On the menu: Academic managerialism and critical theory

Abstract

This paper is concerned with managerialism in universities. It focuses on the way compliance with widely criticised aspects of managerialism—above all, auditing as the dominant form of accountability—is compelled by what Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose call ‘psychotherapeutic authority.’ We offer a reading of two deployments of ‘psychotherapeutic authority.’ The first is the recently published Impossible Bosses: Secret Strategies to Deal with Eight Archetypal Managers, a Jungian self-help book written by a university deputy vice chancellor, a corporate executive, and a management consultant. We read the book in the context of a managerialism losing legitimacy, especially but not only in universities. We place Impossible Bosses alongside Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, which similarly deploys ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ but with very different aims in the context of a mid-twentieth century Anglo-European world attempting to ward off lingering and latent fascist tendencies. While Impossible Bosses aims for the conversion of unhappy workers into capable, self-actualising neoliberal managers, Minima Moralia seeks from its readers an acknowledgment that ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly.’ To get at why and how Adorno's ‘melancholy science’ holds greater hope for universities today than the buoyant optimism of Impossible Bosses, we contrast the different concepts of the unconscious with which they work. Because Adorno's concept of the unconscious is one comprised of ‘social forces’ rather than ‘primordial images,’ it is one on which work becomes possible, even if that work will inevitably be commoditised, will end up on the managerial menu for consumption.

Introduction

In the context of this special issue on ‘Critical Theory Today: One Hundred Years of the Frankfurt School,’ we begin with a scenario Theodor Adorno sketches in Problems of Moral Philosophy, one wherein norms ‘have lost their immediate authority’ (Adorno, 2000: 16). At such moments, Adorno suggests, ‘moral questions’ become possible, but there is also always the risk of backlash, that, once norms have been subject to widespread criticism, they can ‘acquire repressive and violent qualities’ (16–17). Universities, we want to suggest, are undergoing precisely such a moment, one wherein, as Judith Butler puts it—it was Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself that drew our attention to Adorno's Problems of Moral Philosophy—a set of norms ‘refuses to become past,’ and ‘imposes itself upon the present as an anachronism’ (Butler, 2005: 4).

As our title suggests, we are concerned with managerialism, a ‘mode of governance exported systematically from the private to the public sector’ (Lynch et al., 2012: 17–18). For public institutions like universities, managerialism has meant the ubiquity of accountability measures that prioritise efficiency and economy—all who work in universities today are well acquainted with the ‘managerial tools of accounting and audit’ (Power, 1997: 92). In light of an expansive literature on ‘audit culture’ (e.g., Shore and Wright, 2024; 2015; 2004; 2000; Strathern, 2000), and the burgeoning literature within Critical University Studies—a ‘gathering place’ for ‘a new wave of criticism of higher education’ forming an ‘oppositional stance’ to ‘the corporatization of the university’ (Williams, 2012)—it would be fair to say that academic audits ‘have lost their immediate authority.’ Within critical discourses on ‘audit culture’—not only in scholarship but also in everyday forms of resistance—there is no questioning of ‘the principle of accountability’ (Shore and Wright, 2000: 78) or the need for ‘proper financial planning, budgeting, and credit control’ (Webster and Mosoetsa, 2002: 79). The issue, rather, is the auditing of everything, which imposes on all aspects of academic work ‘an ethos of measurement, calculation, commodification and control’ (Kilroy et al., 2004: 2), embeds an evaluative logic that turns academics, within and across institutions, into managed competitors (e.g., Harney and Dunne 2013; Peters, 1992), and divides and stratifies a higher education landscape (Gumport, 2000) to such an extent that some scholars talk of ‘global Apartheid in higher education’ (Mbembe, 2016, 38; Higgins, 2012, 32). All of this is well-known, but little—which is not to say nothing—has changed; audits remain the primary mechanism by which an account of academic work must be given.

The ‘repressive’ force to which Adorno refers cannot, however, be straightforwardly applied here. The authoritarianism in question—if that is what the imposition of auditing as an evaluative measure should be called—does not operate by brute force. If ‘critical thought’ is seen as ‘unmarketable’ (Sitze, 2016: 290–291), if ‘dissent’ is perceived by those who manage universities as ‘irrelevant,’ ‘wasteful,’ ‘unaffordable’ (Gumport, 2000: 76), so long as they are confined to the pages of auditable ‘outputs’—so long as ‘dissent’ and ‘critical thought’ pass through the very system of valuation they question—there is little, if any, trouble: they are converted into units by which ‘excellence’ can be represented on a balance sheet, ‘swallowed up by the empty unity of excellence’ (Readings, 1996: 168). A more subtle, yet effective working of these ‘repressive’ forces may reside in the processes by which ‘dissent’ and ‘critical thought’ are made to assume an exchange value.

