Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Studies in Critical
Social Sciences
Series Editor
David Fasenfest
VOLUME 60
By
Robert Lanning
LEIDEN BOSTON
2014
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CONTENTS
1Introduction1
Background and Context9
The Orientation of the Present Study 15
Adornos Form of Presentation 17
Theory and Practice 22
The Management of Politics and Personal Relations 25
The Socio-Historical Context 27
2Hegel, Marx, Dialectics 30
The Individual 34
Being and Self-consciousness 37
Becoming 42
Contradiction 44
Hegels Positivity, Critical Theorys Positivism 46
A Note on Dialectical Logic 50
Mediation 51
3Aspects of Adornos Method: Constellations and Images 61
Adornos Bilderverbot and the Negation of Messianism 77
4Jazz, Radio and the Masses 83
The Masses and the Culture Industries 86
The Jazz Essays 89
Marx, Music and Relative Autonomy101
Black Influence and Historical Materialist Analysis105
Radio111
5The Masses and Pro-fascist Propaganda120
Pro-Fascism and the Masses124
Irrationalism as the Basis of Analysis127
Lowenthals Anti-Fascist Writings130
Adornos Study of Martin Luther Thomas132
The Approach of Others to Antifascism143
vi
contents
6Mediation151
Hegelian Mediation162
Adornos Mediation165
7Negative Dialectic, Identity and Exchange172
Negative Thought172
The Positive Moment in Dialectics176
Identity and Identity Thinking184
Concept and Identity193
Exchange195
8Conclusion207
References211
Index219
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Of the major points of Marxs work, the most pertinent was that his
method could expose the contradictions of capitalism and contribute to
the organization of an alternative to it. In other words, it is possible to get
from the initiation of critique to socialism. With much of Adornos work,
that is not the case, neither in the method nor the expectation. The argument in this book is directed at the difference.
Marx employed dialectics as the method of his orientation to political
economy (1967: 30), to be able to reason through the experience of capitalism. For Hegel, dialectics was essentially the connection of elements of
experience: this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on
itself and which effects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what
is called experience (1977: 55). Adorno rejected Hegels view of dialectics
and experience as simply part of the idealist machinery (1973: 7). He did
not consider dialectics a method, a pure method (1973: 144), but acknowledged the necessity of beginning with matter rather than thought, unreconciled, contradictory matter. Unreconciled, contradictory reality resists
unanimous interpretation; contradiction existing in reality is a contradiction against reality (1973: 144145). The notion of contradiction being
located in reality and, therefore, against it certainly holds. But while it
may be a contradiction against the whole of reality, as in the reality of
capi talism the social process as a whole, as we will see later it is, most
often, against a part of reality, a moment, with the complex of internal
relations connecting all other parts to the whole clearly in mind. If not,
how do we treat the contradictions of reality that are sublated by the
partial and momentary resolution of the original contradiction? Adornos
position is that no meaningful change in society is possible until the entire
structure, ideology and existing culture industries of capitalism have been
completely overcome. He embeds his theoretical orientation in a categorical approach, seeing contradiction as finality rather than an expression of
both the process of thought and the process of a changeable reality. Thus,
the contradiction in question is against the whole of reality taken categorically and absolutely. The philosophical orientation is on thinking and
interpretation devoid of a structure for thinking through actual political
chapter one
introduction3
determinations, empirical evidence that produces choices precisely
because of the method underlying the analysis. In this sense, Adorno is
correct to say, Experience lives by consuming the standpoint (1973: 30).
It is a higher level than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason is centered on
thinking about thinking. Hegel also began his Science of Logic by noting
that dialectics did not begin from a standpoint but not in quite the same
way as Adorno. Hegels dialectics produced a standpoint internal to the
method when his indeterminate Being and Nothing were given only a
moments distinction before vanishing into Becoming (Hegel 1969: 92).
Such movement might satisfy the apparent neutrality suggested by
Ollman, but it also indicates the reality that dialectics is imputed a standpoint in the process of its development and is in a position to lend its
potential to a practical program without inherently privileging any partisanship. One can accept the idea that dialectics does not initially take a
position, but it is more difficult, in fact not possible to consider the thinker,
the agent of dialectical thinking, the person deeper into modernity than
Hegel who employs dialectics, being without a standpoint, a partisan position on existing conditions, their history and contradictions, and being
partial, at least, to a conceptual effort of the kind Bloch identified as forward thinking. Dialectics as a way of thinking can only be sustained
momentarily without recognizing the social ground of its cogitation. In
the pluralism of ideas and methods of reasoning and resolving, dialectics
itself may not possess a standpoint inherent in its name, but the choice of
dialectics by the thinking subject is a position taken.
Beginning without an obvious standpoint may be a narrative device
that holds the readers partisan interests at bay while the philosopher
forms the argument; this is indicated by Adornos statement that dialectics in its materialist form has degenerated into a dogma (1973: 7). But, in
fact, it is not widely evident in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere that he
holds his particular interests at a distance; rather, from the outset his position is emphatic, especially his writing on culture, the condition of the
masses, and popular music. The style is one that rarely allows the reader
full insight into why he holds the categorical positions he does. Thus, he
continues in Negative Dialectics: My thought is driven by its own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking (1973: 5), evidence of
the retention of the priority of thought/thinking in the abstract, from
Kant. Cognizance of the insufficiency of ones thinking should be a motive
for its development and clarity. If dialectics is a search for knowledge,
Adorno warns that it should not be for the comfort provided by the identity of contradictory elements found in the investigation of the social
chapter one
world. Identity and contradiction of thought are welded together [aneinandergeschweit], he writes (1973: 6), although the weld suggests a more
permanent relation than is necessary philosophically or evident historically. But the obvious question concerns the structure or structuring of
consciousness, how it becomes structured under the conditions of its
experience, thought, and analysis, how the demand for resolution of
opposing phenomena and relations comes about rather than simply being
there as an historical fait accompli that Adorno often imputes to the
moment he fumes against.
The position throughout Negative Dialectics and elsewhere is that identity is total, that totality is totally identical, formed by identity-thinking.
Identity must be purged from consciousness, Adorno argues, as quickly as
it is sensed or the being who identifies will succumb to the existing social
order of identity-thinking. And he assumes this concerns the majority of
beings. This position, a standpoint, assumes that all forms and instances
of identity or unity are barriers to achieving a different social order and
these must be completely transcended before new social structural
arrangements, a new consciousness can be realized. For Adorno, unity in
dialectics implies a non-contradiction theoretically unattainable and he
continually pushes his readers toward a comprehension of this sense of
identity, its inadequacy and danger. His identity is categorical and inclusive of too much that is characterized by the dynamism that can be
searched out and developed in reality; identity is a concept, and he, quite
correctly, sees the concept as claiming to cover reality but cannot precisely because of its movement, and yet he treats the concept of identity as
if it is able to do so. Unity and identity are denounced along with the
notion that there is a positive moment in the dialectic that possesses any
intellectual, social or political value, and it is insisted here that the positive moment, however tendential and brief, is sublation. Adornos criticism of the strive for unity as a goal of consciousness, a matter of the
structure of our consciousness (1973: 5), is a problem, it seems, for all but
a minority of intellectuals, for there is no theoretico-practical relation in
political and social thought for him that has resulted in a dialectical overcoming of existing conditions and the sublation of philosophical and
practical problems.
However, the striving for, or preoccupation with identity, is contingent
on specific social, economic and historical relations, and thus, on consciousness, more or less developed. Contingency implies a set of conditions in which a specific complex of relations has arisen and developed,
and which are surmountable under specifically different, negatively
introduction5
related conditions. But this development toward overcoming is not clearly
evident in Adornos argument for negative dialectics; it admits of no positive moment of which sublation is at least a threshold. A sense of the nontranscendence of conditions of identity-thinking pervades his dialectics.
That dialectics does not begin by taking a standpoint imputes to the
method of thought neutrality it cannot long sustain. Dialectics does not
have an immanent standpoint; dialectics is directed at exposing and analysing the determinants, the internal relations, of phenomena that in the
socially and politically conscious individual will lead to a choice between
alternatives. Dialectics is said not to begin with a standpoint, yet is said to
be surrounded by the demand for a continuous sense of non-identity that
is the standpoint of the theorist.
Mihailo Markovic argued that an analysis of society
is incomplete that is reduced to a mere description, or to structural analysis
without examination of the change of those structures. Equally incomplete
is research that seeks merely to explain and understand actually given phenomena without exploring the alternative possibilities. (1983: 556)
This concept of critique in this regard reflects Marxs basic use of criticism
by those who want to find the new world through criticism of the old one
constructing the future [through] ruthless criticism of all that exists
(Marx 1975a: 142). He sought an alternative, not an interpretation. This is
essentially the sense of criticism used by Horkheimer (1982: 206207) in
his most comprehensive early essay on critical theory. Adorno does indicate desirable changes in the structure of society, but those are most often
only general and vague, beginning and nearly always ending with the
intractable grip of modernity or capitalism or commodity fetishism, as in
the growth into dominance of science and quantification of the
Enlightenment and its business connections in capitalism, or the rise of
jazz as a musical form and the immediate, permanent domination of it by
market interests. These are macro-developments, big changes that,
indeed, mean a great deal to the structure of society, its institutions, the
psychology of a population, and although he speaks to that psychology
often it is still in terms of total identity that cannot be addressed before
total social change. His attitude toward the social movement of university
students and the New Left was a partial and only temporary exception
(see Adorno 1976a: 1011).
Adorno comes up short, then, with regard to the second part of
Markovics prescription change and alternatives as the real content
of social science. Adorno recognizes only those alternatives that have
chapter one
The implication is that some action can be taken to address these presuppositions; the implication is one of possible alternatives. Contrary to
Adornos position, Horkheimer denotes (1982: 219) the necessity of a struggle between social transformation and the theory that advocates it
the closest thing to a genuine relation between theory and practice.
(We return to this below.) But, does this provide or suggest the practical
alternative Markovic or Marx seems to support?
Adorno believes that philosophy can and must stand on its own, and as
with the problem of practice, is degraded by suggestions of its inter
relationship with other disciplines; it may be applied to them but not
with them. Hence, his immanent critique is based in the assumption of
introduction7
philosophys capacity to develop through its own processes. Marxs
attempt to transform philosophy was a practical and theoretical action
that, for Adorno, was not successful and its traces cannot or are not
worthy of discovery. He states at the beginning of Negative Dialectics
(1973: 3) that the dictum of Marx was crippled by the attempts resignation in the face of reality and became the defeatism of reason after
theattempt to change the world miscarried. This occurs repeatedly in
Adornos work.
This makes the principle of non-identity quite problematic and, as in
other instances, a rather formal category that suggests of a type of logic
ill-equipped for contradiction. As we will see, Adorno felt that interpretation was at the heart of philosophy and yet well-before the historical juncture in which that position was taken, Marx had argued that that moment
for philosophy had passed, of necessity. As Bloch noted, in his 11th Thesis
on Feuerbach, Marx did not rebuke philosophers for philosophizing but
for only interpreting the world as if the class issues at the core of capitalism
did not exist; contemplation as such is not an object of rebuke, but a call
to philosophers to study reality is the message Marx wanted to communicate (Bloch 1971: 9395). Adornos position is that interpretation is sufficient in itself to produce knowledge.
Buck-Morss (1977: 154) suggests that Adornos very exposure of fetishism, reification and the sado-masochistic features of jazz are an example
of his immanent critique. Indeed, it is, and it is predominantly one-sided
as we will see in the chapter discussing jazz and popular music. It is insufficient because the mediating energy of critique is not, in itself, a direction. As we have noted, Adorno may be correct in his view that dialectics
itself does not have a standpoint, but like any other method, it is nothing
without an agent.
We can see something of the difference in approaches by noting Marxs
immanent critique of the Commune. His assessment of the contra
dictions workers faced within that form of social organization required
them to pursue a course of action. He argued that they could not
expectmiracles from the Commune, that the struggle would necessarily
take place over a period of time through a series of historical processes
against capital and landed property, and through the development of
new conditions. At that historical juncture the workers knew both
concretely and theoretically that great strides may be taken at once
through the Communal form of political organization and that the
time has come to begin that movement for themselves and mankind
(Marx 1986b: 335, 49192).
chapter one
introduction9
Background and Context
In the mid-1940s Adorno queried the interest of workers in their own class
as a political means to social change. It was a legitimate inquiry, one taken
up later by members of the Frankfurt School but with few attempts to
address the class directly or to address the politics of class struggle.
Marcuse was a partial, but important exception much after this period. In
his aphoristic piece, Puzzle-picture, Adorno alludes to the social mobility and rough equality possible in an increasingly technological society
an immanently socialist element in progress while capitalism retained
its rigidity. His question about subjective class membership therein was
answered, not surprisingly, in a deprecating fashion: Sociologists ponder the grimly comic riddle: where is the proletariat? (Adorno 2005: 194).
We should expect that Adorno would be concerned about the response
of sociologists, but not political leaders of the organized working class.
So, too, should we expect that for him the problem is grim and comedic,
and comes in the form of a riddle; grim to match his own despair,
comedic because of his tendency to be dismissive of the need for detailed
and systematic analysis little seems to be taken seriously except his conclusions, and a riddle because of his interpretive philosophical approach,
a metaphor of a game, notwithstanding its common use in the philosophies of Antiquity. Or perhaps Adorno uses riddle in its agricultural
denotation an instrument that separates the chaff from the wheat. The
comedic problem of the proletariat reflects the orientation of his social
criticism: obscurantist language, images, and the turning-inside-out of
concepts, a style hardly conducive to attracting the interest of working
class activists to a comprehensive and coherent analysis of capitalism and
the possibility of transcending its limits on human development. But that
was never his intention. Nor would it have been conducive to developing
a more critical side of the sociology of the day.
This attitude was also not a favorable approach to attracting or developing the educated organic intellectuals of the working class in the factory
or elsewhere, and those from other class backgrounds who joined their
struggle. Given the historical period of his early writings in the 1930s
and 40s, there is a nearly complete absence of reference to working class
political actions or organizations. It is one of many reasons to ask to
what extent Adorno, early or late, seriously sought an audience there or
wanted his philosophical message to reach and influence activists or proletarian political organizations, an attitude consistent with most Frankfurt
School members toward the working class as a possible historical agent of
10
chapter one
introduction11
popular audience rather than a partisan one (or even a necessarily academic audience) for his first collection of essays, Prisms, published in
Germany after the war (Claussen 2008: 211). It is an interesting change of
intended audience as the agents Adorno hoped would help secure his
reputation as a public intellectual and critic.
If the message in a bottle is a form of communication why cast about
for a different audience, except to argue that the nearest one, the working
class outside Adornos door, was either uninterested or incapable? He
knew the answer: the audience in contemporary capitalist culture is there
for support of the artist, a support that takes place through the commodification of music, painting, the novel, drama, and in his case, academic
discourse. That was a position he adopted toward the existing, dominant
culture industry, but also a position he adopted for his preferred addressees. After all, if there was a possibility for an intelligent consumer among
the public and in the universities then those sites could serve as the marketplace for the criticism he espoused.
The audience he sought was not necessarily antithetical to the interests
of the working class. His desired addressees consisted of intellectuals, students, well-read knowledgeable people interested in the social problems
of the day: philosophy, education, antisemitism, and the re-building of
culture and academic life in post-war Germany. These were legitimate
audiences and some portion of them, such as university students, showed
they were up to the task of confronting the state and capital on issues of
war, economy and racism, although their actions were not always supported by Adorno. From such confrontations some degree of social change
did issue, along with some measure of ideological and organizational skills
useful for building and sustaining broadly-based political movements. It
was an audience present for edification in matters of philosophy, sociology and culture, among other things; it was an audience worth having.
