Desires and Fears: Women, Class and Adorno Theory & Event, 11:1 | © 2008 Claudia Leeb 1. Introduction Feminist thinkers have both appropriated the central concepts of the early Frankfurt School thinker Theodor W. Adorno, such as his concept of the non-identical, and pointed at his problematic depictions of the feminine.1 Despite the growing literature on the latter there is so far no scholarship that shows how the feminine interacts with class in Adorno's figuration of the working-class woman.2 She appears in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno's later texts as the maid, Circe, süsse Mädel (sweet girl) and the waitress. Although Adorno's central aim was to challenge instrumental rationality as he found it in its exploded forms in modern societies -- in the culture industry and in fascism -- I show that he resorts to such a rationality in his figurations of the working-class woman. 3 I draw on the theoretical framework of the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan to grasp the deeper desires and fears that implicate Adorno in the very same instrumental rationality he aims to counter with his critical theory. Working-class woman appears in Adorno's works as the fantasy object petit a in three figurations, the phallic woman, the castrating woman and the castrated woman. I show that these figurations are a response to what Lacan termed the Real -- the element in the symbolic domain and its signifiers that resists absolute symbolization. Objects petit a are the historically contingent objects that takes on the function of unconscious fantasies to conceal the impossibility of attaining wholeness in the symbolic domain.4 1. In her first form, we encounter working-class woman as the "phallic woman," the fantasy object petit a as she is linked to the imaginary domain.5 In this domain the subject desires to obtain her/his wholeness via identifying with an idealized whole image of an other with a small o, which is either the subject's mirror image or the image of a fellow human being.6 In Adorno's writings we encounter the phallic woman as the idealized "whole" woman that marks the utopian moment of reconciliation and a time when instrumental rationality has not yet made its advances. The central moment behind this unconscious fantasy object is desire, the desire to achieve an impossible wholeness via the identification with the idealized whole woman. 2. As fantasy object petit a, which refers to the moment of the Real, working-class woman appears in her second form as the "castrating woman." The Real is linked to anxiety insofar as it confronts the subject with the fact that she remains a suject troué (a subject-with- holes or non-whole) in the symbolic order no matter how much she desires to become whole.7 Here working-class woman turns into the "object, which by essence destroys him...in which he will never truly be able to find reconciliation."8 We find her in this second form in Adorno's texts as the Wesen (essence) of instrumental rationality, which castrates subjects in late capitalist societies.9 3. Precisely at the moment when the anxiety-provoking image of the castrating woman appears, we encounter her in her third form, the fantasy object petit a, which is linked to the symbolic domain -- the "castrated woman." The castrated woman serves a central means to ward off the intrusion of the traumatic Real. Whereas the phallic woman is the result of the desire to become whole, the castrated woman is the result of the anxiety that such wholeness is impossible. We encounter her in Adorno's texts as the complete victim of instrumental rationality, unable to resist the culture industry or fascism. Since the working-class woman (and the working-class man) end up "castrated" in Adorno's thought, Adorno hopes to spare the bourgeois male from his "castration" through instrumental rationality. In section two, "Odysseus's Encounter with the Maids" I draw on "Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment," a chapter in the Dialektik der Aufklärung, to show that despite Adorno's central insights into the mechanisms of bourgeois, male domination, he fails to reflect on how his figurations of the working-class woman contributes to such a domination. In section three, "Odysseus's Encounter with Circe," I explain the three figurations of the working-class woman in Adorno's interpretation of Odysseus's encounter with Circe in Excursus 1. To show the instrumentalizing aspects of his engagement with Circe, I also introduce Adorno's stance on prostitution. In section four, "The Working-Class Woman in Minima Moralia," I explain how the idea of the castrated woman parallels the idea of the castrating woman as two sides of a coin. Both serve to render working- class woman harmless, either through castrating her or through demonizing her. In section five "Instrumental Rationality and the Working-Class Man," I draw on the Dialektik der Aufklärung as well as Adorno's later writings on the culture industry to show that his depictions of the working-class man as feminized is another means to ward off the possibility of bourgeois men's mutilation in modern societies. In the last section six, "The Possibility of Resistance" I aim to show the possibilities for the working-class woman to resist her instrumentalization. 