In this paper, we focus on the ways ‘psychological expertise’ (Rose, 1985: 2) is being deployed to ensure compliance. We draw on the work of Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose who, the 1980s and 90s, examined how the problem of the effective and legitimate exercise of authority over others shifted in the middle of the twentieth century. To do so, they reflected on the ideas and practices that emerged in and around the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Since its emergence in the 1920s, the Tavistock Clinic ‘played a key role in the development of a specifically British school of psychoanalytical theory and technique,’ and it ‘sought to integrate psychoanalysis with ways of seeing and explaining derived from sociology, social psychology and anthropology’ (Miller and Rose, 1994: 32). The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, established after WWII, did work with organisations on ‘problems of productivity, industrial relations and organizational functioning,’ but it also ‘undertook major long-term action research projects that sought to democratize and humanize working life in a number of European countries’ (33). If Adorno points to norms that have lost legitimacy and thus require force, we are concerned here with what Miller and Rose call ‘the implantation of certain norms of self-promotion’ (Miller and Rose, 1994: 60).

While Miller and Rose's research may appear somewhat dated, it has received renewed attention in studies apprehending the spread of psychiatric and psychological discourse ‘into areas of public and private life previously untouched by the mental health industry’ (Cohen, 2017, 50). ¹ This is not, of course, the only way to understand struggles over the managerialisation of the university, but it is, we want to suggest, one dynamic at play, and it is being operated on both sides of divided universities. If psychotherapeutic discourse has long been seen as ‘an authority responsible for reinforcing the dominant moral codes of capitalist society and punishing deviations from these’ (49), critics of the managerial university, too, invoke the authority of psychology to speak of the ‘pathologicality of excessive checking’ (Power 1997: 97). While Bruce Cohen goes as far as referring to psychiatric discourse as ‘a totalising form of professional claims-making, imbued with neoliberal values’ (Cohen, 2017: 53), Ian Parker warns against the risk of overplaying it as either an ‘apparatus of social control or as liberating practice’ (Parker, 2017: 245).

To consider the deployment of ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ within managerialised universities, we place two texts alongside each other, texts that would not ordinarily find themselves together. The first is the recently published Impossible Bosses: Secret Strategies to Deal with Eight Archetypal Managers (henceforth IB), co-written by Vivienne Lawack, Deputy Vice Chancellor: Academic at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, Hanlie Wessels, a corporate executive, and Robert Craig, a management consultant. Drawing on Carl Jung's notions of the collective unconscious and the archetypes, IB addresses readers who are unhappy about their bosses, providing eight diagnoses of managers—the disorders range from near-psychotic megalomania to garden variety indecisiveness—with which to make sense of their difficult bosses. The book offers knowledge to ‘identify and demystify these eight impossible bosses,’ and ‘the secret strategies to deal with them.’ A somewhat banal text—we are in no way advocating its solutions—IB is worth reading closely if only because it allows a glimpse of some of the ways in which ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ is being deployed today to facilitate psychological adaptation to managerialism. ²

South Africa's transition from apartheid invites reflection on ‘psychotherapeutic authority.’ Many scholars have noted that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, which marked a break with the apartheid past, was ‘inherently psychoanalytic’ (Swartz and Drennan, 2000: 206), that the TRC was as an ‘attempt to “cure” a traumatised nation’ (Sey, 1998: 5–6), even if the TRC drew upon ‘watered-down psychoanalysis’ (Sitze, 2013: 99). It was largely in, around, and especially in the wake of the TRC that empathy came to be seen as an ability that not only psychoanalysts should have, but as a relation—even the relation—that all South Africans should assume to each other, as what schools should be cultivating in children, universities in students, and museums in their publics. This claim has found wide support from psychoanalytic scholars. While many such psychoanalytic claims are subtly made (e.g., Field, 2017; Gobodo-Madikizela, 2003; Swartz, 2013), there has also been a characterisation of apartheid as ‘a complete lack of empathy on the part of one group for another’ (Van Zyl and Stryker, 1999, 253), with the corollary that the undoing of apartheid—an authoritarian regime par excellence—comes to be staged as a re-education of a capacity for identification across the racial divides of the past. Such a situation requires attention to ‘psychotherapeutic authority.’

While IB is marked by a South African context wherein ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ has been utilised to mark a break from the apartheid past, our reading of the text aims to draw attention to dynamics at play beyond South African universities. We read Impossible Bosses against Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (henceforth MM), Adorno's text on ‘the teaching of the good life’ (Adorno, [1951] 2006: 15). These are two very different books. Wherever you might find IB in a bookstore—the self-help section, under popular psychology, or in the business section—it would unlikely be alongside Adorno's works. But IB and MM are written in more or less the same genre, at least according to Jakob Norberg's suggestion that, despite its apparent lack of prescriptive solutions, we can read MM as a ‘book of advice’ (Norberg, 2011: 407). In one of Adorno's frequently cited aphorisms from MM, he writes: ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly [Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen]’ (Adorno, [1951] 2006: 39; Adorno, 1951: 58–59). Whereas for the authors of IB, ‘wrong life’ can be righted, success ensured—and they instruct their readers on how to ‘break out of the cage’ in which a difficult boss can place one—for Adorno, ‘life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it’ (Adorno, 2000: 167). The objective of MM, as Norberg puts it, is to allow readers a ‘lucid understanding of their utter helplessness’ (Norberg, 2011: 407), a ‘helplessness’ intensified, for Adorno, by submission to, and identification with, a story of escape that ‘reifies resistance to reification’ (Adorno, [1951] 2006: 202). IB, promising an efficient, effective way to resist managerialism—a ‘quick results-focussed approach to managing your manager’—is precisely such a reification.