Once listening and reading, this audience provided some institutional and
popular security (see Adorno and Becker 1999) as well as personal refuge
for Adorno; it provided conditions for teaching and writing, while for
Horkheimer it provided a privileged withdrawal from public life (Claussen
2008: 208).
Adorno cultivated his return to Germany and his new audience with
questionable actions, not least of which was the Institutes excising of
provocative for the cold-war environment of Germany early writings
of its members on antisemitism and class issues (Meszaros 1989: 100). This,
however, was nothing new for Institute leaders. Horkheimer had been an
obstacle to the conclusion and publication of Erich Fromms study of the
12
chapter one
introduction13
sufficient to maintain an audience and adherents of intellectual and
political diversity. Adornos legacy fits well in an academic world selfdescribed and self-satisfied as postmodern. He was surely the vanguard of
the postmodern against philosophical systems (1973: 2022), interpretive rather than historical in analysis (Adorno 2000a), giving priority to the
refuge of discursive style more than to substance, esoterically pleasurable
and career-building in its abstruseness.
Other than his brief period of lecturing between 1931 and 1933, he began
his university career only in the post-war period. By the time of his death
in 1969 universities in Europe and North American had undergone a significant transformation. The expansion of the post-secondary system in
the United States, for example, included not only an increase in the number of institutions but opened admission to applicants of socio-economic
status, ethnicity and gender who would not have found a place in a university in an earlier period. The same trend was true for Canada, though
slower, but even in this period two of its major universities, McGill and the
University of Toronto, finally dropped their quotas on Jewish students.
Increasingly, the teaching force in American universities operate on a
two-tier system with upwards of 70% of faculty in the U.S. in non-secure
forms of employment with little institutional support while the remainder
hold employment security, little scrutiny beyond the moment of tenure,
generally well-supported by their institutions as well as a textbook industry eager to profit from book sales to students and academics alike. The
university, at least for tenured faculty, has indeed become a place of an
elite core of professionals, effectively a managerial group at the department level. In this atmosphere, perhaps Adorno would be mindful that an
early comment on the commodification of thought (Horkheimer and
Adorno 1982: xixii) would apply equally well to academia.
The period of history in which Adornos work was written that is of primary concern here was a period few have had the audacity to ignore. With
the important exception of the Holocaust, Adorno was one. Perhaps the
North American students of the 1960s whose interest in Frankfurt School
members propelled their writings into the public forum could be excused
for a lack of knowledge about the political vibrancy and objective potential of the political and social movements of three and four decades earlier, although this would be less true of the red diaper babies at Port Huron
or in the Mississippi Freedom Schools or at Draft Board confrontations.
Out of concern for their security, members of the Frankfurt School wanted
to function below the political radar in America to which they had been
fortunate to emigrate. The member who most significantly broke that
14
chapter one
silence was Marcuse, and that was not until the volatility of the 1960s student and anti-war movements were about to be realized. Fromm had
retreated to an interesting humanism informed by Marxs early writings
but distant from revolutionary practice. Lowenthal, as interesting in his
use of Marxism as was Marcuse, was less of a public political presence.
Horkheimer and Adorno had shifted to academic careers in Germany.
Studies of Adornos work continue. The books for which he became
well-known continue to be available or republished in new editions and
translations; major and minor post-war treatises on music and literature
have recently been translated. Two recent studies have attempted to capture his biography as a life of genius (Claussen 2008) (complete with a
note to the reader: How to read this book) and his period of exile in the
United States (Jenneman 2007). Claussens work is thorough, covering
Adornos major works and relations with people in and out of the Frankfurt
School circle, in Europe, England and the United States. Clearly sympathetic, Claussen begins with Horkheimers response to Adornos death,
referring to him as a genius, followed by Adornos own negative view of
the term as typically used. Claussen writes on Adornos collaboration with
Thomas Mann on the music section of Dr. Faustus, and other collaborations, with Hans Eisler and Horkheimer, as well as his relations with
Benjamin, Bloch and others. Claussens use of Adornos correspondence
gives the study both a range and intimacy not achieved in other writings.
Jennemans book focuses on Adornos work on radio providing useful
background material on his interests and work during his relatively short
period in the U.S. as well as important background material on the study
of antisemitism and attitudes toward race, The Authoritarian Personality.
But as we will see with respect to Jenneman there is hardly a glimpse at
what is going on outside of Adornos immediate interests. Generally,
Jennemans and Claussens works are intended to create a sympathetic
and ultimately unproblematic picture of their subject to secure him
against accusations of elitism. Despite these efforts, attempting to prove
or disprove such claims misses the major problem: that Adornos attitude
toward those in social classes below his strata of intellectuals is an inevitable outcome of his abandonment of the central requirements of historical materialist analysis.
Though not unsympathetic, others have sought to critique Adornos
work, as Susan Buck-Morss has, acknowledging his vision of the intellectual elite as the formulators of truth (1977: 42). Her The Origin of
Negative Dialectics, perhaps the most oft-cited resource on Adorno, establishes the links between his early and late philosophy and a detailed
introduction15
exploration of his method. She also provides three chapters on his intellectual relations with Benjamin, constituting some of the most enlight
ening discussion of that issue alone. Gillian Roses earlier work, The
Melancholy Science (1978), is perhaps more critical on some levels, focusing on Adornos method and style, illuminating and attempting to clarify
many obscurities of his work. Other recent works where Adorno is not
the central figure but his presence is inescapable have contributed much
to the knowledge of his work and personality. Esther Leslies Walter
Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000), Erdmut Wizislas Walter
Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: the story of a friendship (2009) and Mark P.
Worrells Dialectic of Solidarity (2009) are among those to be considered.
Serious and less sympathetic critiques of Adornos work are rare. Meszaros
devoted several pages to Adorno, scorning his style, excoriating his attitude toward class and questioning his other priorities designed essentially
to feather his nest in post-war German academia (1989: 91130). In his
short work on the Frankfurt School, Zoltan Tar concentrated on Adorno
and Horkheimer as the central figures of Critical Theory, pointing out
numerous contradictions between their stated program and what actually
emerged. The rather conservative philosophical background of both and
the absence of systematic application of historical materialism and materialist dialectics contributed to Tars conclusion that Critical Theory
dissociated itself from the basic tenet of Marxism: the unity of theory,
empirical research, and revolutionary praxis, a disengagement that led
to, among other things, a social philosophy of despair (Tar 1977: 79, 202).
Tars edited collection with Judith Marcus (1984) provides some of the
most important critiques of Adorno and other central figures of the Frank
furt School and is crucial to any complete understanding of the Schools
theoretical perspective and politico-philosophical shortcomings. All of
these works and others will have a place in this critique.
The Orientation of the Present Study
Except in a marginal way, Adornos work on literature and classical music
are not addressed in this study. My major interest is in two areas: the
works that employ an orientation to dialectics and ostensibly to Marxism,
and works that directly or indirectly address the working class and eschew
a meaningful praxis. Adorno will have his own defense of these areas of
interest in these pages, but these issues I find most problematic in at least
two senses. First, I share with others such as Tar (1977) questions about
16
chapter one
Adornos interest in and use of Marxism as a systematic and critical perspective. Adorno was free to choose his theoretical orientation, but notwithstanding the need for any theory to be fully understood, developed
and expanded consistent with changing social conditions. And once some
relationship to Marxism is implied, including dialectics, that selection
must be complete at least in the sense that Marxism requires a certain
orientation to analysis with a view to concrete action that begins with the
struggle between social classes and requires continuous attention to the
relations of theory and practice and to the development of consciousness.
Adorno avoided the class struggle altogether, and without that his
attempts at exploring the relation of theory to practice and vice versa
were insufficient to sustain his connection to Marxism, however tangential he claimed this to be. His failure to treat the working class, whether
politically active or not, as subjects of history, in reality or potentially, is
most serious. Secondly, largely contingent on the first and as we have
alluded to already, Adornos orientation to social criticism and analysis
includes condescension toward those who did not share his views or the
benefits of his own development; his was not a criticism of different perspectives or interests, it was a disdain that other perspectives against what
he saw as obvious conclusions could be taken up at all. His defense was
that the structure of capitalism, of modern, totally administered society,
not only fostered but demanded degrading interests be taken up jazz
and other forms of popular music, for example and people who did so,
did so willingly to the detriment of themselves and others, a willingness
that fostered the reproduction of existing relations of capitalism. In this
sense Adorno exhibited the modernist tendencies of late nineteenth and
early twentieth century literature. Georg Lukcs described this as a view
of man as solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships (1963: 20).
But Lukcs statement was given from a standpoint; that is, every reader
knew that his dialectics and materialist orientation to history was the
ground of a partisan position as it was, in a different sense, in the later
work of Adornos colleague, Marcuse. As has been suggested above, one of
the more serious problems with Adorno was that he provided criticism
but no means by which targeted thought or conditions could be sublated
or transcended. Such a practical orientation would have to be premised
on the belief that thought and social conditions may be reified but that is
not a permanent condition, something difficult to discern in his work.
Together these problems point to a larger one that Adornos work, for all
the claims made about it, has been systematized into a constriction
onconcrete means to address the problems of capitalism; it serves as a
introduction17
control mechanism in the world of academia as had philosophy before
Marxs eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.
In examining these issues, another task of this effort will be to demonstrate where others in Adornos own time exhibited actions and thinking
very much contrary to his perspective. I also want to show that Adorno
made a choice between alternatives: to demonstrate that capitalism was
insurmountable and that the working class would, itself, choose unreflective acquiescence over challenge to capitalism and a revolutionary future.
In fact, the organized working class was developing a theoretical perspective on capitalism and its culture that included as an intrinsic element the
empirical evidence that alternative and oppositional action was being put
to concrete use in politics and culture.
Adornos Form of Presentation
Notwithstanding the significance of Adornos use of dialectics, perhaps
the single most important point with which to begin is the form of Adornos
presentation, the early work that is much of the concern here, but the later
Negative Dialectics as well. Adorno was a philosopher, one who in the
European manner claimed the social sciences within the domain of philosophy. His style of writing was not unusual among philosophers claiming some relation to Marxism and social critique in the inter-war period
although there are few other instances of the use of his style among the
original Frankfurt School members. Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch
both used a similar style in much of their work images developed from
esoteric language, literary and historical analogies not fully elaborated,
and an unsystematic form of presentation. Benjamin was probably the
least offender over the course of his work and Bloch set this form aside as
less likely to be conducive to understanding in books such as Natural Law
and Human Dignity and On Karl Marx. The accessibility of many of Blochs
and Adornos works suffered because of their style of presentation.
The form of the argument is more than its style, linguistic and otherwise. Specifically, in Benjamins early writings and in Adornos the form
centers on constellations, and in a somewhat different manner it exists in
much of Blochs work. Adornos use of constellations is discussed further
in chapter three, but for the moment it can be said that its usefulness lies
in its imaginative possibilities: what can emerge as concrete prospects
from the arrangement and relation of elements, a more systematic
approach for Bloch than for Adorno.
18
chapter one
As a general form of presentation, the key to a successful Marxist analysis is its grounding in historical reality. Benjamin did this best when he
abandoned his early appeals to constellations for analyses centered historically or arranged in terms of correspondences, although Lukcs had
considerable praise for Benjamins use of allegory (1963: 4044; 1984).
Bloch used this form of presentation with a consistent appeal to dialectics,
the concrete historical elements held as a backdrop but nevertheless with
a strong sense of presence in much of his work. He, of course, was more
poetic, even mystical in his presentation than others, but provided a
steady sense of movement in his distinction between objectively real possibilities and the possibilities of not-yet.
This form of presentation differs from other Marxists of the period,
notleast of which were philosophers such as Lukcs and Korsch. Theirs
was the traditional academic form of presentation characterized by more
clear links to historical evidence and systematic theoretical perspec
tives,extensive assessment and critique of the arguments of others and
ofcourse a more obviously partisan position attached to the communist
movement.
Adorno developed a form of presentation that is furthest removed from
the principles and needs of historical materialism. There are the masses,
for example, whose collective impotence and preoccupation with the
latest gadget became baneful to Adorno, an annoyance, causing him
immense irritation at times the dancing crazes, the jazz mania, the
material fads. But he needs them, for the distance of his form of presentation from comprehensive historical analysis requires casting a group in a
terminal idiom to justify what is essentially his defeatist perspective on
their own attitude and the objective potential for social change.
The form of presentation serves the purpose of criticism of capitalism,
the masses, the culture industry, total administration, etc., but rarely does
it enter the terrain of critique as we have discussed it above. Adorno tells
us what he believes we need to hear about the problems of capitalism and
about our neighbors or co-workers who dont think as clearly and critically as we do. Despite its quick judgements and the stylistic obstacles,
hismessage is an easy one, perhaps more in contemporary academia than
at the time of writing. More than he and his supporters would like to
believe, the form of his presentation is more doctrine than treatise. It is
a message to one faction of the converted those who have thought the
problems and presented their conclusions, but for whom thinking through
them is not a priority, and those for whom the errors of others practice
has become the proof of the necessary aloofness of theory.
introduction19
The enduring problem of this form of presentation, especially with
Adorno, is the over-reliance on images, analogies, and abstractions to
express ideas that arise because of the relation of subjects to their history.
Where that history is underdeveloped in the argument, where the dialectics expressed in images and analogies are esoteric hints instead of clarification, the necessary knowledge the writer possesses is incompletely
conveyed, whatever the level of its sophistication and thoroughness.
Because of Adornos consistent form of presentation of unarticulated historical connections, and inexplicit relations of reality, operating as a
needed sense of difference manifested in an unfailing condemnation of
the masses, it is hard to reconcile Lowenthals criticism of those who saw
in Adornos work a secret hostility to history (1989a: 56). Despite similarities with Adorno in style, neither Benjamin nor Bloch lowered themselves to such denunciation.
A work of philosophy or social criticism can legitimately carry whatever
form and stylistic variances its authors choose; where it becomes questionable are those instances in which a specific social group is one of the
objects of the work. This is not a call for the dumbing down of philosophical discourse or social critique, but it does suggest the significance of a
philosophical language and presentation that can address its message to a
variety of levels of political and philosophical literacy. One aspect of the
argument here is that Adorno failed even to attempt to form his presentation in a way that mediated the existing political intelligence and interests
of the working class either in Germany or America.
Commenting on Adorno and Horkheimer, Gillian Rose suggested that
they seemed to recreate the evils of the old academic community
indulging in intense, idiosyncratic cultural criticism deeply embedded in
the scholarly and institutional constraints which they were committed to
transcend (1978: 8). An example of this is the premise of Dialectic of
Enlightenment, the authors description of its fragmentary character; such
a claim is of questionable legitimacy as it suggests a justification for the
incompleteness of the book and appears as a defense of the absence of
connection of the fragments to traditional disciplines or existing philosophical systems. This is, in part, rationalized by giving over to dominant
societal mechanisms the effect of language devalued by the tendency
of all form[s] of linguistic expression toward accommodation
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1982: xii).
Lukcs remark about James Joyce can be applied to Adorno: technique
is absolute; style is the formative principle of the work (1963: 18), and
since Adornos style is so much bound to his method we should regard it
20
chapter one
introduction21
Adorno sought a style as a defense against, even a refuge from the
necessity of a fully developed dialectical explication. Style as a motivation
for pursuing an obscure dialectics allowed him to minimize the historical
element, but permitted the operation of his analysis to assume that the
reader or listener should possess the knowledge that could be developed
by such an investigation. Arguably, some listeners and readers will possess
such knowledge, but it is an unMarxist and undialectical position to hold
that one can escape the obligation of developing and communicating substantive knowledge that arises out of social analysis. His degree of explanation is several steps below that of an Executive Summary, short on a
potential for analysis by which the body of knowledgeable and interested
persons might be expanded, and the structure of society and its culture
meaningfully comprehended and changed a project that throughout his
career he evoked as not feasible until it happened; in effect, not achievable until it was completed.