2. Odysseus's Encounter with the Maids The self-reflexive starting point of the Dialektik der Aufklärung is Adorno and Horkeimer's experience with German fascism and the culture industry in the United States. One of the central books of the early Frankfurt school, it was initially published in 1944 under the title Philosophische Fragmente. In this book, the authors aim to defend their central thesis: "myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology."10 We can already find in myths the moment of enlightenment rationality, and enlightenment rationality depends on myths. "Myth is the original form of the objectifying definition," argue the authors, "The same form is already far advanced in the Homeric epic and confounds itself in modern positivist science."11 Feminist thinkers have pointed at the inherent contradictions in the Dialektik der Aufklärung. Regina Becker Schmidt, as an example, acknowledges the importance of this work to explain the mechanisms of bourgeois, male domination already present in myth and complete in modernity. At the same time she argues that we can find in it "virile projections upon women that remain caught in traditional prejudices."12 More recently, Robyn Marasco shows us that despite Adorno's awareness of the instrumentalization of woman in the Dialektik der Aufklärung, he cannot break out of instrumental rationality in their depictions of the feminine.13 Despite these important feminist insights there has so far been no attention to the ways in which the feminine interacts with class in the Dialektik der Aufklärung as we find it played out in the figure of the working-class woman. We encounter her for the first time in "Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment," the chapter ascribed to Adorno in the lengthy footnote 5. Here Adorno aims at an interpretation of Homer's Gesang twenty14 to point at the moments of enlightenment rationality in myth. Aiming to sleep, Odysseus "notices how the maids Mägdte sneak toward the suitors at night."15 Since Odysseus's bourgeois self is not completely formed, rationality has not yet managed to completely suppress nature (his desire). "The individual as subject is still unreconciled to himself, still unsure. His affective forces (his mettle and his heart) still react independently to him."16 As a consequence, Odysseus becomes tormented with sexual desire for the working-class woman, who stands in this scene for the "threat of nature," Odysseus manages to escape by using self- preserving Vernunft. Adorno aims to explain with this scene the double movement of domination of outer and inner nature. The domination over outer nature (the working-class woman) proceeds here via a domination of inner nature (sexual desire) with the assistance of rationality.17 Adorno explains here the two methods that contribute to bourgeois, male domination. First, "the affect is compared with the animal that the human unterjocht (subjects)."18 Once Odysseus becomes aware of the sexual engagement between the suitors and the maids, his heart is "barking him." The comparison of sexual desire with the non-human (barking-dog) allows Odysseus to distance himself from and subject his desires (nature). Second, the subjection of nature proceeds via practicing Geduld (patience). Odysseus constantly has to make his desires wait.19 Geduld has, according to Adorno, become the central feature of bourgeois society: a society where desires always have to wait for later.20 The problem here is that Adorno is mainly concerned with the bourgeois, male's subjection of his desires for the working-class woman. He fails to concern himself with the fact that the subjection of his desires goes hand in hand with the subjection of working-class woman. In the first form, she appears in this scene as fantasy object petit a, the phallic woman. Here she stands for the Adornian utopia, the blissful time when the bourgeois, male's sexual desire was not yet subjected to instrumental rationality. Magdt is the term for a female domestic servant and a female farm worker. It still has its remnants in the German terms Mädchen (girl) or Mädel.21 The Magdt is imagined by Adorno as the one who has not yet been mutilated by instrumental rationality into an ideal of femininity, which would preclude active feminine sexuality. It is the idealized wholeness of the maid, fantasized in her active pursuit of her (sexual) desire, that constitutes working-class woman as the moment of utopia, the phallic woman and marks her in contrast to the middle-class woman, Penelope.22 However, the image of the phallic woman, who actively pursues her desire, can only be fantasized secretly in a (although very lengthy) footnote of the text. Adorno tells us that the Mägdte schleichen (sneak) in the night to the suitors.23 In the original Homeric text, we learn that after Odysseus went to bed "the women came out of the hall, the ones that usually united with the suitors and cause each other laughing and serenity."24 The Mägdte then did not, as Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, sneak anywhere. They openly came out from the hall, and had fun and serenity with the suitors "as they usually do." The term schleichen suggests something that one does secretly, usually because one has to hide something. Adorno's imagination of the working-class woman as a (secret) utopia in which she enjoys active feminine sexuality can be read as a positive moment in his figurations of the working-class woman. However, Adorno is not so much concerned with her pleasure, but merely how well she serves to satisfy bourgeois, male pleasure. He excludes from his interpretation the fact that the Mägdte not only gave pleasure to men, they also received sexual pleasure in Homer's original scene: Homer tells us that the suitor and the maids gave each other "laughing and serenity." Thus there was a mutual engagement between the maids and the suitors. The utopia Adorno is lamenting as lost is the one where the bourgeois male could freely obtain his sexual pleasure from the fantasy object petit a. As Andrew Hewitt rightly notes, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment "the inclusion