To reiterate, we are concerned with measures of accountability that have ‘lost their immediate authority.’ While non-compliance with a mode of accountability that ‘refuses to become past’ is sometimes pathologised with ‘psychotherapeutic authority,’ what we are primarily concerned with is the way that both the dominant forms of accountability and the kind of ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ that IB represents—we could well have considered the wellness programmes being rolled out at most, if not all, universities—individualise responsibility and psychologise social issues.

What follows is divided into two sections. In the first, we sketch the notion of the unconscious posited by IB and by MM. While unconscious processes can—perhaps even should—form a part of how we understand managerialised universities, and psychoanalysis stands as one of the most well-developed theoretical apparatuses for apprehending unconscious processes, it matters very much which kind of psychoanalysis is employed. It is Adorno's formulation of the unconscious that we want to affirm here against the one set to work in IB. But if Adorno helps to get at ‘neoliberal wrong life’ (Butler, 2015: 202) as it shows itself in the managerialised university, our aim here is not to apply the concept of ‘wrong life’ like ‘a kind of “hotel gravy” which can be poured indiscriminately over any dish’ (Adorno, [1993] 2000: 29). MM is a text of its historical moment, but a moment whose shadow hangs uncannily over a twenty-first century witnessing a ‘slide into the abyss of authoritarianism’ (Giroux, 2024, 1), a ‘resurgence of authoritarian and ultranationalist populisms’ (Gilroy, 2021, 1). Thus, in the second section, we turn to mid-twentieth century debates on authoritarianism so as to situate MM as a text written in a post-WWII scene wherein scholars from across the humanities and social sciences devoted themselves to the task of thinking through the conditions necessary for the cultivation of a democratic society and to produce adequate responses to authoritarianism. Managerialism, we want to suggest with Turner (2013), is the calcification of that response.

Primordial images and social forces

IB employs the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a psychometric test based on the writings of Jung. This focus on psychological ‘depth’ places IB within organisational self-help literature preoccupied with ‘happiness’—much of it draws on positive psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy rather than psychoanalysis—as rather old-fashioned. The MBTI has, however, been widely embraced within the corporate sector. As Peter Case and Garry Phillipson observe of one consultancy firm specialising in the MBTI, its ‘client list includes such familiar blue-chip companies as British Airways, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, McDonalds, Microsoft, NatWest and Royal Mail’ (Case and Phillipson, 2004: 286). Put in Miller and Rose's terms, the MBTI has allowed organisations, including universities, to represent and to control ‘an inner world of psychological processes and an interpersonal world of human relations’ (Miller and Rose, 1994: 30).

IB differs from other MBTI-based texts insofar as the focus of diagnosis is primarily the other, one's boss, not oneself, but in this difference resides the old theme of individuation. To the requirement of worker's disciplined time-management—a crucial aspect of self-management—IB adds the need to acquire skills in manager-management, and it represents this acquisition as a liberating conversion experience: to escape being managed badly, one must become—must be reborn as—an effective manager of one's manager.

IB, unlike much literature in its genre, posits a concept of the unconscious, but a particular Jungian unconscious. As Lawack et al. put it, citing Jung, ‘many of the problems of modern life were caused by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation.’ Hence Jung's turn, in seeking reconnection with that from which ‘modern life’ has alienated people, to myth, esoterica, fairy tales, and anthropology, the latter revealing in ‘primitive man’ an uncorrupted intimacy with subterranean forces from which ‘modern man’ has lost contact (Jung, [1959] 2002: 5). The turn to the ‘premodern’ is pronounced in Jung's elaboration of the notion of ‘archetypes,’ which IB places at the heart—and in the subtitle—of its undertaking. With ‘archetypes,’ Jung writes, we are in the terrain of ‘primordial types’ (5). Setting this notion to work, IB claims to help readers ‘demystify’ managers, to decypher in their conduct what Jung calls, describing ‘archetypes,’ ‘eternal images’ (7). What makes a boss ‘impossible,’ in this framing, is a negative aspect of what is ‘inborn’ (5).

The ‘archetypes’ are, thus, natural—‘eternal,’ ‘inborn’—and, as such, one is left with little choice but to know these ‘primordial types’ better, adapt to them by learning to ‘manage’ the ‘dark side’ of the archetypal nature of others—and, potentially, oneself, too, if one, in an oedipal twist, turns out to be an ‘impossible boss’—by using easy-to-follow practical skills to out-manoeuvre what, in an ‘impossible boss,’ wells up from their ‘primordial’ unconscious, from an ‘instinctual foundation.’ The unconscious in IB is something that just has to be accepted; it can, of course, be mastered, knowledge of its different expressions harnessed, used to strategically outflank others.