We will later expand on the earlier comment regarding Adornos view
of the concept-object relation, perhaps the most useful aspect of his dialectics in that there is a dissimilarity between an object and the concept of
it. But it seems ill-conceived to employ his view of that relationship as an
explanation, even a defense of his style as Martin Jay has done when he
argues that we should not take some of Adornos statements as perfectly
true to reality (Jay 1984: 265). This provides too much of a privileged space
for the language and other peculiarities of an intellectuals claims, accusations and ungrounded assertions when, in fact, Adorno presents such
statements as components of his thesis of reality.
It must also be acknowledged that Adornos approach to teaching seems
to have been the opposite of his style of writing. In recorded lectures published posthumously, such as Introduction to Sociology (2000c) and Kants
Critique of Pure Reason (2001), Adorno was open to the prior knowledge
students might bring to the lecture hall, attempting to take them beyond
their doubts to a recognition of a basis for understanding the difficulties of
Kant, for example. He also attempted to deflect students idolatrous relation to every word of the professor or scholar, and instead develop a basis
for pursuing their own knowledge (2001: 284). His teaching techniques,
such as the double movement, should also be noted with respect to students approach to texts. On the one hand, [the process of thought] should
immerse itself in the text, and keep as closely to it as possible; on the other
hand, it should retain a degree of self-control, remove itself from immediate contact and look at the ideas from a certain distance (2001: 37).
22
chapter one
Theory and Practice
introduction23
e thics, the former having priority in the period of revolutionary struggle
while ethics acquires its historical significance as an ethics of duty (Truitt
2005: 8485) only in the period of building socialism.2
The present argument is not one for a gradualist approach to social
change. But the tendency in each of these perspectives seems to be to
highlight capitalisms insurmountably oppressive character to the exclusion of genuine efforts of social change that do not yet have the capacity to
result in a full-scale development of revolutionary and conclusive possibilities. Views such as these shut out actions, organization, and the development of consciousness that make headway into the terrain of social
transformation. Further, such views are predicated on rigidly defined categories that endanger the realization of the dialectical method. In Adornos
case, such rigidity the sense so often of absoluteness is a point of
departure toward safer sailing away from the shop and street wars of the
actual proletarian struggle, with an approach that affirmed the separation
of theory from practice.3
Such a categorical approach indicates the non-integral relation, i.e.
external relations, of theory and practice. In fact, Adorno cites the promotion of the unity of these two fundamentals as a central problem. The call
for unity of theory and practice has irresistibly degraded theory to a servants role, removing the very traits it should have brought to that unity.
This remark is directed to the East [and] left-wing Hegelianism (1973:
143), likely with Lukcs, Bloch and Soviet Marxism in mind, at least. At the
other extreme of the political world, he continues, are the short-winded
intellectual habits of the Western side (1973: 143). As often, neither element in this false dichotomy is treated to an analysis that specifies the
problem. The independence of theory needs to be recovered and maintained to ensure its superiority with respect to practice, to make the
changes practice continually pursues. The diminishing of theory occurred
because, for Adorno, it was defeated by power, by which the reader may
assume the politics of the Communist International, but more generally
important, theory suffered from its combination with practice. He implies
the necessity of theorys exclusive place against the failures brought about
by the prioritizing of practice. He allows this dichotomizing to stand as
sufficient analysis without demonstrating the necessity of theorys independence and superiority against concrete moments of its relation to
2See Lanning 2005.
3See also Lubasz, 1984: 80. Lubasz also points out the diversity of opinions regarding
the relation of theory and practice of various members of the Frankfurt School (see also 86,
8991).
24
chapter one
introduction25
consciousness (Lukcs 1979: 411; 1978b: 3132), the priority of theory over
practice can be sustained only in a dialectical relation. To argue for the
independence of theory ignores Marxs principle that the fundamental
unit of analysis of two or more entities is the relation between or among
them (Ollman 1993: 38), a dialectical principle that may include the
relative autonomy of phenomena, but the continuity of developing relations as well. We will return to the issue of Adornos guiding concept of
non-identity in chapter seven.
Politically Adorno was, and remains, a safe bet behind the lectern,
inside his books or as a subject of debate; he would not be on either side of
the class struggle if that was possible, nor would he stand in the middle,
for to him the class struggle was already lost. He wanted to think himself
outside altogether, commenting, showing his genius in obscure sentences
to be replicated by generations of critical academics. There is little dialectical space in Adornos work; his claim of neutrality clear-cut the space in
which the roots extended to both sides of conflict in capitalism, a space in
which their internal relations, distinctions and differences could be a
common ground of struggle. This absence repeatedly turns us back toward
the identity-thinking he claimed to despise and the formal logic sublated
historically and practically by Hegel and Marx, but the distinct shadow of
which overhangs Adornos work.
The Management of Politics and Personal Relations
Many artists, intellectuals and academics have their unpleasant side.
Adorno was no exception. He was certainly sheltered, even spoiled, in
his childhood and youth to the point, as Lowenthal notes, that his attitude
toward Hitlers likely duration in power showed a nave unfamiliarity
with the real world (1989a: 6364). Because of his position close to
Horkheimer when the latter was Director of the Institute for Social
Research, Adorno functioned as a gatekeeper of publication, the entry of
others into the inner circle and the financial assistance the Institute had
to offer. Lowenthals correspondence with Horkheimer at this time shows
not only criticisms of Adornos work but also the anxiety generated by a
possible confrontation with him (1989d: 164, 172, 181182, 198). It is also
well-known that Benjamin kept his relationships isolated from one
another where Adorno was concerned. Erdmut Wizislas (2009) book on
the relationship between Benjamin and Brecht reveals Adornos attempts
to protect Benjamin from Brechts influence intellectually and politically.
26
chapter one
And later, notwithstanding the fact that Bloch was not a practicing revolutionary in the way that Lukcs had been, for example, and certainly not
the way communist party leaders had been during the first half of the 20th
century, Adornos attitude toward him was directed essentially at his
political choices in the East, his post-war choice to reside in the German
Democratic Republic and his continued commitment to the possibility of
socialism. Fromm, too, apparently felt the bite of Adornos personality in
the dispute over his Weimar study of the working class partly because of
Horkheimers relation with Fromm and Lowenthal (Bonss 1984: 2). The
sometimes problematic relationship between Adorno and Sigfried
Kracauer is also well-known (Jay 1986: 217236). Kracauers experiences of
antisemitism were seen by Adorno to have been somewhat self-induced
by Kracauers thin-skinned personality (Campbell 2007: 910; Adorno
1992: 5960). Evidently, despite Kracauers mentorship role in Adornos
youth, the quality of intellectual pursuit did not cohere with the formers
expectations. There seemed to be almost excessive satisfaction, if not
gloating, in Kracauers record of his conversation with Adorno in 1960
over theoretical matters; Kracauer seems to be satisfied that he has made
Adorno at least a little uncomfortable with respect to the latters own
views (2012: 127132).
introduction27
Without attempting to evaluate Adornos personality, we will see that
various statements by him in the works at issue here appear to reflect a
rather closed and unreflective person.
The Socio-Historical Context
The writings of Adorno under discussion here are a selection mostly confined to the period of the 1930s to the early 50s. The period in which most
of these were written was perhaps the most significant in the 20th century
with respect to the organized challenge to capitalism in Europe and in
North America before the Second World War. For the majority of this
period, since 1937, Adorno was living in the United States on the east and
west coasts where, besides some places in the rural south and industrial
north, opposition to capitalism was most visible and vibrant.
The two most important components of this challenge were the labor
movement, especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
from 1935, and on the political front the Communist Party of the United
States (CP). While these two organizations were not integral, the success
of the CIO would have been doubtful without the work and influence of
communist organizers in the rank-and-file of many of the CIO-affiliated
unions. Many members of the CP were veterans of conflicts with the skilltrades-based American Federation of Labor. That organizations exclusion
of the unskilled was challenged most significantly by the Wooblies
(IWW) who, along with socialists, communists, anarchists and liberals,
mounted campaigns to address a wide range of class-related issues at local
and national levels. Campaigns to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti
throughout the 1920s, and in the next decade Angelo Herndon and the
Scottsboro Boys gained international attention and established voices of
protest rarely heard and struggle rarely seen.
Left wing political and cultural organizations were pervasive in America
during this period, largely associated with labor organizations. Ethnic
groups also organized in various ways to retain aspects of their politi
cal and cultural backgrounds and establish better footing on new soil,
especially for younger generations. Socialist Sunday Schools in the early
decades of the century were clearly class-focused, emphasizing the wide
disparities in American life and the unequal burden of war on the working
class (Teitelbaum 1993). The Communist Party devoted much effort to the
political socialization of the young with the expectation of securing a new
generation of activists. Some of these made their mark in the inter-war
28
chapter one
and WWII periods, some much later in the 1950s and 60s (Mishler 1999;
Kaplan and Shapiro 1998; Levine and Gordon 2002). Recent localized studies have shown the extent of inequalities and exploitation that motivated
neighborhood organization and action, and the extent of communist
activity in wider urban life (Kosak 2000; Storch 2007; Naison 1983). A
vibrant history of college-level student organizing also began in the 1930s.
Liberal and socialist students and many of their professors engaged in
activity around political, class and corporate issues (Cohen 1997). Efforts
to educate the adult working class raised the political and intellectual
content in college and university courses (Gettleman 2002).
Estimates of CP membership during the inter-war years are varied and
of questionable reliability. An important and objective measure of influence, however, was the large number of union locals and larger union
bodies led by communists. This has been thoroughly investigated and
analyzed by Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin (2003) and the results along with
other material from communist sources and recent studies provide an
inescapable conclusion: while neither entirely communist nor entirely
active, a significant proportion of the American working class, through its
self-activity and organizing efforts, was neither convinced of the dominance of capitalism nor willing to acquiesce to the manipulation of its
culture industries (Boyer and Morais 1955; Bonosky 1953; Allan 2001; Kelley
1990; Solomon 1998).
All this was virtually ignored by Adorno. His were not political tracts; he
avoided that kind of expression. But his orientation to the masses, the
working class and others on issues such as jazz and popular music, profascist agitation, and popular media, might have been quite different had he
been willing to take into account the evidence of working class political
and cultural activities and their organizing abilities. Setting aside this evidence allowed him to write with a clean slate, unencumbered by material
reality that would have made his categorical positions nonsensical.
***
The discussion that follows begins with dialectics as developed by Hegel
and Marx. This is followed by chapters addressing specific issues Adorno
took up early in his career: his interpretive orientation to philosophy built
around constellations, his writings on jazz, popular music and profascist
agitation specifically related to the masses. We proceed then to a discussion of mediation, an aspect of dialectics I consider lacking in Adornos
work, in this case discussed initially with regard to his relations with
introduction29
Benjamin. The final chapter is devoted to aspects of Negative Dialectics
that includes issues of exchange and identity. I side with Buck-Morss
assertion that Adorno was consistent in his theoretical approach over the
duration of his career, notwithstanding the development of aspects of it
over time. This makes Negative Dialectics generally applicable to issues he
addressed in earlier works.
The title of this book is taken from comments Lukcs made, initially
in The Destruction of Reason, about the pessimism and emptiness of
Schopenhauers philosophy, describing his system as rising up like a
modern luxury hotel on the brink of the abyss, nothingness and futility.
And the daily sight of the abyss between the leisurely enjoyment of meals
or works of art, can only enhance ones pleasure in this elegant comfort
(Lukcs 1980: 243). In the Preface for the re-publication of The Theory of
the Novel (1971b) Lukcs included Adorno as one of the German intelligentsia having taken up residence in what he then called the Grand Hotel
Abyss.4
4A different translation of the passage quoted appears in the Preface of The Theory of
the Novel.
CHAPTER TWO
32
chapter two
expressing the Notion itself or the meaning of the sensuous representation (Hegel 1977: 30). In his objective idealist fashion, instructive for historical materialists as Marx knew, Hegel argued that formalism, despite its
inadequacies, will not vanish from science till the cognizing of absolute
actuality has become entirely clear as to its own nature (1977: 9).
Hegels caution against formalism also recognizes the attraction of
categorization more strongly, compartmentalization as everyday
thinking allows and encourages. The residual formalism (see Kracauer
2012), appearing in Adornos work as categorical thinking, corresponds
somewhat to part of Hegels statement, above: not until X exists or
becomes known will Y occur. But Hegel was clear that until something like
absolute reality was actualized it remained only at the level of a formal
possibility. Further, it is difficult to find Hegels other condition in Adornos
work, that inner activity and self-movement are the constant companions of the existent awaiting its full realization, its actuality. Adornos
excessive reliance on non-identity acts as a constraint on this actualization. This suggests that even with the process of development and change
that is dialectics, Adorno compromises the method by introducing an end
result as a condition of the investigation. Dialectical development has its
stages, levels and discontinuities but these are not formalized by a preceding false unity of dissociated objects or events.
A formalist approach to knowledge is in some ways, as Hegel suggests,
immediately rewarding, especially for the purposes of establishing knowledge and therefore having a basis for its dissemination. A formal or categorical approach provides a neatly trimmed block of ideas and data that
can be named as cause, event, or thing, and that is free of what might generate complications, such as moments, contradictions, or transitions.
Dialectics recognizes the distinction between the immediate and the
comprehensive, the generative process and the moments that at any point
can be cited as the existent X or Y. This is the difference between the S is
not P of formal logic and the S is not yet P of Blochs dialectics, where P is
anticipated, grounded in the internal dynamics of its relation to S.
The residual formalism that I suggest plagues Adornos perspective
does throw us back to the boundaries of formal logic. In the dialectical
approach to logic, Hegel negated the command that formal boundaries
had over knowledge but not because of the advancement of philosophy
as such. The crucial point had to do with the inherent irrationalism of
formal logic, the residual of which exists in any formalistic approach
regardless of the extent that logics boundaries have been retained or
transcended. The problem lies in the absence of any sense in which a
34
chapter two
36
chapter two
provide the space for its becoming the self-conscious subject of history.
Even while the ostensibly predominant interest in Marxism is in classes,
we only see classes arising as conscious collectivities in situations in which
a class presence has been produced, in the genuine sense of the term,
brought forward, from in this case a political response to an immediate
or historically extended problem. This must begin through a discussion of
dialectics, through Hegels Logic and its historical materialist development by Marx and others. In taking this course it is worth acknowledging
Ilyenkovs introductory and concluding note to his Dialectical Logic
(derived from a comment by Lenin) that provided an historico-philosophical analysis of logic from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, that the work
could rightly bear one of three possible titles: Logic, Dialectics, or The
Theory of Knowledge (1977 8: 370).
Being and Self-consciousness
Marx argued that the final chapter of the Phenomenology both summarizes Hegels approach at that juncture of his career and provided the
bridge to its historical materialist correction. He comments: For Hegel the
human being man equals self-consciousness (1975b: 334). Considered
in reverse, self-consciousness is the human being, or as Marx would argue
in the same work, self-consciousness is the full development of the capacities of the species-being (Marx 1975b: 275277). To be self-conscious is to
know that ones subjective sense of being is actualized only in its objective
presence, its social action.
Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on solid ground,
man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature posits his real, objective
essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act
of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of the
objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something
objective. (Marx 1975b: 336)
38
chapter two
Read linearly, the seed becomes the plant, an exploited population a subordinated class. In this respect the argument is structured categorically as
if the process attains insulation from contingent conditions and interventions as it proceeds in development to its end. However, an objects otherness, like the object itself, is not linear in its development, nor is an
immanent trajectory guaranteed for it, for otherness is just as contingently
influenced as is the original object. Hegel implies as much in his
Encyclopedia:
Thus e.g. the plant is developed from its germ. The germ virtually involves
the whole plant, but does so only ideally or in thought: and it would therefore be a mistake to regard the development of the root, stem, leaves, and
other different parts of the plant, as meaning that they were realiter [in reality] present, but in a very minute form, in the germ. (1873: 161)
The manner in which such processes are affected by varied and unanticipated contingencies confirms their objective character. Their objectivity
is further confirmed by the inadmissibility of an imminent future state
arising unconditionally. The complex of possible contingencies arising
from either the natural or social environment or their combination, presents new problems, contradictions and alternative avenues of development whether forced or relatively autonomously chosen (Lukcs, 1978a,
10607). The plant and the human being are distinguished by their relative complexities, each having its distinct, but at times roughly integrated
trajectory of development, contingency and change. The otherness as
such of specific entities is pre-figured as indwelling potential but its course
of development is neither fixed in form nor in content. Other realities,
external objects, can be restricted or abundant in volume, variety and
influence, etc., only by their contexts, their historical determinants an
objects present condition at a given moment in its development.
The more important immanent quality is not a logically anticipated end
result found in embryo nor is it the outcome that becomes necessary
solely under the influence of possible contingencies. Rather, it is the
c ombination of the latter with the indwelling potential for its realization
through which contingent relations become manifest and are appreciated
as such. This is different than the notion that each object contains,
inembryo or idea, its precise future development. The point here is that
the seed to be developed must be integrated with objects and conditions
that favour its development or that can intercede and move its development in another direction. The seed of object A must be affected by and
be the effect of the contingent relations offered by objects or processes
X, Y and Z, just as the seeds in any of those objects or processes must
affectand be the effect of contingent relations of A. These are the internal
relations of dialectics. This does not speak to a hierarchy but to a priority
of quality that exists prior to its influence by other factors that shape
and determine an end result that becomes necessity, even though such
anecessity may be only momentary. The emergence and consolidation
of what is deemed to be immanent or becomes necessary through the
complex of relations is the unity of necessity and contingency. (As we
will discuss below, Hegel would prefer a rephrasing of the last point; not
unity but inseparability or unseparatedness of necessity and contingency.) Thus, notwithstanding Hegels fundamental orientation to selfconsciousness development through the mind, he nevertheless retains
and develops an orientation to the objective world, the material origin of
determinants.
The being or condition to be developed requires self-consciousness of
externality and otherness, and these provide the fundamentally necessary
awareness of the possibility of reality changing the being or condition
because they are objects in reality.
Suppose a being which is neither an object itself, nor has an object. Such a
being, in the first place, would be the unique being: there would exist no
being outside it it would exist solitary and alone. For as soon as there are
objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another another reality
than the object outside me. For this third object I am thus a different reality
than itself; that is, I am its object. (Marx 1975b: 337)
40
chapter two
is both essential and extraneous to it (Adorno 1973: 161). This formulation does not exclude the contingent influences coming to the object from
outside itself, such as the crystallization of communication with others
(1973: 162), the objects development is a shared construction by external
factors that are the extraneous component of its core. Anticipating the
argument in later chapters, one might ask whether the alienated individual, for example, has simply and formally an alienated essence, or is it an
essence diverted from development toward liberation by contingencies
absolutely beyond its control, or only beyond its immediate, unmediated
control? The last of these is where the emphasis must lie for the innermost core can interact with extraneous influences or the latter can
intervene from a conscious source to shape the development of that
core. But the caveat to any of these formulations is Hegels insistence on
inseparable components at the outset, a point addressed below.
The relationship between the individual and society the concrete
effect of one on the other synthesize immanent qualities and distinctly
contingent influences that, as it is at any specific moment and as the relation proceeds to develop, undermines any notion of a linear advance from
the condition of immanence. It is that non-linear conception of movement that provides the space for self-consciousness. Self-consciousness
cannot arise through contingent relations alone, nor merely out of an
imminent condition or the mere assertion that there is potentiality dwelling within. Notwithstanding Hegels aforementioned priority of the mind,
Lukcs argues that Hegels conception of social being
does actually have an existence which is independent of the individual
consciousness of particular men, and has a high level of an autonomously
determining and determined dynamic in relation to the individual. But this
does not change the fact that the movement of this dynamic is a specific
synthesis of individual acts and passions [the] causes and results [of
which] are still very clearly distinct from what the individual himself
thought, felt or intended. (1978a, 25)
Self-consciousness is not only a product of such processes but is also a buttress against the ascendance of a mechanical conception of movement
through immanence alone, for self-consciousness concerns possible trajectories. First, self-consciousness must take as one of its objective responsibilities the possible future condition of a thing or social condition and
its potential growth given its determinations and mediations. Secondly,
to be legitimately called self-consciousness it must meet the obligation
to know its determinants, the pace and complexity of development,
the direction of movement and the possible discontinuities that may
42
chapter two
Thus, if the individual human being is our starting point we have begun
with a quality the eventual being of self-consciousness a capacity that
lies within the species; it is a capacity to be developed as a future condition of the individual itself. This quality self-consciousness is more
in itself and in its otherness when we consider the possible direction and
intensity of its development through a deliberate selection of variables
contingent relations consistent with the augmentation of Hegels
determinate being by Marxs species-being.
Becoming
Dialectics is movement. This is central to Hegels Science of Logic in his
discussion of the first two concepts, being and nothing, which are given
only a moments distinction before vanishing into becoming. Becoming
sustains each of being and nothing because it is their difference. Their
difference is therefore completely empty, each of them is in the same way
indeterminate; the difference, then, exists not in themselves but in a third
(1969: 92). Hegel rejects what is an apparent obvious third, opinion, as
inappropriate to an exposition of logic. The appropriate, necessary third
element is becoming which, as Lukcs points out, carries objectively
greater ontological weight than being (1978a: 64). The empty difference
is due to the indeterminate nature of being and nothing; to the extent they
are distinct from one another that distinction must be expressed by
becoming a third element arising from their difference (Hegel 1969:
417418).
Because becoming arises from the empty difference between being
and nothing as each vanishes into the other (Hegel 1969: 84, 90, 105) the
concept of becoming quickly loses itself as such; becoming at this point,
out of the unity of being and nothing, is determinate being (1969: 106).
Hegel asserts two crucial points particularly important for the present discussion. First, as we alluded to earlier, he finds the term unity to be an
unfortunate subjective expression of comparison, more so than identity
(1969: 91) because it rests on the similarity of one or more components of
different objects. (Identity is also a subjective term but less so.) Secondly,
his suggestion for replacement terms for unity, unseparatedness and
inseparability, allows for the retention of the relation between being
and nothing a relation containing mediation within itself (1969: 74, 91)
and, therefore, shows the positive side of the relation, a requirement of
Hegels dialectics (1969, 73; Lukcs 1978a, 41). Becoming is mediation.
On the other hand, even as this totality of possible relations already exists,
Hegel also argues that as a concrete object it is affected by contingency
and arbitrariness which depends on which determinations the subject
brings to it. It is the mediated development of components that allows for
the development of a given synthesis1 [in order] to discover its implicit
content (Rotenstreich 1944: 253). Hence, Hegels meaning of dialectic:
the Dialectical principle constitutes the life and soul of scientific progress, the dynamic which alone gives immanent connection and necessity
to the body of science (Hegel 1873: 81). Unity must carry this connotation as a reference to its underlying structure, relations and the task it has
already, but not yet, carried out.
1Rotenstreich uses the triad thesis, antithesis, synthesis in his analysis. Hegel rejected
the triadic form as intuitive in Kant and otherwise a formalism without, however, citing
explicitly the above mentioned triad.
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46
chapter two
3Lukcs made the point that the conditions under which false consciousness occurred
must be investigated to understand the circumstances and processes of its development.
See Lukcs 1971: 52.
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the commands of virtue (1971: 75). Morality, given priority over mere
doctrine, assumes the relative autonomy of the religious subject, and that
duty is based on reason rather than the power of religious authority. Thus,
the distinction between the religious and the historical subject. Lukcs
understood Hegels positivity to refer to the suspension of the moral
autonomy of the subject (1975: 18). Thus it is the positive authority of a
doctrine (or the authority of a positive doctrine), inseparable from the
institution behind it that negates the relative autonomy of the subject.
The feelings of a positive religion, writes Hegel (1971: 167), are forcibly
and mechanically stimulated, the actions are done to order or from obedience without any spontaneous interest. Hegels main objection, as Lukcs
(1975: 19) points out, is that positive elements are incompatible with freedom and the dignity of human beings; that is, positivity diminishes the
capacity of the human subject, especially so when the person uncritically
accedes to it. Further, for Hegel, the theological elements of morality must
be removed; they are moralitys positive elements, they can be known and
therefore they can and should be superseded by the person who becomes
an historical subject (Lukcs 1975: 19).
For Hegel, unity in relation to positivity is a false union. He regards
positivity as the unification of the irreconcilable; things that are (a) contradictory, and (b) can interact, recognize their togetherness, or become
unified but cannot reach a relation that resolves their contradiction at a
dialectically positive moment, as sublation. If the latter occurs, this inability results in things remaining essentially positive. Thus, the negative must
be found or introduced, in some way come to the relation and, with
respect to the subject, to consciousness. In other words, positivity can
unite two entities but not, as Hegel wrote, in the way they should be.
Lukcs regards this as an unclear synthesis of a mere idea (1975: 127128),
but significantly the only way to eliminate the positive is through human
activity, for Hegels conception of positivity in these passages is akin to
the materialist conception of false reflections of objective reality or a
false synthesis (Lukcs 1975: 127, 154). This, of course, does not negate
Hegels primary interest in accounting affirmatively for religion. But he
also problematizes notions of religion explained as merely manifestations
of human nature, arguing against the empty universal concepts of
human nature (Hegel 1971: 170).
Hegel eventually replaced positivity with externalization and alienation
(Lukcs 1975: 333334), two concepts that indicate a reified state of phenomena. In his still early use of positivity with respect to religion, the connection to these two concepts is implied, but so, too, is the significance of
the positive moment or social sphere. A religion becomes positive when the
social mood senses a need for greater freedom thereby beginning the creation of and transition to the new form: then and only then can [the] former religion begin to appear a positive one (Hegel 1971: 170); that is, when
it has been at least partially surpassed in the consciousness of the subjects.
In other words, any religion that can be described in Hegels terms as one
that requires the renunciation of ones will and requires the subject to
shudder before an unknown Being (1971: 169) is not positive until its subjects become conscious of their subordinated to it. Its positivity affirms an
authority relation that diminishes the subject, and it is the immediately
available authority of the positive religion that confirms the alienation of
the subject; i.e. without an attempt at negation. Lukcs points out that the
concept of positivity had placed a one-sided emphasis on the dead, alien
aspect of social institutions (1975: 333), that is, the old institution of religion
that had been distanced by a change of mood, yet remained an authority.
The concept of externalization emerged with Hegels increasing understanding of economics and the development of his basic triad of need,
work and enjoyment, along with labor as the annihilation of the object
(Lukcs 1975: 324). Externalization is a specific mode of human activity as
a result of which specific social institutions come into being and acquire
the objective nature peculiar to them (Lukcs 1975: 314). Hegel describes
the process of externalization through the activity of work: In labouring,
I make myself into a thing [and at] the same time I externalize this existence of mine, making it something alien to myself, and preserve myself
therein (Hegel 1983: 123). This process points to a progressive humanist
element in Hegel, as well as the groundwork for the later development of
a materialist analysis of economics. But Hegel is limited to a belief in
the possibility that the subject will overcome alienation within itself.
Nevertheless, this passage (from his Realphilosophie) essentially refers
to the subject externalizing his or her existence to the authority of an
institution, an institution in which truths must be held to be truths independently of our own opinions (Hegel qu. in Lukcs 1975: 18).
What Hegel is leading to here, perhaps indirectly, is the positivism that
was the object of critical theorys conception of modern society. Since
Comte, positivism had been a guarantee, if only embryonic, of the direction of change and predictability, and when formalized as scientific
knowledge it became established truth, capturing social development and
relative human autonomy in an evolutionary string of events as unnaturally natural as the positivity of religion. Positivisms truths that are
independent of our own opinions may, in fact, be truth. But what Hegel
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saw as alienating and what critical theorists saw as the pressure toward
conformism was the absence of relatively autonomous engagement of the
subject with the moral principles that should underlie the rational construction of social relations.
This brief discussion does not fully answer the question about the validity of a notion of a positive moment in dialectics. What it does do is set the
basis for a distinction between Hegels early conception of positivity and
Adornos attribution of it to positivism as such on the one hand, and the
contextualization of the positive moment in dialectics that surpasses the
immediacy of identity on the other. This topic is developed further in
chapter seven.
A Note on Dialectical Logic
We have already noted that in contradictions the place of unity (unseparatedness) in opposing moments and forces becomes the vanishing
(Hegel) of one thing into another being, nothing, becoming.
A is enunciated, and not-A, the pure other of A; but it only shows itself in
order to vanish. In this proposition, therefore, identity is expressedas
negation of the negation. A and not-A are distinguished, and these distinct
terms are related to one and the same A. Identity, therefore, is here represented as this distinguishedness in one relation or as simple difference in the
terms themselves. (Hegel 1969: 416)
Marquit (1990: 150) suggests that Hegel is qualifying his concept of identity
dialectically in that the law of identity is meaningful only if the identity is
also associated with a difference.
Hegels employment of third elements in his logic has implications
directly related to mediation if we take the latter in its simplest connotation an intermediary. This is ultimately too simplistic, although it is sufficient as a beginning. Logic itself includes its own law in this matter. The
determination of opposition has also been made into a law, the so-called
law of the excluded middle: something is either A or not-A; there is no third
(Hegel 1969: 438). Hegel then corrects this principle of formal logic. The
third element is that which is said to be excluded. The third element,
therefore, is that which is neither A nor not-A (1969: 438), that which is
ultimately objectified by being named as absent or not possible in formal
logic. The object, neither A nor not-A, does exist since it is stated to be
comprised of the A and the not-A; the linguistic and concrete copula is
the neither/nor in the statement, denoting a relation to an actual object
where there was none in traditional logic. Further, the implication of the
law of contradiction is that there is not a third that is indifferent to the
opposition (1969: 438), but the third that Hegel recognizes as a necessity
in his logic is, in fact, indifferent to the opposition of the two original
extremes but present in A and not-A. In its indifference, the third does not
take either the side of A or not-A, but is related to each and because of
that relates each to the other. Indifference to the opposition means that
the presence and purpose of the third lies, first, in its non-intervention
in the opposition as such; secondly, its presence and purpose is to nullify
the exclusivity of the original two, thereby entering the relation between
them. This is both an empirical and a cognitive exercise.
To repeat what was noted earlier, this is what Hegel meant in his discussion of being and nothing, that becoming arises through this relation
but neither being nor nothing are annihilated as the third emerges (Hegel
1969: 107). Thus, there is an affirmation of non-identity of A and not-A.
This is a negative moment, but it is not a negation of being and becoming
as such, but a sublation of their separateness. Equally, if not more important to this condition of non-identity is what Hegel sees produced, brought
forward, from this relation: the positive moment of the emerging third,
A and not-A (combined), or as Lukcs put it, noted earlier, negation must
be supplemented from the positive side (1978a: 41). Hegels perspective
on this issue put an end to categorical thinking in philosophical and social
analysis.
