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becomes more important than concrete common interests. If there is not
unity of impulse (and, given the richness of human impulses this is rare),
then the struggle centers on the question of whose impulses are legitimate.
Marriages or long-term affairs become testing grounds of personalities,
rather than relationships with constraints and interests of their own. Larger
communities break apart along the same lines : no matter what the scale of
modern
Gemeinschaft,
the logic of sharing feelings is that the self is made
powerless when feelings cannot be shared . This is why there exists the con–
viction, now so prevalent, that one's real problems are those of the arousal of
feeling in the presence of others. Sometimes this problem is overtly pre–
sented as self-failure; but covertly, in collective as well as individual cases,
the desire for
Gemeinschaft
with others is really an accusation against the
world for not mirroring back to one the resources for completing an identity.
I have spoken of a crisis of legitimation produced in ordinary life by our
very belief in being open and psychologically" liberated. " ]iirgen Habermas
takes up this theme in more abstract terms in his influential book,
Legiti–
mationsprobleme in Spatkapitalismus
(The Problems of Legitimation in
Late Capitalism) . In this work , Habermas calls for a better society in which
human communication is freed of all the constraints of arbitrary power
which operate in advanced capitalism. He advances a theory of cognition
(Erkenntnisleitenden)
in which "distortion-free" communication between
people is possible. I think his view is psychologically naive but also instruc–
tive . For Habermas, the psychological world is deformed by the social reali–
ties of power and control ; while Habermas seems to be talking about the
pressures of capitalism, his real worry, I think, is about the intrusion of
society,itself upon psychological openness, for in any society power of an un–
just and dominating sort will exist. The problem of modern culture lies in its
assumption that human beings must somehow get away from the issue of
domination in order to be communicative and open. To dream of a world in
which psychological processes of open communication, processes which are
taken to be morally good, are free from social questions, is to dream of a col–
lective escape from social relations themselves. The elevation of a psychology
of openness above the dirt and compromise of power politics is precisely the
dynamics of modern
Gemeinschaft.
Habermas's work is not so much a cri–
tique of the problem of legitimation now faced by the culture as the very
embodiment of this problem.
In sum, the repressive eroticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie
was the product of three beliefs. The first and most important was that in–
dividual personality was immanent in appearances in the public world . The
second was that all the details of appearance had a personalistic meaning, so
that appearances became fetishized . And the third was that, for all the
