psychology—the only one seriously to go into the subjective conditions

of objective irrationality—as the work of the devil and lumped Freud,

along with Spengler and Nietzsche, together with the fascists (a claim

Lukács did not shrink from making), on this side the emphasis was,

with no little satisfaction, shifted to the inner life and the human

being and his so-called existential qualities, the better to elude a

binding theory of society. As a result, those subjective conditions are,

in the last analysis, sceptically reduced to insubstantial, merely subjective

motivations, as indeed was already the case in Freud’s late essay

Civilization and its Discontents .

Where any thought at all has been devoted to the relation between

social theory and psychology, it has not gone beyond merely assigning

the two disciplines their place within the total scheme of the sciences;

the difficulties their relation involves have been treated as a matter of

employing the right conceptual model. Whether social phenomena are

to be derived from objective conditions or from the psyche of the

socialized individuals, or from both; whether the two types of ex-

planation complete or exclude one another, or whether their relation-

ship itself requires further theoretical consideration—all this is reduced

to mere methodology.

The Case of Talcott Parsons

In his study ‘Psychoanalysis and the Social Structure’, 1 Talcott Parsons,

an exponent of this approach, rightly stresses the irreducible autonomy

of the social system, which—and here he is in agreement with both the

older German tradition and Durkheim—has to be understood on its

own level and not as a ‘composite resultant of the actions of the com-

ponent individuals alone’ 2 . But here too the distinction fastens on what

the sociologist is ‘interested’ in—behaviour and attitudes relevant to

the social system. Solely for this reason does he demand that sociological

problems of motivation be formulated in terms of the ‘frame of

reference of the social system’ and not of the ‘personality’. The socio-

logical models should, though, be ‘compatible with established know-

ledge of personality’. 3

Without any concern for whether the difference

1 Talcott Parsons, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Social Structure,’ in The Psychoanalytic

Quarterly , Vol. XIX, 1950, No. 3, p. 371 et seq.

2 loc. cit., p. 372.

3 loc. cit., p. 375.

is a question not of method but of objective reality, the choice of a

sociological or a psychological approach is left to the arbitrary discre-

tion of the respective departments.

Against the primitive notion of a single universal science, Parsons

does not blind himself to the fact that ‘the typical problems of the

psychologist and the sociologist are different’. For this very reason,

however, both ‘need to use the same concepts at different levels of

abstraction and in different combinations’. 4 This is possible only on the

assumption that the divergence of sociology and psychology can be

overcome independently of the real nature of their object. If at a

higher stage of internal organization both sciences clarified the logical

structure of their concepts, they could then, on this view, be smoothly

synthesized. Were we in final possession of a wholly adequate dynamic

theory of human motivations, the difference between the ‘levels of

abstraction’ would, according to Parsons, probably disappear. The

way social and individual, objective and psychic, moments relate to

one another is supposedly dependent on the mere conceptual schemati-

zation imposed on them in the busy academic process; plus the usual

reservation that a synthesis would at this stage be premature, that more

facts have to be gathered and concepts more sharply defined.

While Parsons, as a pupil of Max Weber’s, acutely discerns the in-

adequacy of many of the usual psychological explanations of societal

phenomena, he does not suspect behind this incompatibility any real

clash between the universal and the particular, any incommensurability

between the objective life-process, the ‘in itself and the individual that

is merely ‘for himself. The antagonism becomes, instead, a problem of

academic organization that, with steady progress, would harmon-

iously solve itself.

An ideal of conceptual unification taken from the natural sciences

cannot, however, be indiscriminately applied to a society whose unity

resides in its not being unified. Sociology and psychology, in so far

as they function in isolation from one another, often succumb to the

temptation to project the intellectual division of labour on to the

object of their study. The separation of society and psyche is false

consciousness; it perpetuates conceptually the split between the

living subject and the objectivity that governs the subjects and yet

derives from them. But the basis of this false consciousness cannot be

removed by a mere methodological dictum. People are incapable of

recognizing themselves in society and society in themselves because

they are alienated from each other and the totality. 5 Their reified

social relations necessarily appear to them as an ‘in itself’. What

compartmentalized disciplines project on to reality merely reflects

back what has taken place in reality. False consciousness is also true:

4 loc. cit., p. 376.

5 Whence empirical sociology has derived the phenomenon of ‘personalization’, the

tendency to explain social phenomena that are objectively motivated as the actions of

the good or bad persons with whose names the public sources of information

associate them. (See Theodor W. Adorno and others, The Authoritarian Personality ,

New York 1950, p. 663 et seq)

inner and outer life are torn apart. Only through the articulation of

their difference, not by stretching concepts, can their relation be ade-

quately expressed. The truth of the whole sides with one-sidedness, not

pluralistic synthesis: a psychology that turns its back on society and

idiosyncratically concentrates on the individual and his archaic heritage

says more about the hapless state of society than one which seeks by

its ‘wholistic approach’ or an inclusion of social ‘factors’ to join the

ranks of a no longer existent universitas literarum .

