ND I.I., False Need
I was confused, so I made a Table of Needs:
| Real | False | |
|---|---|---|
| Non-ideological | Genuine needs that point to a required social transformation, e.g., the need for freedom or leisure | N/A |
| Ideological | Real needs, arising from suffering or deficit, deformed or misdirected by social conditions, seeking satisfaction in something that can’t actually satisfy it. E.g., the need for safety and security, misdirected into support for authoritarian government | Need that is entirely produced by the system and aims at what no self-aware subject would actually want. E.g., the insatiable manufactured desires of consumerism. |
The ontological need that we’ve been discussing in this part of the book is of the real-ideological kind. There’s something genuine there, but it’s misdirected towards the false solution of fundamental ontology and the jargon of authenticity.
He describes real-ideological needs nicely:
Real needs can objectively be ideologies, without rendering this as a legal mandate to negate them. For in the needs themselves something reacts in the human beings who are recorded [erfassten] and administered, wherein they are not entirely recordings [erfasst sind], the surplus of the subjective share, which the system did not entirely master.
This…
Material needs ought to be taken seriously even in their topsy-turvy form, caused by overproduction.
…made me think of the desperately real need of a child to have a certain toy or games console or smartphone or pair of shoes. The need as expressed is largely generated by the market, but it’s also real: if they don’t get it, they may suffer exclusion, sometimes in ways they will never forget (such is their need for belonging, which might be the underlying need).
But this could mean that there’s not always an easy separation between real and false needs—I’ve said that consumerism produces false needs but surely many of those needs are of this real kind too. That’s what Adorno is getting at here:
Indeed that which is real is not to be cleanly peeled out of the ideological, if the critique does not wish for its part to succumb to ideology, that of the simple natural life.
He is working against the assumption that ideological = false.
The passage that begins “To false consciousness can be added..” is a briar patch. In a nutshell I think it is saying that, whatever the kinds of needs they are, they have to be critiqued, especially the intellectual ones, which can be used to show what is wrong with the world.
This latter [the bad irrationality of the relations of social production] is to be relentlessly criticized against intellectual needs, the ersatz for everything which has been withheld.
He ends the section with a flourish:
The invariant structures are created in the spitting image of omnipresent terror, the vertigo of a society threatened by total destruction. If the threat vanished, then its positive inversion would most likely disappear along with it, itself nothing other than its abstract negative.
The invariant structures, i.e., the apparatus of fundamental ontology supposedly revealing what is solid underneath all history, constitute the philosophical mirror-image of a society in crisis—and this solid ground is the form and posture of what Heidegger is offering, whether or not he introduces some historicizing nuance along the way.