Our understanding of the nature of the universe has received many breakthroughs since Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity during his “miraculous year” of 1905. As the century progressed, a theory of general relativity was sketched out to provide a framework for the movement of matter through the spacetime continuum—testable knowledge employed across a variety of fields today. While relativity is the backbone of our understanding of the cosmos, quantum mechanics was developed in order to explain the behaviour and physical properties of microscopic matter, such as molecules and atoms.
The existence of atoms was proposed during antiquity. In modern times, our knowledge has come to include atomic properties such as protons, neutrons and orbiting electrons that move in waves. Since atoms are the building blocks of matter, atomic properties dictate the physical characteristics of everything we see—and everything we don’t. Relativity has been used to generate precise mathematical predictions about gravity and the speed of objects but quantum mechanics adheres to an uncertainty principle that asserts only probabilities can be known about subatomic movements.
Laws of History
When asked how humans could devise an atomic weapon but fail to develop the political means to prevent it from destroying us, Einstein replied: “That is simple. It is because politics is more difficult than physics.” While humans exist within a space set by biological parameters, our behaviour is subject to endless cultural permutations, psychological dispositions, technological revolutions and political formations. Of all the world’s great thinkers, it was one Karl Marx that delivered a framework for understanding human societies. Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral:
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
Marx was able to see that humans entered into definite relations of production in order to satiate our biological needs and it is upon this basis that history unfolds. As individuals, we are born into a social structure that precedes our existence and conditions our being. Our families, neighbourhoods, cities, employment, wealth, housing—these are better thought of as social products rather than individual affectations. As Marx put it: “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”1
Nature comprises physical material but social relations are to human society what gravity is to the universe. Relations are what channel our energies, shape our matter and mould our consciousness. Marx makes this analogy explicit in Capital when discussing the relative value capitalist commodities: “The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears. The determination of value by socially necessary labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”2 Social relations—of the economy, the state, culture, family, etc.—are not visible but we feel their pull like we feel the force of gravity.
Fredric Jameson credited Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud with founding “the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought” described “as unities of theory and practice.”3 While history is replete with philosophers offering up static codes of ethics and rigid ontologies, Marx and Freud provided the theories of motion, change and flux that capture the subjective totality of the modern age. We can say that Marxism is the social science equivalent of the theory of relativity, explaining the motion and historical development of society as a whole. And if Marxism is something akin to a macrolevel theory of relativity, psychoanalysis would be the quantum mechanics, the microlevel complementary.
The Individual Singularity
Marx recognized the existence of tendencies directing societies depending on their mode of production. But at the level of an individual—a single CEO or suburban consumer or blue collar employee—we are left with an unpredictable singularity that does not strictly conform to laws of history.4 The economic parameters of an individual are concrete but the habits, taste preferences, customs, personalities, overall health, talents, deviancies and sociability are highly variable and unique to each of us. The society will condition our habits, customs and well-being to a large extent but there are infinite combinations of traumas, predispositions and formative experiences that yield highly unpredictable outcomes at the individual level.
Freud himself had a few detours through medicine and conventional psychology before realizing that many of his patients—branded “neurotic” or “hysteric” in 1800s Vienna—were suffering from afflictions of the unconscious mind: “Our starting-point is the unconscious mental processes, with the peculiarities of which we become acquainted through analysis. We consider these to be the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental processes.”5
There is a parallel here to Marx’s theories of human society; like an iceberg, there is an invisible mass, an underlying process that manifests what we are able to observe. For Marx, the material world is rooted in processes of social relations, class conflict and surplus value formation. For Freud, our conscious thoughts and, often, our physical health is a latent expression of unconscious memories. Marxism alerts us to the existence of a vast ideological superstructure that expends considerable energy rationalizing the economic base on which we exist. Similarly, psychoanalysis explains that repression hides our unconscious thoughts from our conscious selves: “The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away and keeping it at a distance. Repression demands a persistence expenditure of force, and if this were to cease, the success of the repression would be jeopardized.”6
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was able to take the field even further, perhaps owing to a comprehension of Marx that Freud lacked.7 Lacan described the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other”—a horde of other people we carry in our heads like traits. Humans are thus transindividual beings that cannot be understood in isolation from the society that produced them. This stands harmonious with Marxism. The entire scope of Lacanian theory is too complex to detail here but his three orders of the psyche warrant consideration for Marxists: the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real.
The imaginary is our concept of self which is locked in by the symbolic order, representing a shared collective consciousness of language, law, culture and ideology. The Real is that which resists symbolization and conscious integration. The most common encounter with the Real is the experience of trauma. To be reductive, we can think of our minds as three orders forming a Borromean knot representing the self, society and nature.8
Lacan believed that psychoanalysis could not be placed onto a scientific footing like linguistics or structural anthropology because of flaws with the causal model. The cause under investigation in psychoanalysis is the very subject resulting from that cause: “Science is therefore not yet capable of encompassing psychoanalysis.”9 Marxism, too, is afflicted by similar problems, the narrow horizon of a bourgeois paradigm that seeks to isolate mechanisms of cause-and-effect rather than examine the complete totality of a system. This should be expected within a capitalist mode of production that is fixated on capital accumulation irrespective of the hazards it produces. After all, the existing mode of production “is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.”10
Toward a Theory of Everything?
Psychoanalysis demonstrates that uncovering unconscious memories, rolling back repression, is the path to rehabilitation and restoration of the individual. In a similar fashion, Marx laboured diligently over three volumes of Capital in order to reveal the underlying mechanics of capital accumulation and ruling class power. Like a revelation of the unconscious, if we understand the motion of capitalism it is then possible to transcend it. By restoring the productive powers of labour under our own conscious control, alienation from our labour can be eliminated and society is made congruent with our human nature. Within this context of an unalienated, post-capitalist mode of production, psychoanalysis will find its proper recognition as a holistic science.
Indeed, Jameson himself once proposed a dedicated institution of psychoanalysis for his hypothetical post-revolutionary society:
We may provisionally call this new institution the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, and it will, in conjunction with unimaginably complex computer systems, handle and organize all forms of employment as well as all manner of personal and collective therapies. Mediating between the individual and the collective, the new institution will combine the functions of a union and a hospital, an employment office and a court, a market research agency, a polling bureau, and a social welfare centre. Presumably what is left of the police as an institution will eventually be absorbed into this central agency, which will eventually replace government and political structures equally, the state thereby withering away into some enormous group therapy.11
Jameson’s version of the proverbial dictatorship of the proletariat is admittedly strange and unorthodox but it underlines the potential that a positive union between Marxism and psychoanalysis represent. Physics looks to merge quantum mechanics with relativity for a “theory of everything.” When socialism comes to the West, this can be accomplished by the praxis of Marxism and analysis.
Thanks for reading!
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 265. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publications, 2019), 49. ↩︎
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 59. ↩︎
David Harvey elaborates on this concept of an individual forming a singularity within Marxist theory in A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume 2 (Verso, 2013): 33-4. ↩︎
Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1995): 301. ↩︎
Ibid, 569–70, 572. ↩︎
For example, Lacan famously based his concept of jouissance on Marx’s theory of surplus value. ↩︎
The Real, of course, is not entirely synonymous with reality in Lacan’s thinking. This conceptualization has some utility within a Marxist framework however. ↩︎
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1995): 139. ↩︎
Marx, Grundrisse, 106-7. ↩︎
Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (Verso, 2016): 81-2. ↩︎
