Artificial Reverie and Administered Negativity

Abstract

In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse complicates the Freudian thesis of the discontent inherent to civilization, arguing that “the conflicts of the unhappy individual now seem far more amenable to cure … and seem more adequately defined in terms of the ‘neurotic personality of our time.’” An central element of Marcuse’s thesis is the addition of historical specificity to Freudian theory. However, as subsequent theorists such as Paul Piccone and Tim Luke warn, such a project requires continual development. As monopoly capitalism achieves complete hegemony, they argue, the integrative forces of one-dimensional society undergo qualitative changes—collapsing backward into “artificial negativity.” With these critiques in mind, this chapter attempts to drill down on the idea of negativity, artificial and otherwise. Complementing Marcuse’s Freudian analysis of late capitalist subjectivity with the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, this chapter seeks to understand negativity from an early developmental perspective. In particular, I draw from Bion’s theory of “reverie” to describe the way contemporary cultural institutions mediate economic demands on character structure with the psychological needs of neoliberal subjects. In this framing, this chapter seeks to understand the internalization of one-dimensional society under conditions of totalized neoliberalism and argues that artificial negativity has continued to develop—emerging in a form I term “administered negativity.” Here, we follow the argument that new modes of thought are structurally compelled during the transition from expansive entrepreneurial capitalism to intensive technological capitalism and that this process of character development nevertheless comports with Marcuse’s one-dimensionality thesis. In so doing, we look to understand the demands of capital on contemporary subjectivity and the continual development of integrative social forces.