The relationship between essence and phenomena, too, requires a
third element, a material object; together these constitute a three-term
relation as Marquit (1981, 321) puts it citing an example from Marx: Thus,
capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They
reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring
forth each other (Marx, 1977: 214). Marquit asserts that the third term
obviously represents the forces of production and subsequently refers to
such relations as mediated or indirect contradictions, in contrast to the
direct contradictions of logic (1981: 321).
Mediation
The process of development and change that are central to dialectics
are represented by social phenomena that are mediated or in a different
expression, contradictions that mediate the sublation of an oppositional
relation. Mediation as a process of sublation and resolution is often
objectively incomplete, a momentary settlement of tension or opposition,
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In this example, the plough is the means by which relations among (a) the
laborer, (b) the soil and (c) produce of the land are to be enjoyed; it is
established as a productive relation, and as a relation that negates the
4For the concept of the vantage point and its value in dialectics, see Ollman 1993.
inherent oppositions between the laborer and the land that, without the
tool, can only produce so much sustenance but has the potential to produce plenty with superior technology, even the most elementary plough.
The end result is active in its means (Hegel 1969: 7456) as mediation.
But the means is the external middle term of the syllogism which is the realization of the end; the rationality in the means manifests itself as such by
maintaining itself in this external other, and precisely through this external
other. (Hegel 1969: 747)
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food that will arise from the relationship of soil, seed and labor. Need
and possibility, laborer and land, oppose one another; they are related
through the plough in their opposition to one another, a relationship that
develops the capacities in each that are drawn into the relation with compatible capacities in the other. Both the agrarian laborer and the land
undergo transformation as a result of the intervention of the plough, but it
is a particular quality of transformation specific to this relationship which
does not exclude other transformations from, for example, natural
factors.
The intervention of the third, the plough, as the practical intervention
distinguishes three dissimilar elements that are pressed into a relationship. The intervening element is a necessary development of the relation
of the original two components; it is not inevitable or a product of evolution, but one that is worked out, so to speak, through the human discovery
that an instrument configured into something that comes to be called a
plough can address a need by reducing the opposition. The plough is not
arbitrary, but neither is it an outcome that is inherent in the original relation. The plough is determined to be the necessary intervening third by
those human beings who imagine they can create an instrument to solve
their problem of food production, and it is derived from their awareness of
those aspects of their natural and constructed environment that are adequate, at least, for the crafting of the plough.5
The third element also denotes purposiveness acting through intelligence that externally determines the multiplicity of objects by a unity that
exists in and for itself, so that the indifferent determinateness of the objects
become essential through this relation (Hegel 1969: 736; see also 734). In
formal logic the concluding term of a syllogism offers an immediate termination of the argument. In recognizing that the excluded but actually
existing third relates the two premises, Hegels third is not an end but
mediation, distinguished by possessing within itself a negative moment
(1969: 675). The third in logic finds its place as the middle term of a syllogism, uniting the two extremes (Hegel 1969: 683). The determinations
articulated in the syllogism confront each other as extremes and are
united in a different third term as in the particular uniting the individual
and the universal (1969: 667), and the something that has been formed by
its determinations and has thus been constituted and unites determination and constitution in its position and function as the middle, mediating
term (1969: 124).
5On necessity in this sense, see Gerdus 2003, on the necessity of geometric angles.
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that the idea of an innovative instrument, such as a plough, arises from the
contradiction between the need for food and the inability to turn sufficient
soil to plant a crop able to satisfy the needs of a number of people. Without
recognition of that contradiction, no intervening instrument would arise
because none would be sought. But the intervening instrument in this
case, when the need of it becomes a conscious requirement, is not something that arises outside the relation (Hegels external other, above, still
holds) but is integral to the initial relation of hungry people and capacity
to plant, grow and harvest. While the instrument may not be an immediate
result in time of the contradiction, it is something that emerges from a
combination of the initial contradictory relationship and the recognition
of the need for the production of such an instrument, or the factors that
inhibit its production. In this case, once the plough comes to consciousness through the laborers imagination, the recognition of its necessity, it is
evident that the contradiction and the resolution comprise a triangulated
relation that includes a distinguishable third as a practical intervention
arising from the initial contradiction; it is observed as an introduction or
intervention of a third element when, in fact, it was the reciprocal relation
of laborer and soil that generated the idea, initially, of the plough.
We do not need a distinct, intervening third (one that nevertheless
arose from the relations between the original two) to form a triangulated
expression of mediation as in the case of the plough; this is evident in
Marxs comments in the Grundrisse on production and consumption.
There mediation, no less significant or superior a component in the relationship, emerges directly from interaction rather than what may appear
as an external intervention. But, again, this is the initial step of the process
of mediation; the intervention appears as such only from a particular
vantage point. Marx writes, Production is thus directly consumption,
consumption is directly production. Each is immediately its opposite.
Production and consumption are separated as phenomena and oppose
each other in the economic system, and yet as integral elements these
make up the basis of that system. The choice in analysis is to retain this
immediate separation, reifying the opposition, or to consider such opposition valid only if the determinants are developed and analyzed, that is, the
qualities in each that will render the opposites inseparable but fruitful in
their relation. Marx continues,
At the same time, however, a mediating movement takes place between the
two. Production mediates consumption, for which it provides the material;
consumption without production would have no object. But consumption
also mediates production by providing for the products the subject for
Each is opposite the other, yet elements of each form the mediating relation, making it possible for each to be completed in the other. Every
object contains a potential for mediation with another for no object or
phenomena is considered so stable that its composition or place in reality
sufficiently guards against change. In each of production and consumption there is implied a) other elements, and b) movement or force for
changing the relationship between both actions and within the make-up
of the actions themselves, and facilitating the emergence of a qualitatively
different relation. We will refer to this expression of mediation as that
which arises from a reciprocation, even while it remains contradictory; i.e.
without any sense of equality between the two initial elements. However,
due to the interaction of the two, the realization of the potential for
change and development, in this case, for example, the character of the
market, is in each as it vanishes into the other; mediation itself effectively
becomes a third force as it develops out of the contradictions of the inherent qualities of each object. If the vantage point is that of the internal relations of things it does not appear as an intervention but as a product
drawn from the integral relations of the original objects. Thus, production
and consumption, for Marx, are opposites and dynamic in that each, as
Hegel argues (1969: 8283, 90, 105), vanishes into the other as an immediate, independent object, or process. Production and consumption interact
as Hegel defined mediation itself as a process towards another state.
Hegels discussion of consciousness as an aspect of the relation between
Lord and Bondsman further illustrates this form of mediation. Each of two
consciousnesses supersedes itself as an independent consciousness, a
consciousness in-itself begins an existence for itself through another consciousness (Hegel 1977: 110). Like Marxs production and consumption,
Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself
with itself and unites with itself ; and each is for itself and for the other, an
immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only
through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing
one another. (Hegel 1977: 112)
Thus, using Hegels example again, the need mediates the production of
food; the contradiction between need and not having necessitates the
imagination and subsequent building of the plough, the idea of which
emerges from the initial contradiction need and not having, laborer and
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soil. In the reciprocating expression of mediation we do not see a distinguishable third element as the intervention in the original two, in contrast
to the vantage point that perceives the mediating element of the plough.
But where we are addressing contradictions in which human agency
plays a part, as between laborer and land, it is the imaginative, self-
conscious subject, the subject aware of its capabilities, its place in the
complex of relations one of the original sides of the contradiction that
employs its imagination and creativity to develop the opposition.
Consciousness of a particular quality, able to comprehend its potential,
moves and develops itself in its contradiction.
Besides its two expressions mediation must also be understood as having two domains, a generalized domain and a particular domain where
mediation can be seen to act in ways specific to a component of the context. These are not categorical and, therefore, cannot be treated as separate. Again, there is a theoretical interest in this distinction as well as an
interest in its value for practice, especially because vantage point remains
a crucial position for each domain. The generalized domain is the mode
and relations of production; in developed capitalism it is its entire organized system. This becomes important when we examine Adornos criticism of Benjamin in chapter six. The generalized domain of mediation is
the totality of economic, social and other processes. The prevailing mode
of production mediates, effects, influences all aspects of social relations,
notwithstanding the potential for the relative autonomy of any such relation. In bourgeois thought, however, each of these relations, each fact of
society appears as nothing more than an isolated immediacy (Lukcs 1971:
183185).
With the generalized domain of mediation we can come back to the
reciprocal relation of production and consumption. Both production and
consumption are abstractions of capital. An analysis of the internal relations of capital reveals that each partially determines the other along with
additional determining factors, and that each is a component of the complex of capital. Marxs method as illustrated in the Grundrisse demonstrates the set of internal and historical relations relevant to the discussion
of this type of mediation. Thus, the complex of capital, the processes and
relations of which it develops, its resulting production and, in turn,
consumption constitutes a broad, many-tentacled mediation. This is particularly relevant when considering cultural production and other superstructural activities. The interaction that takes place between production
and consumption is, itself, the mediating element, but the interaction can
only develop through, and because of this broader complex of relations.
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CHAPTER THREE
62
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But what should be taken from Dilthey through Husserl to, even peripherally, Heidegger is more telling; namely, their intuitional components
drawn into Adornos method. While the unintentional, as used in this
context, must be accepted as an understanding of reality it is also a freefloating element in Adornos program where objects and ideas are grasped
experimentally through their viability within a proposed constellation,
a viability evident only at the bursting-point, the point in which it can be
assumed that the appropriate relations (for Marx, concrete determinations) have congealed and ignited to the point of dissolution, as Adorno
would have it.
Constellations were constructed by trial combinations, the successful
combinations fall[ing] into a figure which can be read as an answer, while
at the same time the question disappears (2000a: 32). The selection of
phenomena, the trial and error combinations were to be the interpretive
functions of the philosophers primary task, riddle-solving. While Adorno
makes claims to the objective character of phenomena and the process of
constellation construction, the claim of the latters sudden illumination of
the complex lends the entire process and result a subjective and arbitrary
character.
Adorno provides a sense of dialectics valuable to a process of analysis
even if it does not help his own method emerge from the subjective. The
notion that a constellation is formed from certain ideas and material elements that converge into a question, constitutes a formative and formal
sequence. That the solution springs forth while the question disappears
understates the necessary residual character of the question. The justifiable questions, as Lukcs remarked in his critique of Webers sociology,
are those that are posed by reality itself (Lukcs 1980a: 614615). If the
question disappears what has happened to the component of the constellation that formed the question? The procedure expresses something of
Adornos excessive concentration on continuous negativity. The question
must remain at least residually, for the question can only be formed by the
material conditions out of which it arises and is consciously constructed.
If we apply this problem to a principle of Marxs the difference in positions
becomes more clear. Marx asserted that the working class is the only class
not interested in its continuation, but to be organized toward its own
dissolution. Hence, the question of its existence and the determinants
of its transformation are a product of the conflicts and contradictions
that become evident in the history of its internal and external relations
and may result at some historical juncture in a solution springing forward. But this would be due (as discussed in chapter two) to the internal
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r elations that the two classes had recognized as their unity in difference
since it was the needs of the bourgeois class that created its other; that
which springs forward from this contradiction is integral to that relation.
Although there may be objective forces in that intervention, or priorities
designated among possible contingencies, the elements of selection and
interpretation carry less weight than the material history of class.
If the conditions of the working class under capitalism are transformed,
they are sublated, they do not disappear, such conditions are not annihilated. Thus, the question remains as historical fact and the root of the
transformation. That the question might be annihilated by the solution
devalues the internal relations of the determinants of the transformation,
if such are more than an agglomeration of subjective selections of the philosopher and are powerful enough to elicit an answer. They can only do so
adequately when their internal relations are enunciated. Thus, BuckMorss comparison of Adornos and Marxs method needs qualification.
She notes that Marxs analysis of the commodity was governed by principles of abstraction identity and reification. Adornos constellations
were constructed according to principles of differentiation, non-identity,
and active transformation (1977: 98). First, the identity attributed to
Marx should more accurately be designated as unity (or in Hegels preference, unseparateness) of aspects of commodity production, a unity
already in the totality of relations, premised on his use of identity as [different] expressions of the same fact (Marx 1968: 410411), a point explored
further in chapter seven, below. Secondly, the degree of transformation of
elements in Adornos constellations cannot be significant or sustained;
the suddenness of their transformation is attributable to the shallowness
of the relations the analyst constructs around them.
In Adornos formulation there is an unnecessary division of labor
between philosophy and the sciences. Science is assigned the tasks of
research and the construction of questions while philosophy, although it
always remains bound to science (2000a: 32), is assigned tasks of interpretation and illumination. Yet when Adorno uses the commodity structure as an example of his program for philosophy his interpretation is
only possible because the commodity structure, as Marx articulated it, is a
structure of rational scientific thinking. The components of the commodity structure are relevant based on the rational discovery of their determinants and form the binding material of Marxs method. Interpretation
assumes that the object must be read again and read differently if we are
to be able to understand it. What, in fact, this means with respect to the
commodity structure, its internal relations and so on is unclear. What is
clear is that Adornos call to interpret, implies, quite rightly, that a different quality of consciousness may well be what provides the difference
between a first reading and reading again, but it is not something he
extends to the masses who are, in effect, stuck at the first, erroneous reading. Our discussion of identity and change (chapter seven) will clarify this
point. Interpretation is superfluous for at best it can only inform the rearrangement of the components based on a re-reading of the evidence. But
that, too, is a scientific endeavour to which, as Adorno argues without
clarifying details, philosophy must remain bound.
Adorno cites the relationship of configuration to reality by its philosophically certified [name]: dialectic (2000a: 34), and links the interpretive process to praxis and social change. But, the argument that through
the construction of a configuration of reality the demand for its [realitys]
change always follows promptly is not clearly defined, although we might
take a cue from the statement, the historical images are manageable and
comprehensible instruments of human reason (2000a: 36).
Notwithstanding the underdeveloped, yet clearly existing dialectical
aspects of Kants work based in synthetic judgements,1 the method
Adorno proposes is an experiment in thought and relies on thought that is
possible a priori, clearly associated with Kants process of knowledge
development. For example, Kant defines synthesis as
the act of putting different representations together, and of comprehending
their manifoldness in one item of knowledge. This knowledge may at first
be crude and confused and hence in need of analysis, yet synthesis is what
really gathers the elements for knowledge and unifies them into a certain
content. (Kant 2007: 103104)
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of Capital. In other words the qualities and relations are present and can
be understood, thus they are perceptible through reason and critique in
finding an alternative to appearance and immediacy.
The fact that Adorno was less concerned with economic factors, as
Buck-Morss notes, and more concerned to discover the truth of the social
totality (which could never be experienced in itself) as it quite literally
appeared within the object in a particular configuration (Buck-Morss
1977: 96), actually does make a substantial difference in both the outcome
of the project and its content. She notes the differences between Adornos
and Marxs criteria for analysis (1977: 98), with Adornos emphasis on the
phenomenal elements out of which constellations were to be formed by
the philosopher. However, despite his acknowledgement in The Actuality
of Philosophy of the materialism of Marxs analysis of the commodity,
Adorno preferred a less material, less grounded approach to construct his
constellations. It was not organized around determinate relations but his
own intuitive selection, motivated in large measure by his rejection of any
conception of totality as irrelevant to philosophy. His selection of elements is determined by his imputing to objects and phenomena the criteria and relevance for their admission to the constellation. He determines
the relevance of particular elements in their isolated state, arguing
simultaneously that philosophy must learn to renounce the question of
totality (Adorno 2000a: 32). This is evident in the fragment Man and
Animals. In Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, isolation is only a momentary possibility. This was never a simple notion of the interrelation or
interconnection of things, but of the linkages provided by determinants,
contradiction, sublation, and partial resolution at a higher level. The rejection of totality, ignoring the explicit significance of determinate relations
follows hand-in-hand with Adornos crucial distancing of his program
from the social: the truth content is in principle different from the historical and psychological conditions out of which it grows (2000a: 33).