of women in the general schema is based entirely upon the perspective of male pleasure."25 However, Hewitt fails to note that it is not women in general, but foremost working-class women who serve to satisfy bourgeois, male pleasure in Adorno's works. This positing of the working-class woman as object petit a is then a means of sublimation, which is for Lacan nothing else but a socially accepted way to delude oneself on the subject of das Ding, the moment of the Real, and "to colonize the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes."26 In Adorno's one-sided reduction of pleasure to chiefly male pleasure, he reinforces what he criticizes about instrumental rationality: the coldness of love, because the other becomes merely a tool for one's desires. Such a presence of instrumental rationality in intimate relationships points for Adorno at the falseness of bourgeois society, which establishes love as something unmediated, as a pure feeling, which distracts us from the fact that love expresses the rationality of exchange, where love becomes a mere means of domination.27 Moreover, the fantasy object of the idealized whole woman cannot guarantee any wholeness. Consequently, she turns into the second form as she appears in Adorno's texts, the moment of the Real, the castrating woman. Here she becomes the impossible, inhuman monstrous thing that marks the moment of the Real. In the scene with Odysseus's encounter with the maids, the castrating woman appears as the "threat of nature," Odysseus has to risk and master to obtain his bourgeois self. In the English translation, the term Magdt used by Homer (and Adorno) in this scene is translated as "woman," thus erasing the fact that it is specifically working-class woman who occupies in contrast to the bourgeois woman (Penelope) the position of the "threat of nature." As the moment of the Real, she becomes the object of anxiety, the "essential alien (dissemblable), who is neither supplement, nor the complement of the fellow being (semblable), who is the very image of dislocation, of the essential tearing apart of the subject."28 The double movement of the domination of inner and outer nature does then not only proceed by paralleling inner nature (sexual desire) with the animal, but equally by paralleling the working-class woman with outer non- human nature. Since the castrating woman stands for the moment of the Real, the monstrous and non-human thing, her subjection via instrumental rationality becomes justified.29 Given the anxiety the castrating woman provokes it does not surprise that she appears on a manifest level of the text (and out of footnote 5) precisely at the moment when she is already dead. It is here where we encounter working-class woman in her third form, as the fantasy object petit a that is related to the symbolic Other, the castrated woman. At the end of Excursus 1, Adorno comments on the brutality of the murdering of the maids in Homer's Gesang twenty-three. The maids were led to the courtyard, where through "slings around their necks they all died in a miserable way" because of their "frivolous" acts.30 For Adorno, such a treatment of the maids in Homer already foreshadows the coldness of instrumental rationality in capitalist society.31 Although I appreciate this "feeling" for the working-class woman, it seems to me that the authors are more concerned with the fate of the bourgeois male, who loses with the "real" death of the maid the fantasy object petit a he needs to secure his utopia, where her role as the phallic woman is supposed to conceal his fundamental non-wholeness. Rhode- Dachser explains that "woman," who stands for the "threat of death," is a male projection through which "the man attempts to tame his fear of death, by allocating death, as castration before, to the woman. She is then the one who will suffer from it, while he -- conqueror of death -- stands on the side of life."32 3. Odysseus's Encounter with Circe Working-class woman appears in "Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment" also as Circe, which refers to Adorno's interpretation of Homer's Gesang ten. Circe, a famous temptress in Greek mythology, lived on the island of Aeaea where she lured men with her enchanting voice into her home and then transformed them into swine to use them for her own pleasure. According to Adorno, Odysseus's encounter with the maids belongs to the same Erfahrungsschicht (level of experience) as Odysseus's encounter with Circe.33 Once the twenty-three men, sent by Odysseus to explore the island of Aeaea, give in to their desire for the enchanting Circe they are turned into swine. Once the men's desire for Circe is paralleled with the non-human (the swine), Odysseus's use of rationality becomes a justified tool to subject Circe and his desires for her. Like the maids, Circe advances in Adorno's imagination to the utopian moment, the fantasy object petit a linked to the imaginary domain. She is the phallic woman, since "she will take the erotic initiative."34 In this first form Circe stands in opposition to the bourgeois wife Penelope, because she has not yet succumbed to an idealized femininity, which has become fixed in modernity. "Circe's call sign is ambiguity," argues Adorno, "it is this non-differentiation as opposed to the primacy of a definite aspect of nature (whether matriarchal or patriarchal) that constitutes the nature of promiscuity: the essential quality of the courtesan, reflected still in the prostitute's look."35 Although there is a positive moment in Adorno's call for a time when the feminine and the masculine were not yet appearing as fixed opposites, it is not so much the look of the prostitute that we are getting here, but Adorno's gaze upon