The first of the eight archetypal ‘impossible bosses’ IB describes is a ‘Ms Say-Me,’ who is ‘prone to aggressive behaviour,’ ‘a manager,’ one reads, ‘more difficult than average to manage.’ Indeed, ‘Ms Say-Me’—we leave aside the gendering of this ‘archetype’—‘instills fear,’ ‘instills dread’ and ‘psychological subservience,’ she is ‘ruthless,’ ‘humiliating,’ ‘tyrannical,’ ‘muscle flexing,’ she leaves others ‘feeling bullied,’ she is ‘unpredictable,’ has a ‘brash and thoughtless character,’ is ‘vengeful and nasty,’ ‘above the law,’ and an ‘extreme micromanager’ prone to ‘dominating others.’ But this is, in the Jungian sense, an ‘archetype’ that can have a positive expression. ‘Ms Say-Me’ is also ‘honest’ and ‘results driven,’ one reads: ‘What you see is what you get. And this is actually a good thing.’ In ‘managing’ her, the aim becomes using her own archetypal character—a ‘cocktail of insecurities mixed with a good dose of competitiveness and aggression’—against her. ‘[T]he battle is half won,’ as IB has it, ‘when you realise your manager is displaying one of the eight archetypes,’ and you are ‘armed with insights.’

IB not only naturalises such conduct; it also individualises and psychologises workplace tensions and their resolution: ‘Ms Say-Me’ is aggressive because ‘there are certain things that matter more to her than they matter to most people, and these things are typically tied to her self-doubt around intelligence, status, performance and success.’ Instead of attending to the institutional conditions that engender insecurities, the source of workplace ‘aggressive behaviour’ is located in the unconscious of an individual type—an unconscious comprised of ‘eternal images’—and in a personal attachment to ‘certain things,’ rather than in the inescapabilty of these ‘things’ to which all employees are inevitably ‘tied.’ Let us call these ‘things’—with universities in mind—the auditing metrics by which ‘intelligence, status, performance and success’ are measured. Locating the problem in the unconscious as it shows itself in an individual, IB makes the reader individually responsible for ‘turning the tables,’ for ‘re-establishing agency,’ for overcoming—to stay focussed on the abovementioned ‘archetype’—the aggressive competitiveness and insecurity of one's boss.

If many social scientists would bristle at the kind of ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ IB deploys, the vision Lawack represents has won a certain amount of support in South African universities. After she was unsuccessful in her application for the role of Vice Chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, over 200 academics wrote an open letter of support, decrying the ‘clear unfairness’ she had faced in the process, and the missed opportunity of a ‘historic appointment of a qualified and experienced black female vice-chancellor’ (cited in Grove, 2024). Lawack, as Jacob Cloete puts it, ‘stands with the marginalised and oppressed in South Africa,’ and Cloete marshals ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ to diagnose critique of her as ‘neoliberal,’ suggesting that such critique is suffused, ‘at the unconscious level or the collective unconscious,’ with ‘racist’ and ‘patriarchal’ values—it ‘reeks,’ he says, ‘of racism and condescension’ (Cloete, 2024).

We are not suggesting that the psychologising formulations of IB are universally accepted among Lawack's supporters, only that such formulations have entered public debate on its primary author's treatment in her workplace. Nor are we saying that the Eurocentric and patriarchal values to which Cloete points have been reckoned with. They have not. But a quite different diagnosis of the problem is asked for. Two issues are at stake here. The first concerns the Jungian unconscious, the second the histories of auditing that recede when the problem is lodged in ‘archetypes.’

Jungian ideas have been set to work in organisations to address ‘the other within,’ a ‘shadow’ element of the unconscious that has been projected out, onto others (e.g., Feldman, 2004: 251). However helpful and effective, such post-Jungian formulations still adhere to a notion of an ‘inborn’ unconscious—at most, society may contour it, constrain or enable its expression—that bears all the marks of Jung's engagement with anthropological ideas about ‘primitive man.’ While this has been debated within Jungian circles (e.g., Samuels, 2018; Segal, 2007), it has also offered itself as a resource for shoring up authoritarian forms of masculinity and Eurocentric race thinking (Parker, 1995).

It is perhaps for this reason that Cloete, unlike IB, invokes Jung alongside anti-colonial psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon: ‘Carl Jung coined the term collective unconsciousness, which Frantz Fanon later revisited and adapted to aid his argument in Black Skin, White Masks’ (Cloete, 2024). This is the kind of reorientation that would have put IB on a different track. Cloete, in his defense of Lawack, may underplay Fanon's reservations about the ‘cosmic Jung’ (Fanon, [1952] 2008: 117). ‘European civilization,’ Fanon writes,

is characterized by the presence, at the heart of what Jung calls the collective unconscious, of an archetype: an expression of the bad instincts, of the darkness inherent in every ego, of the uncivilized savage, the Negro who slumbers in every white man. And Jung claims to have found in uncivilized peoples the same psychic structure that his diagram portrays. Personally, I think that Jung has deceived himself (144–145).

For Fanon, ‘the collective unconscious is cultural, which means acquired’ (145). Fanon is concerned here with the ‘imposition of a culture’ (146), and with the ways in which the colonised come to internalise a set of assumptions about morality: ‘Moral consciousness implies a kind of scission, a fracture of consciousness into a bright part and an opposing black part’ (150). For the coloniser and for the colonised, who have internalised the mores of their subjugators.

