By Stefan Wallner
Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1969) talks about the destruction of the traditional father through capitalist culture (or rather the destruction of culture through capitalism). In a traditional family structure the father speaks with the authority of duty and repression; his patriarchal suppression and power give the first socialisation towards duty as a concept. Duty in this context simply refers to doing something because you have to regardless of personal interest and freedom. This idea of duty stands in the way of permissive consumption, for example, if we choose not to book a flight because it is not ecologically responsible. As long as you just do what you want, you can consume to dynamic. Hugh replaces his own duty to act as the father with this form of permissive egoism. And what better duty to abandon than the duty of being the representative of patriarchal duty? And starting a second family in Hong Kong.
Hugh is the father of the play. After having two children with Martha, he abandons the family and starts a second one in Hong Kong. His ex-wife Martha is clearly devastated by this, resorting to alcoholism. It is worth noting that despite his abandoning the family, Hugh isn’t presented as an evil monster. He tries (and fails) to have a reasonable conversation with his daughter over dinner and is genuinely shocked by the state of his former family. Which is of course in part caused by his absence in the first place, but he hasn‘t left completely: he financially supports his family to the point of completely bankrolling them. We could also say he bought himself freedom or that he has substituted himself with his money.
The loss of the traditional father frees Hugh: He is left with no clear role and a lot of money.
Let us take a moment and think about the dual role of the traditional father. He is, on the one hand, the moral and educational authority responsible for telling his children what is right or wrong through acts of repression. This repression allows his children to define and develop themselves as subjects and adversaries to his authority. The other side of fatherhood is purely economic. The father is the ‘breadwinner’ and the person responsible for work outside of the household, while the mother is responsible for work inside the home. The instance of the father as repressive patriarchal authority gets eaten up by the capitalist tendency to destroy everything not directly in service of value creation through reckless permission. So, we have a structure (the traditional family centred around a dual father) that just lost its repressive element stabilising it.
Hugh still fulfils his role as the economic centre. He bankrolls the whole family even after leaving. The loss of the traditional father now frees Hugh, since he is left with no clear role and a lot of money. I assume that his family life up to this point with Martha had already been unstable, but instead of facing this challenge and using his authority to stabilise the family, he disappears. Like a child dropping a losing game, Hugh starts a new family. In this way, he himself becomes a carefree child, no longer having to act as a dutiful father. But when it comes to raising children, there are no backsies.
Hugh is not the only character infantilised by the imperative to do what he wants. If we have a look at Martha, we clearly see that she is just as much a child as he is. But while he is the child free to step away from a game he doesn’t want to play, she has to play the game indefinitely due to the consequences of quitting. She needs constant care and attention from her oldest son Henry. She plays
Henry is a child playing an adult and an authority.
So, what are we to make of the complete death of the father? Mark Fisher noted that the failure of paternalism in capitalist society is more than just ‘parents not doing their job.’ It is a structural imperative of capitalism to reduce every form of imperative repression until nothing but permission (to consume) has become the only imperative. Hugh’s imperative is to do what he wants. His money allows him to have a second family and to eat steak in Hong Kong, but when he is faced with the consequences of abandoning his family, he finds that he himself has no more power. He can’t take on the role of the authority to centre the family around him. He “lets Martha be taken away.” This is a culminating moment in the play. Hugh using his money to stabilise the family is him giving up on his efforts to have any authority as a father – the family bound together by duty and repression is stripped away from our protagonists, leaving only the cold economics of clinical care. Money replaces duty; clinical experts replace paternal authority.
Hugh, the child, turns to the adults for help, but there are no adults left, only children playing adults and external professionals working for money. Sending Martha to a clinic is him giving up on the remaining shreds of dignity and power he had. For a price, of course. A world without duty only knows transactions.
Photo (c) Sarah Naumann
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