this originally began as an addendum to my review of todd mcgowan's "emancipation after hegel", but i do believe it deserves its own post. the central issue i want to probe is the status of authority in modernity. specifically, i want to build on (and push back slightly on) a key statement made in chapter seven: learning to love the end of history: freedom through logic. one key paragraph (in fact, arguably the anchoring thesis) of the chapter reads thus:
If there is no aspect of being that escapes contradiction, if every entity (even God) includes what negates it, then there is no consistent authority in the world. Authority depends on consistent self-identity: we attribute authority where we posit an absence of contradiction. But we do so only insofar as we leave the figure of authority unthought. Its consistency depends on our positing it as unknown, and when we try to know it, as Kant does in the Transcendental Dialectic from the Critique of Pure Reason, its contradictory status becomes evident. The subject finds itself enthralled to external authority only as long as it can believe in the consistent status of this authority, and the discovery of its contradiction has the effect of freeing the subject, as the subject recognizes that even the ultimate authority is in the same boat as the subject itself.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 134
and this is why Hegel reads modernity as the end of history, because
The modern world permits every subject to experience this revelation of the inconsistency of authority. Every subject can recognize that contradiction is coextensive with being itself because no subject in modernity has any necessary superiority to any other. This is why modernity is the epoch of revolutions: if there is no undivided Other, no figure of authority that avoids contradiction, then no one has a right to rule. As a result, rule becomes the object of contestation, and, what’s more, subjects must learn to exist without reliance on any consistent external authority whatsoever.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 134
this reading of modernity is uncharacteristically optimistic for a thinker like mcgowan, who has analyzed so strongly the unique circumstances of neoliberal subjectivity. this is, of course, not to say that in the existing status quo, we have achieved hegel's emancipatory project, but that modernity is uniquely poised to allow the subject to achieve freedom. i'd like to offer a critical extension of this analysis.
my contention is that modernity does reveal the inconsistency of authority. the problem is that neoliberalism has discovered how to govern through that very revelation. it no longer requires subjects to believe in a consistent Other. it requires only that they interpret the inconsistency of the Other as a deficiency of themselves.
superego and modernity
i argue that the status of authority in modernity is the superegoic command. the superegoic command does not offer a liberation from the status of authority; rather, the exact same structure can be found in it. the superegoic command is contradictory, but the superego relocates that contradiction into the subject as personal inadequacy.
the traditional authority is one of repression. in the lacanian analogy, it is the father who instantiates prohibitions and enacts the social law. this is the figure of authority most strongly reminiscent within mcgowan's readings of freedom and authority; an opaque, external authority which commands the subject. the superego, in contrast, is an authority which is not repressive. the fundamental demand of the superego is "Enjoy!". the superego commands us not to repress our desire for the sake of the law, but to seek out unencumbered jouissance.
at the risk of sounding more foucauldian than i actually am, there does seem to be a shift from the fundamental social authority being more repressive to productive in the modern day. the fundamental drive of capitalism (as mcgowan himself shows in capitalism and desire) is to convince the subject to pursue more and more objects in the hope that it may one day achieve enjoyment. the relationship of the subject to enjoyment is drastically different than the monk who flogs himself for daring to desire. as mcgowan himself writes,
...over the course of the twentieth century, the power of the superego has arisen as the power of the public Law has lessened. In one sense, the rise of the superego is the fulfillment of the Law, but in another, it represents the seeming destruction of the Law, the end of its prohibition on enjoyment. Unlike the public Law, which prohibits enjoyment, the superego commands it. According to Lacan, “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Enjoy!” The rise of the superego and its demand for enjoyment is correlative to the transformation from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment.
— Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction?, p. 30
this is of course not to say that the superego is uniquely modern. as freud and lacan show, the superego is a part of subjectivity, not a specific historical phenomenon. my argument is instead that authority in modernity has a more superegoic structure than in the past.
nevertheless, the structure of ideology remains present in exactly the same form as it does for traditional authority. the key structure that mcgowan isolates is that a contradictory authority retains its power because ideology hides that contradiction by imagining it as resolvable.
the superegoic demand is contradictory because it commands us while at the same time obscuring its status as a command. no one would think that they were being authoritarian in telling another to enjoy themselves, and reciprocally, nobody imagines the command to enjoy themselves as a command. it appears to us as common sense or good advice, certainly not a violent imposition. nevertheless, if enjoyment continually fails, yet the demand to enjoy persists, then the demand cannot originate from the subject's own experience. it must be sustained by an external symbolic injunction. the superego's existence is in contradiction (in the hegelian sense) because it constitutes itself as demand by disavowing itself as demand.
and yet the failure to recognize superegoic demand as demand is the structure of ideology. a subject who fails to enjoy themselves does not recognize that a failure to enjoy oneself is a fixture of subjectivity but rather projects that failure onto themselves. i am not enjoying myself because i am too uptight, or i haven't found the right lifestyle, or i need to find my authentic self. the command to enjoy is misrecognized as spontaneous desire, and its inevitable failure is experienced as personal failure. this guilt then renews attachment to the command. this is the ideological figure of superego, no less present in modernity than in the divine right of kings.
the reason the superegoic demand is unique is because it no longer requires us to imagine that the demand is external. the subject thinks that it is the master of its own destiny, and that it must take responsibility for its autonomy by pursuing its self-interest. the subject imagines that it does things for itself. this is, of course, a fantasy, insofar as psychoanalysts have demonstrated that the subject's desire is always constituted by the Other, but the notable aspect is that the subject no longer prostrates itself to obey the Other's repressive desires, but rather internalizes the Other's command to enjoy.
enjoy your contradiction!
this leads us to a natural question - what is it that causes mcgowan to claim that modernity has a privileged position with respect to contradiction? what causes him to bracket a structure that he so clearly identified both in previous historical epochs and in the modern world, in his other works?
for a thinker as perceptive as mcgowan, i'm hesitant to attribute it to a mere failure to consider it. rather, i do think there is something different about modernity that can cause one to miss its shortcomings. if we refer again to mcgowan's passage on the special status of modernity, he writes that
...if there is no undivided Other, no figure of authority that avoids contradiction, then no one has a right to rule.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 134
mcgowan is correct that modernity reveals the inconsistency of authority, but incorrect about the consequences. neoliberalism does not return to premodern authority but governs in the wake of that revelation. put differently, authority no longer claims "i possess the truth", but instead, "there is no authority but yourself". the mistake is to identify isolation with freedom, which mcgowan seems to so vehemently critique in his discussion of the state as a structure of freedom (because of its inherent sociality). this structure only succeeds if a subject identifies its own contradiction with the contradiction of the Other. neoliberal subjectivity renounces external authority in favor of internal.
for mcgowan's emancipatory project to succeed, the subject must therefore recognize its internal contradiction to turn its back on the perception of a stable authority once and for all. i argue that neoliberalism does appear to resemble hegelian contradiction, and yet coopts it by giving it a telos. the result is not an embrace of contradiction but its instrumentalization.
the neoliberal modern subject is increasingly willing to forsake self-identity and embrace what appears on the surface to be a form of the contradiction that mcgowan explicates. think of the demand to reinvent oneself constantly, to be flexible, to adapt to changing circumstances. we seem to be willing to embrace ontological contradiction insofar as we think of ourselves as ever-evolving beings, working through and against stable identities in the same way the hegelian dialectic does.
however, the difference between mcgowan's emancipatory project and neoliberalism is that neoliberalism cannot imagine contradiction without a purpose. the subject's internal contradiction is transformed into a productive demand to reinvent oneself, to adopt any identity. the contradiction of the self is made productive. because contradiction is not truly embraced but tied to the axiomatic god of capital, the supposed emphasis on dialectical transformation is instead oriented, in the end, towards a stable endpoint.
mcgowan himself identifies a similar structure when he argues that "the superego channels the destructiveness of the death drive into the framework of obedience". that is why the transgressive enjoyment of the superego does not represent a genuine moment of the death drive. similarly, i argue that neoliberalism channels contradiction's instability into productivity, but does not represent a genuine embrace of contradiction.
on authority
interestingly, mcgowan himself seems to recognize this structure, but only remarks on it in passing. as an explanation for why modernity feels so unfree, he suggests that the culprit can be our societal confusion of civil society ("the social bond established through economic exchange" [p. 205]) with the state, writing that
Though modernity gives birth to the form of the state, it also unleashes an unprecedented development of civil society through the capitalist economy. While the state and civil society develop simultaneously and often work together, their structures are fundamentally at odds with each other. Whereas civil society encourages the subject to immerse itself in its own private concerns, the state demands that the subject recognize itself first and foremost as a public being.
When one conceives of the state as an organization that one joins for the sake of mutual protection, one reduces it to the logic of civil society. Once one thinks that state membership is nothing but an option, one misses completely the constitutive role that the state plays in one’s subjectivity. This occurs when the state takes on the hue of civil society, which it has increasingly done since Hegel’s death. The state today appears as an oppressive force because it has largely become an arm of civil society, serving as the handmaiden for the forces of capitalism. When this occurs, the state loses its capacity for giving individuals an ethical basis for their existence.
When the capitalist economy displaces the state in this way, it simultaneously disguises our solidarity as subjects. Without a recognition of the necessity of the state, we come to see ourselves as involved in a pitiless war of all against all, in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Once the capitalist economy gains priority over the state form, the fundamental contradiction that defines our political being recedes from view. Capitalist subjects do not view themselves as political beings. Their individuality simply exists on its own, not through the mediation of the universal. As a result, they experience themselves as private entities. Capitalism’s assault on the public world leaves subjects immersed in their own private particularity, unaware of the psychic necessity of the public world to underwrite their privacy.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 205-206
this portrayal of capitalism, however, seems at odds with mcgowan's prior analysis, that freedom can come from the emphasis that no one has a right to rule. modern neoliberalism accepts this judgment but then privatizes authority, which seems to suggest that a contradictory authority alone cannot provide the basis for freedom.
although it seems paradoxical, this is where i think mcgowan's emphasis on the necessity of the state comes in. mcgowan argues that
One can imagine freedom without the state but not without some similar structure that functions as a shared obstacle for the collective, which is why Hegel’s thought is completely incompatible with any form of anarchism.
When the individual subject conceives itself without reference to the state, it conceives itself initially as a being of pure self-interest, even if it ultimately wishes to subject this self-interest to the interest of the community. One can imagine the subject pursuing its self-interest, but the problem is that this pursuit is not freedom.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 203
the issue with neoliberalism is that privatizing authority, it necessarily obscures the subject's status as a public being. mcgowan's attack on anarchism here is much more compelling when read as targeting the liberal individualist tradition than of mikhail bakunin (although mcgowan would surely not align himself with the latter, either). although figures like locke and nozick would not consider themselves anarchists, their understanding of the state as a civil entity which manages and mediates between private individuals is exactly the neutering of the state that mcgowan is wary of.
hegel's emancipatory project is, fittingly, contradictory. it cannot abandon authority because that would give way to the privatization of authority, but it cannot blindingly accept authority because authority must be contradictory. modern neoliberalism wages a two-stage war on hegelian freedom. first, it correctly recognizes that external authority is always faulty, but refinds authority internally, within the self. the self is guiltily responsible for its own flourishing. secondly, it convinces the subject that its own contradictions are not a signal of its own failed authority, but rather opportunities to capitalize on, to redirect towards the capitalist drive.
a true emancipation, therefore, does not look like the abandonment of external authority, because such an abandonment always leads to individualism. rather, as mcgowan argues,
The subject is free only when its substantial Other suffers abject humiliation without ceasing to be the expression of authority.
— Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 163