On these terms, if we can accept them, auditing can itself be understood as a part of an acquired ‘collective unconscious,’ at least if we consider the history of auditing in the double-entry bookkeeping of fifteenth century European merchants, which, as Mary Poovey shows, were ‘codified’ in the sixteenth century, and ‘became a display of mercantile virtue’ (Poovey 1988, xvi). The line from double-entry bookkeeping to a neoliberal audit culture is neither straight nor continuous, but something of that scene of emergence continues to compel an identification with accounting as ‘the outward sign of integrity’ (Strathern, 2000, 2–3). A growing body of scholarship examining the entangled relations between accounting and colonialism (e.g., Power and Brennan, 2022; Sian and Poullaos, 2010), between accounting and slavery (e.g., Rosenthal, 2019; Fleischman and Tyson, 2004), and accounting and patriarchy (e.g., Haynes, 2017), would seem to confirm that neoliberal universities are haunted not by ‘primordial images’ but by the histories of the mechanisms they use in the interests of accountability.

Auditing has not been as intensely applied in South African universities as it has been in the UK, but audits at post-apartheid South African universities have become routine, and they operate with a double mandate. There have been ‘pressure,’ on the one hand, ‘to prepare South Africa for participation in a sophisticated global economy,’ and, on the other, ‘to render higher education more responsive to the needs and challenges of a country pulling itself away from its apartheid past’ (Ensor, 2006: 183). Responses to both these ‘pressures’ are measured and managed in universities: audits are used to make South African universities globally competitive spaces, and they have been turned into an instrument that monitors the extent to which social transformation is being monitored. With academics needing to ‘report on how much they have done to “decolonise” their curricula’ (Jansen and Walters, 2019, 23–24), the knot in which this places universities in the process of ‘decolonising’ themselves is that the very measures used to gauge the extent to which they have been ‘decolonised’ are left unexamined.

The problem to which we are pointing is not that IB invokes unconscious processes within organizational settings, but that it conceives of the unconscious in a way that foregrounds the individual as the locus of social problems and as the site of intervention. It is worth contrasting the formulation of an ‘impossible boss’ afflicted by an ‘inborn’ unconscious with the way Adorno writes of the ‘social forces in the most inner mechanisms of the individual’ (Adorno, 2014: 330). We are suggesting that histories of accounting mark the subject, introduce, in Fanon's words, ‘a fracture of consciousness into a bright part and an opposing black part.’ Like Fanon, Adorno attends not to a subject with a ‘primordial’ unconscious, but to the ‘socio-economic constitution of individual subjects’ (Norberg, 2011: 402). If Adorno writes in his later work that ‘society comes before the individual consciousness and before all its experience’ (Adorno, [1966] 2004: 181), this does not mean that there is nothing like ‘nature,’ but, rather, that ‘nature’ only comes into being through a dialectical relation with historical material circumstances. It is along these lines that we might more productively begin to think about managerialism and the unconscious.

Insofar as Adorno's writings draw on and critically appropriate psychoanalysis, they cannot be placed fully outside of what Miller and Rose call ‘psychotherapeutic authority.’ Adorno is, for the most part, ambivalent about psychoanalysis: it has been put in the service of ‘practical adjustment to existing conditions,’ although it has also been ‘a radical medium of enlightenment’ (Adorno, 1968: 82). This ambivalence marks MM, where Adorno does not spare psychoanalysis the charge that it has normalising effects, but he also devotes considerable energy, using psychoanalytic ideas, to ‘diagnosing the sickness of the healthy,’ the ‘deformations’ that emerge from ‘successful adaptation to the inevitable’ (Adorno, [1951] 2006: 59).

Adorno is cautious about the psychoanalytic ‘reduction of psychic life to a repetition of what happened in the past’ (Adorno, 1968: 81). If there are repetitions of early life, Adorno is at pains to underscore that ‘concrete historical components already enter early childhood experience’ (90). On the one hand, the ‘administrated world’ and the ‘culture industry’ impress themselves directly on the child. As Jessica Benjamin glosses Adorno's position: ‘Internalization is replaced by direct conformity to external pressure’ (Benjamin, 1977: 44). On the other, even parent-child relations are shaped by ‘social forces,’ and in this regard, Adorno is concerned with what Mary Douglas calls the remnants of ‘institution-building’ (Douglas, 1986: 67), the way the ‘earliest social interaction’ (62)—Douglas means infant-feeding—is conditioned by the guidelines of ‘mothercraft,’ which regulate not only the duration of, and the intervals between, feeds, but also ovulation and, thus, fertility, thus controlling ‘labour power for capitalist enterprise’ (Jolly, 1998: 5). In such a formulation, the ego is not master of its own house; it is driven by an other scene—at once intimate and shot through with ‘social forces’—that is never fully recoverable, though it leaves memory traces that can always be reactivated in everyday encounters, including those in the workplace.

That would not, however, constitute the totality of the unconscious for Adorno. While the ‘sickness of the healthy’ need not imply the hidden vitality of the sick, Axel Honneth has drawn attention to the way Adorno borrowed from Freud the idea that neurotic symptoms bear a wish for recovery, meaning that, for Adorno, suffering and resistance imply each other. If symptoms recall early infantile scenes of ‘conformity with the instrumental pressures of the capitalist form of life’ (Honneth, 2005: 61)—if they recall, in Douglas’ terms, the compliant adaptations of early ‘institution-building’—they also ‘can, in the midst of all instrumental ways of life, always awaken the desire to be freed from the social restrictions imposed on our mental capacities’ (61–62).