If there is no such connection, it is hardly possible that this vague materialism could be seen as even a precursor to taking up Marxs more
fully-developed method. Nor is it possible to see this as more than a fundamentally subjective approach.
But at that point in the essay Adorno was questioning the possible resolution of the thing-in-itself problem using the commodity structure as his
example. Kants thing-in-itself fundamentally neutralized efforts to investigate and analyse it with the claim that it cannot be known to us (Kant
2007: 2324). Adorno, then, asserts the misdirection of Lukcs attempted
resolution to the problem when he sought to show that somehow the
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social conditions might be revealed under which the thing-in-itself problem came into existence (2000a: 33).3
In this regard, Buck-Morss acknowledges the influence of Husserl on
Adornos method (1977: 96). Although not citing Adorno, Lukcs points to
the consequences of an approach without the depth and intensity of relations. The relation of the ideas to objective reality is disrupted from
that of concrete content, and a method is created that blurs and indeed
erases the distinction between true and false, necessary and arbitrary, real
and merely imagined (Lukcs 1980: 483). Commenting specifically on
Husserls method, Lukcs states that it amounts to nothing more than the
subjectivist-idealist statement: it is my ideas which determine the essence
of reality (1980: 483).
Marxs method is a movement of concretization, the ascent from the
abstract to the concrete (Ilyenkov 2008: 5960 and passim.); that is, a concretization of abstract elements, abstractions of socio-historical reality
that once concretized reveals totality. His method is detailed in the economic manuscripts in the section, The Method of Political Economy
(Marx 1986a: 3745). Through examples, beginning with population, he
outlines the process of analysis in which the value of several aspects of the
method that are developed in contrast to that of earlier political economists. Of particular importance with respect to Adornos method of
constellations is Marxs emphasis on controlling abstractions via concretization, through the internal relations that inform the interactions of all
components. By itself, each component remains an abstraction; the correlation of each through analysis results in the concrete concept of population. The movement of analysis is to locate all phenomena that are
determinants of population that contain aspects or attributes of other
phenomena as a part of the internal relations of each including population itself. Upon completion of this process population is concretized by
the agglomeration of all phenomena through the internal relations discovered in the process of analysis. This process not only produces the concrete population but contributes to the concretization of each component
as these are internally related to all other components culminating in
population as concrete. All the components of population, then, cohere
by way of their internal relations, because each and all are determinants of
population. Marxs principle in this process is that the concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinants, thus a unity of the
3Lukcs attempt to work out this problem is found in the section, The Antinomies of
Bourgeois Thought of the chapter on reification in History and Class Consciousness (1971).
diverse from abstract determination by way of thinking to the reproduction of the concrete (1986a: 38).
Unlike Adornos approach, Marxs is a summing up of internal relations of each component that contains some of the attributes of components to which they are related (Ollman 1993: 37). The course of abstract
thinking, Marx writes (1986a: 39), which advances from the elementary
to the combined corresponds to the actual historical process. The relationship of thinking to the historical process gives priority to materialist,
concrete analysis; in this way no social phenomena or combination could
be understood immediately but only as it historically developed out of
and in relation to other phenomena. While there is evidently a relationship among the components of Adornos constellations, they have been
subjectively posited and this cannot bear a strong relation to those phenomena in Marxs method that are dialectically and historically related. In
the latters analyses there is no flash of an answer and no disappearing
question.
It is not possible to construct a simple comparison between Marxs
method and Adornos. The latters is neither a critique nor a develop
ment of Marxs method. Referring to Adornos 1931 lecture, Buck-Morss
(1977:24) suggests that it is difficult to attribute to it a Marxist sense while
affirming that it was not Marxism. However, his later discussion of constellations in Negative Dialectics does approach Marxs method most
significantly in his referencing of the history contained in objects making
up the constellation, and the consciousness of that history by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to
other objects (Adorno 1973: 163, see also 172). The processes that have
contributed to the formation of the object become known when the object
is understood in the constellation, implicitly acknowledging the neces
sityof relations among the various elements. Although he maintains the
notion of the constellations sudden burst of revealing knowledge, this
will not occur by way of a single action but through the effect of a combination of contributing factors.
If we use Marxs method to address an implicit question of Adornos,
What is the relation between human beings and animals? the analysis
would look much different and the outcome more concrete. The root of
Adornos comparison is that animals are not humans, animals do not possess the capacity to think, animals are subject to domination by humans;
the result of these factors is that animals are unavoidably miserable in an
environment populated also by the wilful terror of human beings. Happy
animals there are, but then how short-lived is their happiness! The life of
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a gitation where the focus shifts from animals to the working class devoid
of the liberating influence of thought.
How did Benjamin employ the method he outlined in Origin? In
addressing this question, the issue is not whether Adorno employed
the method accurately as it was articulated by Benjamin, particularly
since the method was of provisional status in the latters own work at the
time though developed in other ways later. Rather it is the substantial
differences between the two authors that are largely due to the respective
intellectual sources and the purposes they brought to their individual
projects.
As Adorno would do, Benjamin (1998: 33) begins his The Origin of
German Tragic Drama with a rejection of philosophical systems, except
where they are inspired in their basic outline by the constitution of the
world of ideas. Benjamin preferred philosophical contemplation based
on constellations indirectly relating to or underlying an idea, exuding the
brilliance of the mosaic (1998: 29), of fragments held together. Concepts,
he argued, mediate the relations of phenomena and ideas as the latter are
expressed through objects. Although not without qualification as to its
limits (1998: 43), the method is inductive, gathering the multiplicity of
ideas for representation (objects, phenomena) by criteria not fully explicit.
Benjamin claimed Origin could be adequately read only by thorough
knowledge of the Kabbalah. Sholem wondered about Benjamins rationale for this claim that was made to others but never to him despite his
knowledge of Kabbalah texts. He suggested that the common understanding of the Kabbalah was its difficulty to decipher inner secrets and that
Benjamin may have wanted to defend his method in the first chapter
against the reproach of [its] incomprehensibility (Scholem 1981: 125).4
This may have been the case, but Scholem also acknowledges what
Benjamin knew: the mysticism and revelation of mystery in the Kabbalah
and its various interpretations (Scholem, 1998: 46 and passim). Thus,
whether originally intended or not the Kabbalah model indirectly had its
presence in Origin but the discussion of the mysteries was more materially based. Adorno, however, revelled in the power of the philosophers
privileged knowledge upon which an even more privileged interpretation
of inner secrets could be made; in his work, the riddle stood in the place of
Benjamins Kabbalah mystery.
4Sholem also points out that Benjamin may have modified a comment Sholem had
made to students, that in order to understand the Kaballah, nowadays one had to read
Franz Kafkas writings first, particularly The Trial (Sholem 1981: 125).
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Beyond the introductory chapter, Origin is indeed more easily comprehensible. Adornos constellations, with their sudden, unexplained bursts
of light differ from Benjamins analysis of the baroque tragic dramas. His
approach was to focus on the allegories and their multiple elements as
illustrative techniques of the dramas. Benjamin provides a clear historical
and material context (though not, strictly speaking, the model of historical materialism) in which dialectics is evident in the relations he discusses:
history, objects, convention, the dialectical relation of antimonies and
that of written language and sound, and most importantly, the allegory as
an object of knowledge. The secreted meanings drawn into the open are
based on a theological orientation, though less apparent than in his essays
on language of the same period (see for example, Benjamin 1996).
For Benjamin, allegory is a schema of knowledge that does not emerge
as a natural expression of an object or idea; rather, it is a cultural product
of the allegorists comprehension and critique that intervenes in the
power of the symbol that attempts to establish an unequivocal relation to
the subject.
If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally
secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power.
That is to say that it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or
significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. (Benjamin 1998, 183184)
Adorno offers what is, in the end, no clear method. He continues from
the passage, above:
If the idea of philosophic interpretation is valid, then it can be expressed
as the demand to answer the questions of a pre-given reality each time,
through a fantasy that rearranges the elements of the question without
going beyond the circumference of the elements, the exactitude of which
has its control in the disappearance of the question. (2000a, 37)
What are these elements? What is their spatial arrangement that gives
them a circumference in which the fantasy can comfortably work? More
over, how can this be compatible to any degree with a dialectics of the
object?
In Benjamins initial use of imagery, constellations are altered toward
an ostensibly more materialist reading by Adorno in the 1931 lecture, but
Benjamin also revised his use of them a decade after the Trauerspiel book,
especially in The Paris of the Second Empire, which Adorno rejected as
insufficiently mediated. The latter essay was constructed around images
and constellations that had not only a more materialist grounding but also
a stronger and more explicit basis in Marxist analysis. Benjamins initial
use of constellations was clearly a product of the mind through his analogy of the timeless constellations of ideas in relation to objects and heavenly constellations (1998: 34) but later became more materialist and less
theological.
In Adornos hands the interpretation of the philosopher is fundamentally intuitive and subjective. While he claimed otherwise, his version of
interpretation does not meet the threshold of an historical materialist
analysis. A major part of this can be attributed to Adornos style; he understands the images and constellations he creates; he believes them to be
self-explanatory if one follows fully his construction and if one takes as
given the assumptions drawn from his interpretation.
Adornos Bilderverbot and the Negation of Messianism
Constellations are only one use of images in Adornos work. Images can
provide us with a mental image obviously, or a physical layout in the
imagination of a social condition or problem. But the onus is on those who
imagine or project in this sense to provide an explication of the image
from root to material actuality of a condition or problem.
Another example of Adornos images is the curiosity that appears in
a few instances within his writings that advances his dissuasion from
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the substance of its negativity. (Adorno 1973, 207; see also Pritchard 2002:
291; Finlayson 2012: 26;8 Comay 1997: 55)
This remark is preceded by a concern for the relation of theory and practice, and the object of theory in relation to knowledge. At issue for Adorno,
as we have noted, is the problem of the unity of theory and practice; what
is not at issue for him is the relation between the two as a mediating one.
The object of theory is not something immediate (Adorno 1973: 206),
thus it is not immediately either an image of God, theologically speaking,
nor the projection toward a secular utopia the object of emancipatory
praxis. Such mediation that would emerge from the relation of theory
and practice would not be intended to carry home a replica (1973: 206) of
the object of theory, that would be too mechanical and too immediate.
But the negativity that Adorno attributes to materialism in this instance
is not an absence of an image or a projection of possible of utopias. The
absence, rather, is Adornos unwillingness to conceive of the image or the
picture in terms other than the absolute, the finality of the construction of
utopia. In other words, it is his unwillingness to see it in the same way he
conceives of the inability of concepts to fully or adequately, for more than
a moment, cover the dynamic substance and relation of things. Pritchard
argues that, in fact, this is the orientation of Adorno, but it remains a theological orientation, an end of emancipatory praxis, not one that is open to
the contingencies that mediate what is not yet complete. Thus, her argument does not hold that Adornos view of the ban is directed at the social
reality that begs close scrutiny and careful correction (Pritchard 2002:
301), especially premised on the rather static account that things have an
excessive character; rather, things are dynamic, they do not hold still and
are not to be held motionless, that is the meaning Adorno cites as the
problem of concepts that he does not extend to other domains.
Adorno concedes that the ban goes beyond pronunciation of the name.
The ban allows him an avenue to despair: the ban has been extended
against hope: the mere thought of hope is a transgression against it, an
act of working against it (1973: 402). But this remark is still within the
realm of the theological, extending it, illegitimately, to the secular the
hope of something new, something changed, something imagined and
worked toward enaction utopia.
Finlayson suggests that Adornos austere negativism is based on two
claims, that there are no possible vestiges of the good, of utopia, or right
8Finlaysons is a slightly different translation than that in Ashtons translation of
Negative Dialectics.
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choice as the process of secularization became an alternative to traditional Judaism. Within this movement, the idea of messianism emerged as
a legitimate secular idea because of its place in traditional Judaism and
because it is inherently volatile and can produce profound political reverberations (Weisberger 1997: 115).
For a Jew (Adorno had limited connection to Judaism10) who proclaimed a socialist orientation or anyone informed by messianic principles (these might be the same) how is it possible to have a future
orientation limited by constraints on its communication and imagination? The language of the image ban for Adorno and others, including
contemporary commentators appears to be none other than the ban on
what moves the imagination of utopians, for whom its realization is possible but beyond any feasibly foreseeable future. The difficulty is the
extent and legitimacy of the extrapolation from Jewish traditions to critical theorists visions or assertions that would correspond with either the
earthly future or the hereafter that reflects its principles back on the present seated in a future prospect.
I have noted the ban on naming God which is not a real ban at all, given
the various circumventions of it and the temporal distance from the purported ban to the point at which Judaism established the only-one-god
principle of its faith. Further, any orientation of future conditions or possibilities drawn from that historical period cannot claim any notion of
afterlife, or the hereafter for Judaism at that time gave priority to the
earthly existence, the problems and possible resolutions, not to what
might be beyond this life (Telushkin 2010, 186189). Certainly Jewish secularism, messianic or not, gives priority to this-worldly actions and prospects. The point is that what has been portrayed as a perspective informed
by historico-religious practices has been illegitimately appropriated to
ban secular models of action that would reveal and settle the future.
10Adorno was born to a Catholic mother and a fully assimilated father of Jewish background. He was baptized Catholic and later confirmed as a Protestant but maintained
atheism in his adult life except for a brief flirtation with Catholicism. After the fate of Jews
began to be known in the early years of the war, Adorno wrote that he could no longer
separate himself from that fate (Claussen 2008: 267).
CHAPTER FOUR
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Radio, film and later astrology columns and television all reflect the prevailing order and the need for conformity, or exhibit the utter destructiveness of new technology. Adorno might well have respected Benjamins
opening paragraph in his essay on art and mechanical reproduction in
which he alluded to Marxs method that
showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. What could be
expected, it emerged, was not only an increasingly harsh exploitation of the
proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of conditions which would make it
possible for capitalism to abolish itself. (Benjamin 2003b: 251)
One can find elements of truth in many of the statements made about the
culture industry, but they do not constitute a substantive historical materialist analysis. In Dialectic of Enlightenment the analysis comes in the form
of statements that are categorical, characterized by an often impenetrable,
dogmatic style, and free of the encumbrances of complex socio-historical
relations. Aspects of the argument within that text convey the liberating or
disempowering function of the culture transformed by the Enlightenment,
often alluding to both. For example, Every progress made by civilization
has renewed together with domination that prospect of its removal
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1982: 40; see also xiii) expresses the kernel of
truth within the dialectic but also begs for further historical analysis to
demonstrate its veracity. Regardless of the aims of Enlightenment, such as
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terms mass and masses have had more positive or politically affirmative
meanings than pejorative ones; the former have been associated with the
political and labor left over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Marx
and Engels contrasted mass the great mass of the proletariat with
the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties
(1976b: 497); this phrasing alludes to the internal relation of the two and
the potential dialectical development from mass to Lenins vanguard. One
also thinks of The Masses, one of the most important political and cultural
publications of the early 20th century left in America (19111917); one
thinks also of the innumerable calls to revolt in the factory or the street
that referenced not an undifferentiated glob but a collective force of frustration, alienation and commitment moving in a new direction a mass,
more voluminous and heavier than a clique or an elite. But the masses as
often used by upper classes also referred to the unwashed, uneducated
crowd transformed by a shout into an uncontrollable mob. The term is a
political one regardless of the perspective from which it is employed.