her. This gaze is not what Adorno calls a "free gaze" that contains (self-) reflection. Rather, it is a cold gaze, the gaze of instrumental rationality, which merely fixes others and, as a consequence, extinguishes the subject. Such a gaze is also present in Adorno's discussion of prostitution in Germany in Sexualtaboos und Recht heute.36 Here Adorno protests homicides of prostitutes and argues that they are not legally dealt with because society wishes them death, since they embody pleasure, which is not allowed to exist in German society. Although Adorno's call for the prosecution of homicides on prostitutes is important, to call the "pleasure" which prostitutes deliver to bourgeois men "unmeditated" is problematic, since it denies the fundamental exchange character upon which this arrangement is based. His treatment of prostitution in this article remains then caught in an abstract character, which does not consider the oppressive societal factors that lead to prostitution in the first place. Randall Halle brings this abstract character of the article to the point: "By focusing on the reason why people hate prostitutes, he Adorno entirely ignored the conditions which give rise to prostitution and passed over in silence the actual situation of prostitutes."37 Adorno's discussion of prostitution leads us to Lacan's discussion of courtly love. In courtly love, man creates fantasy object petit a by fantasizing woman as the inaccessible, dominating Lady. The cruelty of this work is for Lacan obvious in the fact that this creation remains in stark contrast to woman's reality, which is her non-emancipation in feudal society. The idea of the Lady has then for him "nothing to do with her as a woman, but as an object of desire."38 Also Adorno's idea of prostitutes has nothing to do with the actual situation of prostitutes, but with her creation as fantasy object petit a. Whenever the prostitute appears in Adorno's text he is concerned with her "dying out": "Since Expressionism the prostitute has become a key figure in art, though in reality she is dying out, since it is only by portrayal of figures devoid of shame that sex can now be handled without aesthetic embarrassment."39 Adorno seems to be less concerned with the actual deaths of prostitutes, but with the loss of fantasy object petit a, the utopian phallic woman, whom he needs to secure his wholeness. On a textual level Adorno sustains the fantasy object of the phallic woman by suspending a crucial element in his portrayal of Circe as a figure "devoid of shame." Let me cite Adorno again: "Circe has been made the prototype of the courtesan -- a development prompted of course by Hermes' lines, which assume that she will take the erotic initiative: 'Then, in fright, she will ask you to sleep with her...'"40 One might pause here for a moment and be surprised about the tension in the text between the erotically initiating Circe and her being frightened. Why is she frightened? Adorno can only uphold the phallic woman as an utopian moment by suspending the sentence from the original source that would have allowed us to understand why Circe is frightened. Homer tells us that Hermes, whom Odysseus meets on his way to Circe, provides Odysseus with a counter herb to protect him from Circe's herbs and gives him the following advice: "When Circe will beat you with a long crop, then pull the sharp sword from the hip and enter into Circe as if you attempt to kill her, in fright, she will ask you to sleep with her. Do not hesitate before the goddess' bed."41 Odysseus follows Hermes' advice. He violently enters his sharp sword (the phallus) into Circe, as if he attempted to kill her. The place where one puts one's sword (scabbard) is called in German Scheide, which is the same term used for vagina, which suggests sexual violence involved in this scene. The suspense of the "frightened" is then necessary to uphold this utopia for the bourgeois male, which was never an utopia for the working-class woman. This false utopia of the phallic woman provides us then already with a taste of what the bourgeois masculinity looks like in a fully rationalized world. Since the phallus stands for the moment of the Real, Circe, being the one tasked with concealing the moment of the Real, cannot guarantee any wholeness. As such she easily turns into the second form as she appears in Adorno's texts, the castrating woman. Here she advances to the moment of the Real, "the essential object, which isn't an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."42 Adorno argues: "The courtesan assures happiness and destroys the autonomy of the one she makes happy -- this is her ambiguity Zweideutigkeit. But she does not necessarily destroy him: she affirms an older form of life."43 This "ambiguity" of Circe refers to the ambiguity of the bourgeois male, who has to take on a balancing act between the contradicting fantasy objects of the phallic woman, who guarantees his happiness as whole, and the castrating woman, the moment of the Real who threatens to destroy any such wholeness. Adorno achieves this balancing act on a textual level by asserting, right after his acknowledgement that Circe, both assures happiness and destroys, that "she does not necessarily destroy him." However, this threat cannot be completely swept away, since Adorno argues that she does not necessarily destroy him, which always leaves open the possibility that she actually does.44 Odysseus escapes such a threat with another List (cunning), an early form of instrumental rationality. Adorno explains: "Odysseus sleeps with her Circe. But first he makes her swear the great oath of the sacred ones, the Olympian covenant. The oath is intended to protect the male from Verstümmelung