Adorno offers nothing as reassuring as a ‘quick results-focussed approach’ to this unconscious comprised of ‘social forces.’ As he says to students in Problems of Moral Philosophy: ‘I shall not be able to offer you anything resembling a practical guide to the good life’ (Adorno, 2000: 1). Rather than a positive statement on the ‘good life,’ and a set of steps to pursue it, ‘right life’ emerges only negatively, against ‘wrong life.’ Indeed, Adorno places hope in the study of ‘wrong life’ and the suffering it engenders: ‘He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinise its estranged form [Wer die Wahrheit übers unmittelbare Leben erfahren will, muß dessen entfremdeter Gestalt nachforschen]’ (Adorno, [1951] 2006, 15; Adorno, 1951: 7). To scrutinise, for Adorno, is not simply to do research, Forschung, but Nachforschung: it is a going after, an apprehension of ‘damaged life,’ a tracking, but also, perhaps, a way of studying even after recognising that such scrutiny may not be able to escape becoming entangled in the problem under study. ³

Yet, traces of ‘right life’ remain available in the scrutiny of suffering, which may allow one to see that life could have been otherwise. To the extent that Adorno offers anything like advice, it concerns form; it is through form—in the case of Minima Moralia, a fragmentary form—that one might abide by the ‘non-identical,’ by that which slips through the metrics of conventional thought, by what ‘ceases to exist’ because it ‘cannot be counted and measured’ (Adorno, [1951] 2006: 47). Thus, Adorno elaborates a ‘melancholy science’ (15)—the ‘non-identical’ will have slipped away—which presumes a subject capable of study at a moment when the possibility of studious scrutiny was already fading, and rather than mournfully move on, accept the loss, he ‘lingers’ (18).

In the next section we take up questions of form in relation to what Turner, in an analysis that goes over much the same shifts in authority that Miller and Rose engage, writes of as the ‘culturally psychotherapeutic interventions’ (Turner, 2013: 242) of the mid-twentieth century, interventions in which Adorno is implicated, and where dominant and resistant forms are at stake. We draw on Turner to consider one example of a wider public psychotherapeutic turn, allowing us to place our reading of IB within a broader context.

After authoritarianism

In the middle of the twentieth century—from the 1930s, through WWII but especially in its wake—authoritarianism became an object of scholarly interrogation (e.g., Allport, 1954; Adorno et al. 1950; Reichard, 1948). The aim was to discern ‘the potentially fascistic individual’ (Adorno, et al., 1950, 1), to divine the latent and lingering signs of authoritarianism within democratic societies, to understand and to transform ‘the cultural atmosphere in which hatred breeds’ (Horkheimer, [1950] 2019, x).

Commenting on this anti-authoritarian moment, Turner draws attention to the role of the US Committee for National Morale, ‘largely forgotten today’ but ‘very influential in its time’ (Turner, 2013: 2). The committee—it included highly influential figures such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Gordon Allport—provided, Turner shows, the ideational scaffolding for numerous cultural interventions, such as The Family of Man, a photographic exhibition of 503 black and white photographs curated by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, after which it toured the world for a decade funded by the US government.

Steichen's exhibition emerged within a US milieu consumed with anxiety over authoritarianism, and it was against authoritarianism that The Family of Man ‘solicited empathy’ (Turner, 2012, 78), impressed on its audience ‘an international need for affinity and identification in the post-World War II world’ (Zamir and Hurm, 2018, 1). The Family of Man executed this by exhibiting unity in difference, offering to audiences ‘the gamut of life from birth to death,’ ‘a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world’ (Steichen, 1955: 4). As its critics have noted, difference was refracted through the prism of bourgeois nuclear family’ (e.g., Sekula, 1981). But when The Family of Man was exhibited in South Africa in 1958—the very week, Tamar Garb notes, that Hendrik Verwoerd, psychotechnician of apartheid, was sworn in as Prime Minister—the empathy that the photographs solicited was ‘marshalled to the defence of,’ as Garb writes, an ‘antiapartheid position’ (Garb, 2014, 44). The official message that the exhibition constructed, that of a ‘universal community of interrelated and mutually empathetic global citizens’ (37), was affirmed—for the most part, by white liberals, but even black anti-apartheid commentators like Lewis Nkosi saw in it ‘a blueprint for an egalitarian and empathetic world’ (49).

Post-apartheid South African psychotherapeutic authority, which has posited empathy as an antidote to apartheid, repeats aspects of a twentieth century critique of authoritarianism. What Turner's work throws into relief are the latencies of that twentieth century critique that have allowed it to become a form of managerialism. Turner's argument focusses on how the ‘surround form’ of mid-twentieth century ‘culturally psychotherapeutic interventions’ such as The Family of Man occasioned a break with one-to-many modes of media associated with authoritarianism—paradigmatically, Hitler on the radio—but, at the same time, asked a US and then global audience ‘to adjust themselves to a softer but equally pervasive system of management’ (Turner, 2013: 183), ‘a managerial mode of control’ in which ‘people might be free to choose their experiences, but only from a menu written by experts’ (6, emphasis added). ⁴ Or, as Rose puts it, a mode of power that compels subjects ‘to take control of choices’ but only within a ‘marketplace of options’ that ‘authorities consider desirable’ (Rose, 2017: 306–307). While we may still want to talk of ‘managerialism's authoritarianism’ (Kilkauer, 2015: 1114), the critique of authoritarianism, on Turner's reading, engendered the problem of managerialism, which carries aspects of the authoritarianism it displaced. Put differently, authoritarianism morphed into an ossified version of a twentieth century critical response to it.

The Committee for National Morale, like the Tavistock—and like IB and MM—drew upon variants of ‘depth’ psychology. Both Adorno and Horkheimer were not fully outside of the broader sphere of debate in which the Committee for National Morale operated. When The Family of Man travelled in 1958 to Frankfurt—the same year it went to South Africa—it was opened by Horkheimer, and, with certain qualifications, he extolled the value of a collection of photographs that ‘allows the viewer to identify with it’ (Horkheimer, [1958] 2018, 51). Viewers were, according to the ‘surround form,’ able to select from the menu the images with which they could identify, and Horkheimer made his own selections. ⁵ But he did advance, as Martin Jay puts it, ‘empathetic identification’ (Jay, 2018, 61). If Horkheimer's writing kept at a critical distance anything resembling bourgeois humanism, the opening of this exhibition demanded of him a different role as a ‘re-educator of Germans,’ underlining that ‘the exhibition abetted emotional identification with people of different backgrounds’ (58–59).

Adorno would similarly lend his weight to what Turner calls ‘culturally psychotherapeutic interventions.’ At the heart of Adorno's radio broadcast, ‘Education After Auschwitz,’ is his problematisation of ‘hardness’ and ‘coldness,’ ‘a deficient libidinal relationship to other persons,’ an ‘inability to identify with others,’ going as far as calling it ‘the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred’ (Adorno, [1967] 2005, 197–198, 200, 201). Crucially, however, such identifications would be powerless if they took an ‘imperative form’ (202). Warmth, like the ‘good life,’ cannot be prescribed; all one can strive to do is ‘bring coldness to the consciousness of itself’ (202). Or, as Adorno has it in MM, the best one can aim for is to study life in its damaged forms, allowing ‘right life’ to emerge as what will have been foreclosed and yet still might act as a spur for ‘moral questions.’ Adorno, unlike the authors of IB, leaves it to the readers of his fragments to find and to forge ‘an ideal of human flourishing that remained precarious and largely unrealised’ (Gordon, 2023: xviii).

From the ‘McDonaldization’ of the university (Parker and Jary, 1995) to its ‘Uberization’ (Goldberg, 2016), successive generations of critique circle what Turner calls the ‘menu,’ which characterises managerialism, a form to which ‘users’—student-customers no less than lecturers, managers, and administrators—are bound. It is in this light that we can understand the seductive appeal of the MBTI. Seizing on the form of the menu, IB offers the warm enclosure of a psychological itinerary—conversion, rebirth as a manager—that starts at eight predetermined positions, devised by self-appointed ‘experts.’ If questioning this itinerary as neoliberal becomes subject to psychopathologising diagnoses, we might also question the stereotypical thinking at play in the MBTI as a ‘form of astrological character analysis’ (Case and Phillipson, 2004: 479). As Adorno writes, ‘astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula’ (Adorno, 2002: 61). Just as astrological advice columns provide stereotypes ‘to help people to master their everyday conflicts’ (101), IB provides its readers, as Adorno says of horoscopes, with a ‘threat-help pattern,’ a neat picture of an enemy accompanied by a wish-fulfilling ‘happy ending’ (75). The trouble here is not only that ‘archetypes’ operate as stereotypes, helping individuals solve problems located in a ‘primordial’ unconscious, but that the preselected options from a menu are fed to readers like soothing phantasmagorias to overcome a ‘natural’ expression of instinct in others, inviting passivity.

Conclusion

Adorno's emphasis on form can be taken in several directions we have not been able to pursue here. Instead of providing the usual summary of the argument, we would like, instead, to end by thinking about how a critique of the menu form—a templated horoscopic form of managerialism—may be of use today in the managerialised university. We will note three possible moments of approach.

The first concerns the choice of psychoanalysis one might use to think about how the menu form repeats itself, and why we continue to be bound to it. Butler, to grasp how, for Adorno, ‘social forces take up residence within us’ (Butler, 2005: 106), borrows from psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche. What is key for Laplanche is the constitutive role of ‘an adult cultural world in which the child is totally immersed from the outset,’ ‘a world of signification and communication swamping the child's capacity for apprehension and mastery’ (Laplanche, 1999: 129). In this framing, the unconscious of the adult carer is transmitted to the infant by way of ‘enigmatic messages sent by the adult, and which the child (after a period of latency) will have to “treat,” to “translate”’ (Laplanche, 2011: 308). The key point is that the unconscious is not a natural endowment, but is, rather, implanted. Laplanche gives primacy to the other, who issues ‘enigmatic messages’ that neither the infant nor the adult fully understands. This other can be the ‘socius’ itself (110). The way the child identifies with an adult who cares for it cannot, of course, be ignored, but the processes to which Laplanche points concern the ways a child receives ‘an assignment within the social’ (110–11), is identified by it. As Butler reads Adorno's aphorism—‘Wrong life…’—with Laplanche, because ‘the social traverses the individual’—‘the social’ shapes an initial scene of infantile dependence no less than it structures workplace relations within which there are relations of interdependence that recall, stir, reactivate infantile scenes and their frustrations—the conditions of life deemed ‘wrong’ also ‘constitute who I am’ (Butler, 2015: 213–214).

We could, in other words, do worse than bringing Adorno and Laplanche together, but we might also turn, as we suggested above, to Fanon, for whom subjects are constituted by a ‘cultural situation’ in which ‘a host of information and a series of propositions slowly and stealthily work their way into an individual’ (Fanon, [1952] 2008, 130–131). What Freud call the ‘primal scene’ and Laplanche calls ‘the fundamental anthropological situation,’ Fanon calls a ‘cultural imposition’ (167–184). Fanon offers a way of thinking about norms that ‘have lost their immediate authority’ and yet still acquire ‘repressive’ force in the subject who would resist and attempt to exceed them, and Fanon's ‘sociogenic’ psychoanalysis can be productively placed in relation with Adorno's lingering in the ruins of ‘damaged life,’ which is, for Adorno, the proper function of psychoanalysis, to provide ‘a report on the forces of destruction rampant in the individual amidst a destructive society’ (Adorno, 1968: 95).

The second moment concerns the forms in which we give an account of what universities do, and what universities are for. Here, we might turn to Adorno's essay on the essay, on the essay as a form that ‘bears witness to the very non-identity it has to express,’ that ‘eludes official thought’ to make available ‘a moment of something inextinguishable’ (Adorno, 2019: 11, 17). Alongside ‘The Essay as Form’ we might place Bill Readings’ proposition that ‘universities should, as it were, be required to write essays in evaluation’ (Readings, 1996: 133). Readings means this not as a prescription on form, but as a ‘metaphor for producing a judgment of value’ (167), the aim of which is not, Readings stresses, ‘consensus,’ but, rather, holding open a space for ‘dissensus,’ ‘leaving space for what we cannot envisage to emerge’ (Readings, 1996: 167, 176). The point would not be to reconcile what Adorno calls the ‘non-identical’ and Readings calls ‘thinking without identity’ (127), but to ask how the account we give can become ‘a social question rather than a device of measurement’ (119).

Instead of restricting ourselves to the choice of writing an essay or describing a fragment of the real, we could also turn playfully to Adorno's hope in unreal games: ‘The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real,’ Adorno writes: ‘Unconsciously they rehearse the right life’ (Adorno, [1951] 2006: 228). For Adorno, studious scrutiny and play, even if they do not amount to the same thing—Adam Sitze has explored the ‘extimate’ relation between study and revolt in ‘serious play’ (Sitze, 2016: 293)—are not unrelated: ‘In his purposeless activity the child, by a subterfuge, sides with use-value against exchange value,’ by which Adorno means that the child abides, through play, by the ‘non-identical’ (Adorno, [1951] 2005: 228). In this regard, we have not been here nearly as playful here as we might have been, and this is our third moment.

Sirma Bilge writes in an aptly titled piece that textures Turner's formulation of managerialism, and lodges it within the university, ‘We’ve Joined the Table but We’re Still on the Menu,’ that ‘there is always the route of refusal, refusing institutionality, power and recognition’ (Bilge, 2020: 323). It does not come without a cost. The reasons we do not take ‘the route of refusal’—the reasons we do not play more—are not meagre: if, as Butler suggests, the conditions of ‘wrong life’ ‘constitute who I am,’ a subject's resistance to domination will always entail a confrontation with social structures against which one cannot rail without wagering one's very existence (Butler, 1997). It is in this sense that Butler describes ‘the daily experience of neoliberalism’ as one with ‘no sense of a secure future’ (Butler, 2015: 202). Most often, resistance to being ‘displayed on the menu’ (Bilge, 2020: 30) winds up back on the menu. There is no position untouched by standardisation, equivalence, exchangeability, no place that ‘escapes the marketplace’ (Adorno, [1966] 2004: 4).

It is in this spirit of resignation that we offer these three menu options: 1) If ‘psychotherapeutic authority’ is unavoidable, there are forms of it that throw into relief the ‘social forces’ imprinted on the unconscious. 2) If an account of academic work must be given—and an account always must be given—then opt for a form—essayistic, fragmentary, playful or otherwise—that sides with ‘use value,’ even if, ultimately, it will not be able to escape commoditisation. 3) If one, for reasons of self-preservation, is going to adhere to the menu form, remember that ‘self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved’ (Horkheimer and Adorn, [1944] 2002: 43). We are in a form of ‘wrong life’ that cannot be lived rightly. But in that failure, we might be able to recall that it could have been otherwise, and might still be.