Hence, the term could well be used in the way Adorno does without violating one of its historical connotations; but if there is a prior need, as in
the case of the jazz essays, to precede its use with sociological characteristics and qualities, it will have quite another meaning. Without such an
intervention, the reader has little choice but to assume that all who might
fall into the most prevalent definition of the masses will be tarred with the
same disparaging brush.
Adornos use of masses is a way of collapsing all social classes below
the level of the bourgeois class into a single field. The working class, perhaps the middle, lower-middle classes, the lumpenproletariat (this is not
clear), are the targets of these components of capitalist development and,
for Adorno, these are the social groups most willing to exchange their
human potential for material goods and the momentary illusion of happy
alienation. Thus, implicitly the term is used in its standard lexical sense of
a coherent body of matter (Oxford). Masses cohere because of the similarity of the substance of each particle, melding, thus adhering to the similar construction of particles on all sides and, therefore, losing the
particularities of any individual adherent. A mass has no shape except
that which is thrown onto the potters wheel, rubbed, squeezed and
thumbed until the shape has satisfied the potter. But, finally, with respect
to Adornos orientation to dialectics, the masses, as he uses the term,
violates his view of concepts in general in the sense, as he rightly argues,
something always remains after the definition, or that once a concept is
defined it is necessary to discover what it covers (2000a: 32; 1973: 153154).
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Eric Hobsbawm referred to Adornos writings on jazz as Some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz (qu. in Witkin 2000: 145). Robinson
has countered with apologetics for Adornos perspective. Adorno could
not have known that when he took up his pen to polemicise against jazz
he was writing about a specifically German brand of music, and this can
be assumed because Adorno will be treated [in Robinsons article] not as
a socio-cultural theorist but as an astute observer of the popular music of
his time (Robinson 1994: 1). He also argues that Adornos essays can only
be understood in the Weimar context, despite his emigration and subsequent jazz writings. This begs the question as to his motivation for support of the Nazi law against Negro music, not simply the general category
of jazz.
Adornos jazz essays were written over a twenty year period (19331953)
when not only were there changes in jazz and popular music, but equally
important there were significant changes in his location, from Germany to
England to America and back to Germany, and the corresponding opportunities to comprehend jazz in different cultural contexts with their
respective historical determinants. Robinson discusses the rather stunted
development of jazz in Germany, the substance of which, he suggests, was
the motivation for Adornos initial, negative reaction. But he also notes
that Adornos exposure to the more wide-ranging jazz in the U.S. did not
cause him to revise his views, even when he was able to assess the genre in
its original milieu and to take advantage of comprehensive histories of
jazz as he did in reviewing two books on the topic (Adorno, 1941: 167178;
Robinson 1994: 24). Witkin (2000: 147) makes a similar point that
Adornos period in Oxford, where he could have been exposed to a variety
of jazz, caused no revision or modification of in his views. Gracyk (1992:
533) notes how resistant Adorno was to alternative knowledge, especially
with respect to jazz composition whether involving musical technicalities
or empirical evidence concerning its socio-historical context. The absence
of an historical element in virtually all of Adornos work also deprived him
of an adequate basis for understanding the relationship of jazz not only
to European but to African music as had the German musicologist Erich
M. von Hornbostel in the mid-1920s (Herskovits 1958: 262263).
Notwithstanding the general adequacy of Hobsbawms verdict,
Adornos view of jazz requires more than dismissal for it is indicative of
much deeper issues, the most important of which are the problems of
method and his undialectical approach to cultural analysis. Adornos
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In his review of Walter Hobsons American Jazz Music, Adorno cites the
authors discussion of the language of jazz, remarking that these claims
are made without any attempt at an historical or pragmatic analysis of its
elements (1941: 167). This may be an accurate criticism but hardly distinguishes Hobsons method from Adornos regular practice of ignoring or
subordinating historical factors. For example, in the opening of his 1941
essay, On Popular Music, he alludes to the difference between serious
and popular music, a difference of levels considered so well defined that
most people regard the values within them as totally independent of one
another. These different levels require clarification, Adorno admits, but
he rejects an historical analysis of the division as it occurred in music
production and of the roots of the two main spheres. While he qualifies
circumventing an historical method as one that would necessitate examining differences in both European and American contexts, it is precisely
this approach that could have provided the material he was lacking in his
understanding of popular music and jazz. Since he was concerned only
with the actual function of popular music in its present status the convenient dichotomy of popular and serious was unreflectively retained
(Adorno 2002c: 437).
Without detailing every aspect of Adornos criticism it is more advisable at this point to provide a series of hypotheses derived from his
essays followed by a fuller discussion of aspects of Adornos work in this
area. (This discussion excludes the important issue of black or Negro
contributions to jazz which will be treated in a separate section.) In what
follows, there is a loose categorization of elements of his view of jazz
and popular music that, as noted in chapter one, constitute an example
zof Adornos method of immanent critique. Buck-Morss (1977: 154)
noted that Adorno made the characteristics of fetishism, reification and
exchange visible inside the phenomenon of listening to music. I would
argue that this is a superficial visibility, more precisely, an immediate visibility of characteristics that is neither developed nor analyzed giving
the attribution of immanent critique, in this case, an unsteady claim to
veracity.
a)Jazz and popular music are commodities because, as noted above, they
arise from the general laws of capitalism (Horkheimer and Adorno
1982: 132).
b)Regardless of its apparent expression of free music, looseness, innovation, improvisation, etc., jazz music is standardized by the requirements of the capitalist marketplace (Adorno, 1991a: 43; 2002a: 496;
2002c: 438, 440, 445), the demands of its audience taken in by the
pseudo-individuation of the experience of jazz (1981: 126; 1991a: 31);
despite appearances, there is no actual variety (2002c: 499; 1981:
123, 124).
c)The standardization that negates free expression in jazz, (b) above,
commands the obedience of the masses (1991a: 42; 2002c: 460461) in
listening (2002c: 442; 1991a: 41) and behavior (1981: 126; 2002c: 455),
even though the masses fail to comprehend the music (1981: 128; 2002c,
444) which, at best, serves only as a diversion (2002c: 458) and a partial
satisfaction of their base instincts and drives (2002b: 490).
d)Obedience, (c), is made possible by the total subjection of the masses:
their passivity (2002c: 465466; 1991a: 30), their need for psychological
adjustment (2002c: 460; 1981: 131) their unreflective identification with
bits of music (2002c: 455), industry stars (1981: 128) and a willingness to
be manipulated (2002b: 474; 2002c: 442443).
e)The masses accept their subjection, (d), because they relish their role
as customers (2002c: 458) possessing a tune as their personal property
(1981: 3336; 2002a: 497) and having acquiesced to the notion that any
possible revolt only entraps them further in existing social relations
(1981: 46).
As a list of components of Adornos essays, stated here as hypotheses, this
is incomplete. But if these are treated as experimental elements of a constellation they will, upon agglomerating in some configuration, flash
Adornos conclusion.
(a)Commodities
For the moment in which he wrote and thereafter it is possible to understand but not completely accept a basic point of Adornos that jazz
is a commodity in the strict sense: its suitability for use permeates its production in terms none other than its marketability. It is subordinate to the
laws and also the arbitrary nature of the market, as well as the distribution
of its competition or even its followers. (Adorno 2002b: 473)
Through the music of Tin Pan Alley, dance music, the popular song on the
screen, and the technical distribution of music on vinyl, tape and eventually digital, it remains a commodity. That the popular use of the music that
pre-dated but informed jazz generally escaped commodification in the
strict sense that he implies is not of concern to Adorno, an issue to which
we return below.
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2In his contribution to The Intellectual Migration, Adorno says of his 1936 jazz essay
that it to be sure suffered severely from a lack of specific American background but at any
rate dealt with a theme that could pass as characteristically American (1969: 340).
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c)Obedience
Conscious acquiescence to the demands of the market through jazz and
popular music ran parallel to other claims that more clearly illustrated
obedience and the wilful absence of self-control. Listening to such music,
for example, was something people could not help but do given their mental states, such as sado-masochism, that diminished their strength of mind
(Adorno 1981: 122). The purposeless syncopation in jazz, which of all the
tricks available [was] the one to achieve musical dictatorship over the
masses (1981: 125) also corresponded with premature or incomplete
orgasm (2002b: 490). In a passage on fans (fanatics, as he noted in
Perennial Fashion Jazz) in On Popular Music he referred to fans
flocking unreflectively to join the ranks, and a footnote is appended: On
the back of the sheet version of a certain hit, there appears the appeal:
Follow Your Leader, Artie Shaw (2002c: 468). Despite a recognition of the
distinction between use value and surplus value, Adorno immediately collapses both into the basis for obedience and subjection. Such demand for
conformity and the implied relinquishing of control provided links among
the masses, their music and their attraction to fascism. The connection
has many tentacles of which, according to Adorno, the need for selfish
possession and the hurting of others are two. We will also address the
problem of obedience and conformity in the following chapter as well.
d)Subjection of the Masses
Notwithstanding the overall sense of an arrested, categorical argument,
the relation of the masses to music is characterized in a number of specific, but related ways. Consistent with Adornos orientation to commodity power within capitalism, the masses were exploited, oppressed by the
market structure, specifically, for example, by the music publishers whose
propaganda apparatus hammers hits into the masses (2002b: 475). The
masses are also related to the market through their acquiescence to all
manifestations of the power of capital. Even while the masses may want to
resist or break away from the fetishized commodity world they do not
want to fundamentally change it (2002b: 478).
Adorno characterized popular music as an expression of the alienation
of the masses; that focus rather than the more generalized and structural
problem of alienation was the object of his criticism. The working class
was the irreducible and unrecoverable substance of the indistinguishable
mass. As jazz became more popular it moved down the strata of society
from its original home among the upper-middle class. In doing so it
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became more reactionary, more beholden to banality, until it ultimately glorifies repression itself. The more democratic jazz is, the worse
it becomes (Adorno 2002b: 4753). There is an explicit measure of acceptance for the forum of upper class jazz consumption, a more intimate
reception than merely being delivered up to loudspeakers and the bands
in clubs for the masses (2002b: 474; see 2002d: 419). The democratization of jazz, like the development of industrial society since the
Enlightenment, in which conformism is a requirement for production,
results only in the impotence of the worker (Horkheimer and Adorno
1982: 37) the machine operator, the domestic, the saxophone player. The
pseudo-democratization of class relations through jazz confirms the
consciousness of the epoch: immediacy, tricks, deception (2002b: 475).
Here Adorno begins to create positive links between jazz and popular
music on one hand and on the other the authoritarian threats growing in
Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Such threats become manifested in
the manipulability and acquiescence of the working class, even as they are
victims (2002b: 474). The concern with authoritarian politics of National
Socialism in this instance and elsewhere is a far different response than
his affirmation of their laws to ban Negro music. Adorno held similar
views regarding the connection between traditional music, folk music,
and nationalist tendencies in Europe (Jenemann 2007: 59).
Adornos point is to show that jazz and popular music, while existing in
a commodity form, have their real significance, even durability in the
moment of their use for the musician who makes the music, the audience member who appropriates it in the same moment, but also the listener of radio and recorded music. The audience and the listener have,
respectively, bought their ticket and their radio set but it is the use of the
music, repeated attendance and repeated listening, that secures, for
Adorno, their subordination.
A good portion of the working class had succumbed to the attraction of
utility music, (Adorno 2002c: 456, 464) jazz, movie sound tracks or
advertising jingles that served as popular music, attractive because of
their dependable, easy-to-memorize patterns. Like the masses acquiescence to formulaic music, they read, among other things, the novels of
official optimism where, according to Adorno (2007b), the proletariat
triumphs against the oppressor because the Party has prescribed the plot,
the characters and the outcome.
3See Robinson (1994: 19) for a different translation.
e)Customers
The attraction to popular music, Adorno argues, is in part the need to possess it as something of the fans very own, to restructure it, and revise it as
they please. Their pleasure in possessing the melody takes the form of
being free to misuse it. Their behaviour toward the melody is like that of
children who pull a dogs tail. They even enjoy, to a certain extent, making
the melody wince or moan (2002c: 456). There is a sense in this of personal attacks made from the conviction of his intellectual and cultural
superiority. His ostensible target was the commercialization of music in
all forms but particularly popular music, appealing as it did in his view, to
the baser instincts of the masses. This was not a concern of Adornos
alone. In his classic of jazz history, Shining Trumpets (1946), Rudi Blesh
took up the issue in a manner not dissimilar from Adorno.
Commercialism [is] a cheapening and deteriorative force, a species of murder perpetrated on a wonderful music by whites and by those misguided
negroes who, for one or another reason, choose to be accomplices to the
dead. Commercialism is a thing not only hostile, but fatal to [jazz]. (qu. in
DeVeaux, 1998, 488)
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other hand, if I have no vocation for study but have the will and the money
for it, I have an effective vocation for it (1975b: 325). If in referencing
beautiful music Marx had in mind the classical composers that may
reflect a personal taste, but it cannot be transposed to the 20th century to
privilege a particular kind of music and degrade the experience and choice
in the appreciation and performance of other forms of music. His remarks
do not bind historical materialist analysis to the symphony or the
cantata.
One cannot refer to this view as Eurocentric either for that would
diminish or ignore the significance, then and now, of other folk traditions
in music (Finkelstein 1989). Experience and choice have much to do with
socio-historical context, the conception in time and place and among
groups of people as to what music is its use-value in particular contexts
such as in magic, ritual, organized religion, military ceremonies, social
movements and popular celebration. This is not to reduce musical choice
to cultural relativism but to emphasize its socio-historical context in
which a judgement of its quality is developed in comparison with standards internal to the type. In turn, the centering of the socio-historic type
of music in this way does not rule out innovation and deviation from
established standards.
When Marx alludes to the production of the rich man profoundly
endowed with all the senses (1975b: 302) he is referring to the fully-
developed individual, fully aware of his or her essential powers, senses
fully humanised. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of mans
essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility either cultivated or brought into being (1975b: 301). Thus, the beautiful music
can only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a
subjective capacity (1975b: 301). The musical sense through the sense of
hearing, in itself, is a capacity relatively free of social coercion or constraint
to hear or not to hear music, to want or not to want certain music, to take
from ones socio-historical context music that is a free object for ones
developing capacity.
Marxs allusion to the rich man, the fully developed human being, is a
future orientation the end of the alienation within capitalism in which
music, listening, all the senses are attributed an exchange relation in the
marketplace; that sets music in an economic domain but does not negate
the possibility of the capacity of relative freedom, noted above. The goal
of this future orientation is that of free humankind who are a long ways
historically and developmentally from persons with no musical sense at
all. But this dichotomy cannot persist; there is much in between these
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discussions of jazz, for there is no grip on its process. The movement out
of slavery, the adaptation to free labor, the relative liberty to imagine,
write, sing, to literally blow ones own horn, cannot be reduced solely to
the commodity-drive of capitalism and total oppression alone without
losing literally the desire for freedom of every African American and
every liberal, communist or ethically decent person who ever wore out a
pair of shoes marching or hired the first black musician in a band.
Reduction to commodity alone is not a critique and reduces Marxism to
mechanical dogma of slogans and posturing; it is an expression of despair.
As commodities, jazz and popular music do satisfy human wants,
even those that are derived from fancy (Marx 1967: 43). Commodities
can take any form; they can be durable or momentary, they can have more
or less monetary value on the market, and they can generate surplus value;
however, the latter, as a basic characteristic of a commodity, is not necessary to satisfy a human want, despite the fact, Marx argued, that the wealth
of capitalist societies rests on an immense accumulation of commodities
(1970: 27; 1967: 43).