The Price of Conceptual Harmony

To unify psychology and social science by employing the same con-

cepts at different levels of abstraction necessarily amounts in concreto

to a harmonization of actual conflict. According to Parsons, the inte-

gration of society, which he tacitly assumes to be in general a good

thing, can be said to have succeeded when its functional needs—as an

objective social moment—coincide with the schemata of the ‘average

superego’. 6 This dove-tailing of the individual and the social system is

elevated to the status of a norm without any investigation of the place

both these ‘measures’ occupy in the overall social process and, above

all, of the origin of the ‘average superego’ and its claim to normative

validity; it can also be the normative expression of bad, repressive

conditions. Parsons has to pay a price for his conceptual harmony: his

notion of integration, a positivist version of the (idealist) identity of

subject and object, leaves room for an irrational society powerful

enough to shape its subjects from the outset. The coincidence of the

average superego and the functional needs of a social system, namely

those of its own self-perpetuation, is triumphantly achieved in Huxley’s

Brave Neiv World .

Such consequences are, needless to say, not intended by Parsons’

theory. His empiricist stance does not allow him to imply that this

identity has been actually realized. He emphasizes the divergence be-

tween men as psychological beings—‘personality structure’—and the

objective order—the ‘institutional structure’—in the contemporary

world. 7 In agreement with sociological tradition, Parsons, while re-

maining psychoanalyticaily oriented, takes into account the dimension

of non-psychological motivations, the mechanisms that cause people to

act in accordance with objective, institutional expectations even in

opposition to what the psychologists call their personality structure. 8

On this argument, their general, socially mediated goals and the ways

and means of achieving them would claim priority over their particular

subjective inclinations. Parsons does not, it is true, stress as firmly as

Max Weber did the decisive mediation here, the rationality of self-

preservation 9 . Apparently he conceives the social norms as being them-

selves sedimented patterns of adaptation and could thus be said to

approach them in ultimately psychological terms after all. But in

6 cf. Parsons, loc. cit., p. 373.

7 cf. Parsons, ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 374.

9 cf. Max Weber, ‘Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie,’ in Gesam-

melte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre , Tübingen 1922, p. 412.

opposition to the pervasive subjectivism of the economists, he at all

events knows that economic motivations cannot be dissolved into

such psychological entities as the ‘profit motive’. 10

Rationality and Fear

The individual’s rational economic behaviour undoubtedly derives

from something more than economic calculation and the profit motive.

This explanation is much more likely to have been a retrospective

construction which, while explaining very little, was supposed to make

some kind of convenient sense of the rationality of average economic

behaviour—a rationality which, from the individual’s point of view, is

by no means self-evident. Fear constitutes a more crucial subjective

motive of objective rationality. It is mediated. Today anyone who fails

to comply with the economic rules will seldom go under straight away.

But the fate of the déclassé looms on the horizon. Ahead lies the road to

an asocial, criminal existence: the refusal to play the game arouses sus-

picions and exposes offenders to the vengeance of society even though

they may not yet be reduced to going hungry and sleeping under

bridges. But the fear of being cast out, the social sanctions behind

economic behaviour, have long been internalized along with other

taboos, and have left their mark on the individual. In the course of

history this fear has become second nature; it is not for nothing that the

word ‘existence’ in usage uncontaminated by philosophy means equally

the fact of being alive and the possibility of self-preservation in the

economic process.

The superego, the locus of conscience, not merely represents what

is socially tabooed as being intrinsically evil but also irrationally com-

bines the ancient dread of physical annihilation with the much later

fear of being expelled from the social community which has come to

encircle us in the place of nature. This atavistic and often exaggerated

social fear, which latterly, to be sure, can at any moment revert to real

fear, has gathered such force that, however thoroughly one might see

through its irrationality, it would nevertheless take a moral hero to cast

it aside. Presumably people cling so desperately to the now highly

problematic and largely absurd quest for material goods of civilization

which economically rational behaviour is supposed to guarantee them

because civilization is something it was once so unimaginably hard for

them to bring themselves to undergo; and the communications media

play their part in keeping them in line. The instinctual energy of the

homo oeconomicus who lords it over the homo psychologicus is the compulsive

love for what was once hated; it had to be hammered in.

Such ‘psychology’ marks the point at which rational exchange con-

verges on violence, but it simultaneously sets limits on what individual

psychology can achieve. A firm belief in the transparent rationality of

the economy is, no less than the presumption that psychology is the

sufficient ground of men’s actions, a typical piece of bourgeois self-

deception. This rationality is based on physical coercion, on bodily

torment, a material moment that transcends both immanently econo-

10 Parsons, ibid., p. 374.

Adorno, Theodor - Sociology and Psychology - I.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: