Can ‘Bad Subjects’ Overcome Ideology?

With Freud, Althusser, Breton, Geuss and Marcuse

“Why is it so hard for men to be happy[?]” Freud asks civilised society.[1] In this paper, I trace how human experience is restrained by social formations, and explore the possibility of ‘overcoming ideology’ through art. Freud submits that there is a “cultural frustration” produced by the claustrophobia and unfreedom of civilisation wherein human instinct is repressed by the forces of modernity and culture.[2] The suppression of humanity’s nature is not accidental or incidental to the project of civilisation. Rather, Freud contends that modern civilisation sustains itself through the denial of instinct by impregnating humans with psychic guilt towards their own nature. The struggle for freedom, therefore, is a struggle against the binds of modern society. Culture, modernity, civilisation are all interchangeable terms that are the site of battle between the demands of accultured life and the irresistible appeal of disorder. Repression restricts human experience to maintain culture. Freedom and happiness are vitiated by the malaise of repression.

Certainly, not all repression is eliminable – some socialisation, tension, and sacrifice is a trans-historical reality necessary for social freedom and protecting individuals against violence and loss of life. In The Idea of A Critical Theory, Raymond Geuss concedes that although “some imposed frustration…must be legitimate and unexceptionable,” there is “surplus repression” which poses a stark threat to contentment and emancipation.[3] The organisation of modern civilisation has constructed elaborate webs of restriction such as alienating economic systems, patriarchy’s imposition of stifling gender roles, and positivism’s reduction of reality to a set of empirically verifiable scientific laws. These exploitative, confining superstructures which benefit few – if any – individuals, are cast as exigent, when in fact they are surpluses of culture’s project of survival. Geuss admits two problems arise with identifying ‘surplus’ repression. First, it is impossible to create a universal metric to track where ‘necessary’ repression crosses over into ‘surplus’ since each society has its own standards of necessity wound up in local sociology. Second, relatedly, the work of culture is precisely to present these localised surpluses as requirements, which is to say that surplus repression is naturalised through ‘ideology.’

If we accept Freud’s characterisation that repression is the psychic denial of instinct and nature that uses guilt and discontentment as psychological tools, then we can see how repression’s substantive content and operationalisation in civil society is provided by ideology. According to Geuss, ideology in a descriptive sense is “the beliefs the members of the group hold, the concepts they use, the attitudes and psychological dispositions they exhibit, their motives, desires, values, predilections.”[4] However, we have seen that these motives, values and desires are what normalise surplus repression, making this descriptive understanding of ideology is closer to what Freud might call culture. Hence, Geuss introduces a second approach to ideology in which it is a pejorative “program of criticism of the beliefs, attitudes, and wants of the agents in a particular society” that aims to emancipate society from its false consciousness by “demonstrate[ing] to them that they are so deluded.”[5] Even this definition can be edified with Louis Althusser’s insistence that “ideology has a material existence,” not exclusively a discursive one. [6] It is not a politically neutral false consciousness, because it contains particular socioeconomic principles such as those of the patriarchy or capitalism which frame the way society is ordered. Ideology, for Althusser, is situated in the patterns of behaviour naturalised by institutions to distort the real conditions of life. With this conception of ideology, the distinction between belief and action is exploded to reveal a system where individuals are “always already” recruited or interpellated into subjects of ideology through their participation in civilisation.[7]

Therefore, within the context of this paper, repression becomes a psychic force – an internal movement, a modality of upholding ideological systems of power. This distinction is critical, and the equation becomes: subjects of ideology participate in ritualised practices of modern society because ideology successfully hails individuals into subjects through the repression of their basic humanity. The psychological experience of repression could generate discontent or, if ideological interpellation is wholly successful, an attachment to repressive ideology. This suggests that not everybody is conscious of the carceral effects of civilisation, nor does everybody respond to discontentment with resistance because ideology paints itself seamless, essential, and eternal.

If surplus repression is deleterious to living a free and happy life, who can overcome it? How? To ask this is to ask how might one escape being a subject of ideology blinded to the real conditions of life, racked with guilt, unable to surmount repression. For Althusser, the individual who resists ideology is a ‘bad subject.’ He does not flesh out who this or how they have come to be, but his acknowledgment of their existence is significant for it sets limits for the power of ideology. Even though individuals are “always already” being fabricated by ideology, interpreting this congenital interpellation to mean that there is no possibility of emancipation would be a theoretical dead end. Unfree repression would be a foregone conclusion of the modern human condition. However, reasonably, there have been and continue to be ‘bad subjects’ who express in no uncertain terms their problematic experiences with repression – without bad subjects history would have seen few revolutions and society would have stagnated.

In their instantiations of how repression can be resisted, Herbert Marcuse and André Breton suggest that art has a unique potentiality to thwart the conventional wisdoms of restrictive ideology. If this is true, then artists would be ‘bad subjects,’ primed to disrupt the systems of culture. In this paper, I argue that one could be a ‘bad subject’ by resisting repression through aesthetic creation, but genuine overcoming of repression requires attempting to identify the surplus repression implicated in the project of culture by studying the material apparatuses of ideology. To make this argument, I look at Marcuse’s explication of the aesthetic as a non-oppressive organisational principle before briefly engaging with Breton’s Manifesto for Surrealism. Next, I analyse the politics of the artist as a ‘bad subject.’ Lastly, I contemplate what it means to overcome repression and set forth an alternative praxis for protesting ideology. 

Aesthetic Resistance – Marcuse and Play

In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse suggests that those who most commonly feel like hostages of ideology, those who spend time in a plane opposed to logic – artists – are uniquely placed to reclaim free nature from the clutches of repression.[8] The term ‘aesthetic’ connotes an “inner connection between pleasure, sensuousness, beauty, truth, art, and freedom.”[9] The aesthetic represents the coalescence of “the “lower” and the “higher” faculties” of people – it harmonises raw sensuousness and visceral pleasure with truth and intellect.[10] Modern civilisation is centred around a binary that freezes logic on one end and senses and instinct on the other. In such a society, ideology hails individuals as foot soldiers of a distorted, politically expedient reality that banishes freedom and the expression of chaos from its realm. Artists, however, through their investment in the aesthetic, “attempt to reconcile the two spheres of the human existence [rationality and sensuousness] which were torn asunder” by civilisation.[11]

Artists create beauty by representing the pure reality of an object. This representation is realised through the play of their imagination. Marcuse contends that the object’s real existence despite its fantastical origins in the artistic imagination gives rise to a space with its own set of laws. These laws are the opposite of civilisation’s restrictions, they are laws of freedom and play. Play liberates both the subject and the object of the creative process by operating in accordance with synthetical, aesthetic laws which welcome sensuousness without resorting to repression.

The connotational shift when talking of ‘aesthetics’ from a reconciliatory faculty to embodied artwork is symptomatic of how civilised society exiled sensuousness to a specific profession and disregarded its political and philosophical power. In modern society, imagination is devalued and humankind is alienated from their sensuous reality, but artists rupture the workings of ideology and repression. The act of creation, which marries instinct with skill and cognition, defies the psychic force of repression. Furthermore, the urge to represent reality must begin with plumbing at what reality entails, thereby resisting the false consciousness that ideology sets up for the duration of the creative process. Even if artists are ultimately unsuccessful in excavating the real nature of reality outside ideology or determining the exact point of surplus repression, their activities at least try to find this out – this is deviance is enough to confirm them as ‘bad subjects.’

Marcuse goes further. He believes that the total problematic of ideology and repression can be resolved if only society were to universally organise around the non-repressive laws of the aesthetic. His vision of society is only possible in a state of plenitude, where necessity is replaced by abundance, and society at last, is free to play.

However, by caveating his entire political project with a utopian state of abundance, Marcuse’s aesthetic faculty loses its significance as a meansfor liberation and becomes its consequence.[12] Plenitude presupposes the overcoming of the modern repressive state, without indicating how that would take place.

Still, Marcuse’s notion of play correctly diagnoses repression as what must be overcome to attain emancipation. Its most convincing assertion is that to overcome repression, simply trying to ‘repress repression’ as it were, is insufficient. Even if his theory a feeble attempt to mechanise how repression can be overcome beyond saying ‘through play,’ from his theory it is clear that the overcoming of repression differs from the movement of repression itself.

Surrealism – Anarchistic Automatism?

“It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself,” proclaimed André Breton.[13] Surrealism emerged out of a contempt for the art of civilised society that was colonised by self-consciousness, cultural conventions, and deference to literary and political authority. In its manifesto, Breton defined surrealism as “[p]sychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought…in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”[14] Repression’s annihilation of fantasy and daring, where prudent rationality reigned supreme, had chained writers to realism. Of course, the ‘real’ is constructed by ideological manipulation, and Breton believed that it was through automatic, unthinking writing that the repressed author could create strange, nonsensical and transformative art that dislodged ideology’s control.

Breton’s manifesto does not propose a path to the collective overcoming of repression, but his instructions allow individual artists to peel back layers of indoctrination and accultured sensibilities. Automatism might produce valuable art, it might not – its significance lies in the liberation it gives the ‘bad subject’ creator to play in the Marcusian sense (albeit without Marcuse’s beauty requisite). Surrealism triumphs in its professed aims of attacking the authority of rationalism, championing nonsense, and coaxing the unconscious’ fictions and fantasy out from repression, but it fails to provide any path to liberation outside of artistry.

The Politics of the Artist as a ‘Bad Subject’

Marcuse and Breton both prove that artists are capable of militating against repression. However, there are two reasons why this resistance critically fails to constitute the ‘overcoming’ of repression. First, there is the obvious elitism of claiming that artists are the most likely or adept ‘bad subjects.’ Being a ‘bad subject’ would then become the privileged domain of the bourgeois artist who is able to create absurd or aesthetic art without considering the economics of survival in modern liberal society. While such artists are ‘bad subjects,’ neither are they the only group capable of resistance, nor does being  a ‘bad subject’ does necessarily imply that one has overcome subjection.

Crucially, portraying artists as invariable or paradigmatic ‘bad subjects’ takes a confused, narrow view of repression and ideology itself. Artists deal only with escaping from repression. The surrealists and Marcuse problematise the psychic traumatisms of repression, its intellectual restrictions, and its creative implications for the individual artist. However, all repression is embedded in the larger ideological firmament which has a material existence. What is needed to truly overcome repression is critical engagement with the structure of ideology – a structure that artists remain painfully disengaged from. In Marcuse, there is convenient dissonance in trying to present unfettered reality on a canvas without dismantling the illusions that obfuscate reality’s visibility in the first place. Play and automatic writing operate exclusively in the intellectual plane, not the material one. Therefore, while they offer temporary artistic catharsis, it is not a complete political praxis of overcoming ideology.

The focus on the individual ‘bad subject’ is doomed to fail. Repression cannot be treated by designing personal respites of creative freedom, because ideology will continue to engineer the larger social reality. Since subjects are the results of interpellation, not their cause, emancipation from ideological subjection must explore the material conditions of ideology that enable interpellation. The subject and predicate of critical theory must be accordingly reversed. Which is to say we must search for the contradictions in society that produce ideology, experiment with its mechanical structure, and investigate the institutional soil of repression –  because repression is not the essence of civilisation (as Freud and Marcuse rightly show), it is the result of historically produced politics. Ideology is constantly struggling to establish itself, it cannot be treated as omnipotent.

Overcoming – An Alternate Praxis

Overcoming must begin in the flesh and bones of material ideology. Where repression limits and prescribes through ideology, overcoming liberates its subjects through theory, play, beauty, and rigorous commitment to the political decentralisation of authority with a praxis. We must ask, what kinds of subjects are being produced? How are institutions reinforcing civilised behaviour? We must interrogate these patterns and superstructures in order to pick at the convoluted gossamers of ideology. The goal is not for singular or temporary escape from surplus repression, but the collective dismantling of ideology through vigorously practical methods of revolution.

One might argue that the distinction between psychic repression and material ideology is synthetic, making this explication of overcoming the result of an artificial scission. Yet, I maintain it is an important theoretical development because it refocuses the narrative to focus not on subjective repression (as artists do), but material structures (bringing workers, activists and educators into the conversation).

It is not enough to say that we are repressed and let others know of their repression, we must actively disrupt the networks of ideology – by exposing its weaknesses, encouraging mutual recognition of subjection, weaponising education, and even pursuing revolutionary art and play. This interrogation of ideological apparatuses does not need to produce positivist progams, but it must go beyond emancipatory discussion in the form of critical theory. Overcoming’s methodology does not start with subjects that need to be taught how to undo themselves. Instead, overcoming begins with sustained, collectivist ways to undo the apparatuses of ideology.

Which is to say that overcoming cannot be individual or temporary. It is structural, collective, and material. Resistance may begin asymmetrically, welter, and backslide, but the liberation of all individuals is the real task at hand. So long as surplus repression exists for some, it has not been overcome.  

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[1] Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 33.

[2] Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 44.

[3] Raymond Geuss, The Idea of A Critical Theory, 15.

[4] Raymond Geuss, The Idea of A Critical Theory, 5.

[5] Ibid, 12.

[6] Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 166.

[7]Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 175.

[8] Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.

[9] Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, 173.

[10] Ibid, 173.

[11] Ibid, 178-9.

[12] It is also unclear what it means for society to be organised in terms of the aesthetic in a material sense. 

[13] Breton, La Libertaire, 1952.

[14] Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 26.