Marx is also clear at the beginning of Capital that it is a work of history
(1967: 43) to understand the various uses of things. Thus, any discussion of
material production must specify its definite historical form which leads
to understanding the non-material form of production, or spiritual production that corresponds to the material (Marx 1963: 285). As manifestations of the culture industry, jazz and popular music cannot be seen to be
merely a capitalistic intervention into the realm of African American and
other popular cultures. Because of the technology that facilitated its development, jazz and popular music combine material and spiritual forms of
production. Marx does not specify the full meaning of spiritual production. Regardless of how much the term spiritual in specific contexts connotes something external to and above the human group, this is not the
meaning Marx had in mind. Rather, the sense of spiritual by way of its
correspondence with material references a totality of relations that
make up, as Max Raphael (1968: 193) put it, the inner wholeness of the
individual. This is comprised of three essential sets of relations: being and
non-being, consciousness, and the positing of value in relation to the
actuality of potential. Concentrating on painting Raphael provides a sense
of an aesthetic orientation to various forms of art as aspects of creative
development and attitudes toward nature and the historical world.4 It is
the creative development of the human being creative abilities and
4See, for example, Raphael 1945.
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recording technology used by early jazz musicians and others before the
end of the 19th century, as well as the Tin Pan Alley phenomena of mass
production of music and printed scores for a broadening entertainment
sector. This occurred decades after the formal freedom of African
Americans was achieved, but still in a social environment characterized
by racism manifested across virtually every aspect of daily life.
Jazzs development within the context of a growing sector of entertainment, increasingly commanded by large corporations and the influence of
their capital, shifted small-scale spiritual production and its labor toward
material production increasing capital through that labors productivity.
Simultaneously, however, this sector of capital dominance produced
relatively autonomous individuals who exercised a degree of individual
choice as alienated subjects and who nevertheless could appropriate
resources in their conscious development toward becoming fully developed human beings.
Radio
One of the instruments of monopoly capitalisms culture industry is radio.
Although cultural monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison
to basic industries, radio parallels the insurmountability of the power of
the steel barons and chemical giants (Horkheimer and Adorno 1982: 122).
Radio does so because, like industrial monopolies, there is no machinery
of rejoinder to the power of a communications vehicle whose programs
are all exactly the same (1982: 122) belying the notion that there is consumer choice (1982: 123). In the intractable promotional bias of radio
(2002c: 443) the audience has no choice but to accept what the culture
manufacturers offer (Horkheimer and Adorno 1982: 124). Jenemann
(2007: 61) appears to accept Adornos conclusion that there was no productive use of radio by the masses in relation to its own stated purpose.
These ideas were developed around the same time as Adornos work in
the Princeton Radio Research Project, roughly the period of writing
Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Insofar as Adorno addresses the phenomena of radio, he notes its corporate base and implied additional economic and cultural phenomena,
adding a series of conditions that corporations, like jazz, weave into their
productions: obedience, absence of choice, acquiescence. Thus, he asserts
that the power of capitalism and the conditions it produces, in turn, facilitate the capitulation of the audience just as, in his terms, the worker capitulates to the boss at the steel mill, and the dancers to the commands of the
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band leader. Further elaborated and nuanced analysis has been closed off,
replaced by a description of capitalist industry and its cultural arm in categorical terms with the additional claim for certainty: the whole world is
made to pass through the filter of the culture industry (Horkheimer and
Adorno 1982: 126).
Film is added to the constellation and as such is essentially a replication
of radios place in the culture industry. Its power, especially the sound film,
lies in the objective nature of the products themselves, an objective
power capable of negating the imagination and spontaneity of the consumer. Like radio there is no possible avenue of response the audience
can do nothing but watch, listen and absorb. Such objective domination is
inherent in the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the
masses whether at work or at leisure (Horkheimer and Adorno 1982: 127).
The objective element of Adornos constellation is the structure of the
radio industry which, like the film industry, develops its communicative
and persuasive powers from the system of economic production.
Adornos claim that all radio programs are the same is an unreflective
position premised on cursory observation formalized against concrete
evidence of actual and possible alternatives, an approach that makes the
mere description of capitalism and the culture industry more appealing as
a fait accompli than the prospects developed from organizing and intervention. Granted, such interventions may well be of a liberal character,
consistent with the needs of the economic and political system, limited by
liberalisms claims to formal freedoms taken up by individuals and institutions alike. But such interventions, whether as liberal reforms or the projects of more oppositional sectors of society, are equally dismissed by
Adorno ostensibly because these cannot alter the essence of capitalism,
its essential structure and its culture industries. Beneath the surface of his
dismissal lies his refusal to reduce his theoretical perspective to the
uncertainty of concrete, politically motivated intervention.
Adornos views of radio and its use by and effects on the working class
were shaped by his sometime colleague in research, Paul Lazarsfeld.
Adornos view of the working class was much like Lazarsfelds which was
shaped by the latters first experience in Austria studying the social and
political impact of radio. Lazarsfelds 1931 listener research carried out in
Vienna surveyed 110,000 people, almost half of whom were described as
workers and employees. The results of the survey were a disappointment
for his colleagues in the Socialist Party; the results showed that workers
preferred light comedy and popular music programs over those preferred
by the Socialist Party itself: chamber music, literary reading, symphony
One problem with this research was that Lazarsfeld provided the quantitative data with very little contextualization such as the character and
quality of print sources or the content of radio programming.
A partial exception to this type of research was the work of his colleague Herta Herzog (1944). While she reported on research that supported the general ORR perspective, she was also more interested in the
particularities of women listeners and readers with respect to education,
income, locality and substance of program or reading material. While
there were differences in reading preferences for example, radio listeners preferring true story reading compared to the more sophisticated
reading of non-listeners. Herzog qualified problematic, and possibly
biased, ORR categorical separations of program types such as educational
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and service. The latter included topics such as proper behavior, selfimprovement, public and private morality and the possibility of upward
mobility; but these were appropriated by listeners as educational
(Douglas 2004: 144). Similarly, Varga (1996) has shown that the nationwide Canadian radio program, School for Parents, beginning in 1942,
offered advice by child-care experts that, notwithstanding a critique of its
ideological orientation, combined the broadcast with pamphlets, study
guides and focus groups to become an active, multi-faceted educational
program in contrast to one of passive listening. Neither Herzog nor
Lazarsfeld included alternative programming or reading in their research.
One implication is that the mainstream press and radio was considered
neutral and therefore the logical field of quantitative sociological study.
However, it may be assumed that the majority of listeners of labor-
generated radio tuned in precisely because of its alternative content: the
interest in workers issues, membership in trade unions and programming
that evaluated aspects of the structure of capitalist society. The same may
be said of the readership of left-wing newspapers and magazines of the
Depression period and after. It would not be a stretch to suggest, then, that
Lazarsfeld and his colleagues in America did not consider surveying leftwing or labor print and radio because of their assumption of its bias while
not considering the possibility of their own. Bias in the mainstream press
was not explored. Hence, there is much to support Douglass claim about
ORRs elitist bias: it was taken for granted that those from the lower levels
needed to be put under the microscope but not those from the same educational and economic level as the interviewers themselves (2004: 143).
But there was, indeed, much more going on in radio broadcasting than
programming that was all exactly the same as Horkheimer and Adorno
claimed. In an historical materialist analysis, one would be obliged to consider the objective character of radio in terms of its technological base and
its various social and cultural functions without diminishing its basic
structuring by the interests of capital and the legitimating function of the
state. Those interests have been evident almost since the invention of this
instrument of communication. Independent radio in its infancy was virtually shut down in the United States during the first world war because it
was viewed as an unregulated security risk. But the Radio Act of 1927
required stations to operate in the public interest, convenience, or necessity (Fones-Wolf 2006: 15), a piece of legislation coincident with the recognition of advertisement as the normative means of financial support for
radio (MacDonald 1979: 1620). Thus, radio emerged in a liberal political
and economic environment, not entirely exclusive of the influence of
state interests. Just before World War II the darker side of the liberal environment had an impact on radio when the National Association of
Broadcasters created its voluntary code of ethics that forbade its members
from selling air time for controversial issues (Fones-Wolf 2006: 63ff.). This
immediately constrained the ability of the labor movement to continue to
promote its cause. This was significant, although not altogether victorious
for the new code, for trade unions had already claimed radio as an instrument of their own.
Contradictory listening practices of radio audiences were arguably an
inherent feature of the interaction between popular culture and radio as
an instrument that brought forward a variety of resources and entertainment, legitimizing dominant ideological perspectives, but also providing
space for alternatives such as labor and perspectives on racial equality.
For example, Douglas notes that much of radio programming of the 1930s
depicting African Americans, either blacks performing as blacks or whites
acting the part, was built around stereotyped characterizations such as
coon acts, mammies, and other characters in dialect. So strong was such
stereotyping around speech that some black performers were required to
take dialect lessons to meet the standard imposed by program producers.
Wonderful Smith, an African American actor, was fired from the Red
Skelton Show in 1948 because, as he put it, I had difficulty sounding as
Negroid as they expected. But importantly, two African American newspapers petitioned to have degrading programming removed from the air
(MacDonald 1979: 331, 334). Equally important was the presence of African
Americans on radio during the Depression years that was significant for
transcending stereotyped roles. Music and comedy were the major content of such programs; much of the music was jazz that, in contrast to
Adornos limited view, exhibited the broad range of the genre. But listeners could also hear other programs featuring African Americans, such as
John Henry, Black River Giant, a CBS series in the early 1930s, and Paul
Robeson in dramatic and musical performances such as Freedoms
People on African American culture. A fifteen minute daily news program that began in 1935 on WJTL Atlanta, devoted to interests of the
African American community, increased to five and a half hours a week by
the end of the decade (MacDonald 1979: 332, 339347).
Fones-Wolf demonstrates labors use of radio during the depression
years as a vehicle for public education about unions, a tool for recruiting
workers into unions and organizing effective rebuttals to the claims
of management in strike situations. Unions, such as the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), developed their own programs
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to convey their basic message, to help overcome individuals fears of signing union cards, and to portray unionism as a normal aspect of life. The
ILGWU had its own Drama Department broadcasting, among other
things, a series of plays about its history and Upton Sinclairs The Flivver
King, about Ford Motor Company (Fones-Wolf 2006: 5558). Soap operas,
childrens programs, music, as well as instructive talks about unions were
important elements of labors use of this medium. Labor on the Air, a
production of the San Francisco Union Council covering the west coast,
into Canada and out at sea, was receiving 1000 letters a day from listeners
in 1940, and estimated its audience to be 300,000 to 400,000 (Fones-Wolf
2006: 48).
It is indeed curious that Adorno could compile the information on profascist radio broadcasts, discussed in the following chapter, during this
same period without at least acknowledging the existence of organized
labors alternative use of the instrument. It could not have been for the
absence of information which the medium itself provided (some of which
is discussed by Jenemann, 2007), and Fones-Wolf provides several references to articles about labor and radio in readily available mainstream
publications of the time such as Variety and Billboard.
Other than the comments from Dialectic of Enlightenment and elsewhere on radio in general, Adornos concerns centered on radio music,
particularly the performance and broadcasting of classical music. It is not
the intention to address issues of classical music here, but aspects of
Adornos writings about classical music on the radio are related to his
writings on jazz.
In The Radio Symphony (2002e) Adornos major concern was with the
fate of the integral form of the symphony, in that case Beethovens
work; the general orientation of the essay was to criticize NBCs Music
Appreciation Hour (MAH) for its poor pedagogical structure and the
effects of that teaching on listening children. Where this essay made contact with the jazz essays was precisely in the problem of the integral whole.
We have seen that he was critical of the consumer of jazz, the live audience or through radio, for his or her tendency to recall or otherwise concentrate on a fragment of music, the tendency to repeat it as well as to
alter it. That radio offered the listener of classical music an opportunity to
hear a piece more than once, and the fact that the opportunity came with
interruptions was a normative relation to listening through this (and
later) technology (Adorno 2009: 252). Through radio the symphony,
according to Adorno, had become trivialized because it has degenerated
to empirical time which disrupts the suspension of time-consciousness,
(2009: 256, 258, 261) one of the qualities of great symphonic music. Unlike
the concert hall, the radio facilitates the degradation of music by allowing
for the fetishization of its character through a sense of individual ownership of it by way of quotation listening in part or in whole (2009: 263,
330. 352). The radio phenomenon produces an attitude in the listener
which leads him to seek color and stimulating sounds (2009: 267).
Adornos concern was with a particular form of music connected historically to specific domains of listening, specific customs of appreciation,
and deference to the perceived cultural superiority of that form of music
and the social situation of its usual audience. There is little doubt that the
forms of music current in the 20th century affirmed and facilitated a different kind of listening that required less detailed and technical musical
knowledge, less attention and concentration. The current technological
capacity to rerun films in ones living room again and again is surely also a
sign of the fragmentation of attention that, from music to film to relationships, carries over into the classroom.
Similarly, Adornos criticism of the MAH reducing music education to a
personality cult in music certainly has its basis in reality. He acknowledges musics progressive period, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, and its regressive character in his own period (2009: 360361).
It is not pertinent to the argument here to dispute this reduction to personalities, but it is worthwhile noting Adornos own tendency to shift his
argument from a concrete problem to the issue of greatness equivalent to
the relevance of personality. For example, in his radio discussion on education in 1969 with Hellmut Becker he initiated the conversation with a
reference to Kants concept of tutelage in the latters What is
Enlightenment. In that context, a resource for addressing the question of
individual capacity and courage with respect to education in Adornos
period as well as Kants own, is deferred at least momentarily to draw the
issue back to Kants greatness (Adorno and Becker 1999: 21). Such a
deferment appears to give priority to Kants intellectual qualities as much
if not more than the resource he provided for Adorno and Beckers
discussion.
It is not surprising that when considering the technical issues as well as
the general cultural issues brought about by the advent of radio, Adorno
would ignore important comments on the medium by Benjamin. In the
first instance the difference in the perspectives of the two must be recognized: Adorno consigned the technology to the absolute control of corporate interests while Benjamins interests were in the use and likely
development of the medium, addressing briefly various problems to be
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CHAPTER FIVE
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1936 (Jay 1973: 125).4 The Lynds did structure their sample of working and
business class families, randomly selected to begin with but refined later,
such as excluding responses from African Americans in the final tabulation because of their small proportion in Middletowns general population. They used casual conversations as part of their data but relied on the
whole on interview schedules drawn up beforehand and adhered to with
minor deviations regarding, for example, religious views (Lynd and Lynd
1929: 507509). Their small group of trained interviewers was intended to
assure consistency in the style of questioning and the quality of
recording.
Pro-Fascism and the Masses
Especially in the short content analysis of Martin Luther Thomas fascist
radio program and in his later analysis of astrology columns in the early
1950s, Adornos characterization of the masses is built on the foundation
of his perspective already seen in the critique of his jazz and popular
music essays. The Thomas material was intended to draw attention to the
means by which people were attracted to the messages of fascism in the
United States. It was among several pieces of research on American fascism carried out in the same period, such as Leo Lowenthal and Norbert
Gutermans Prophets of Deceit (1948/1987), Alfred McClung Lee and
Elizabeth Briant Lees The Fine Art of Propaganda (1939/1972), George
Seldes Facts and Fascism (1943), John Roy Carlssons Under Cover (1943),
and Ben Hechts A Guide for the Bedevilled (1944). More recent studies relevant to that period include Neil Baldwins Henry Ford and the Jews (2001).
Together these indicate the extent and seriousness of the problem of fascist sympathies and antisemitism in America at the time.
Given the predominantly Jewish make-up of the Institute, antisemitism
may have been a backdrop for Critical Theory as a whole, but it did not
widely or frequently appear as a topic in the work of Institute members. It
was argued by Adorno that Elements of Antisemitism, the final chapter
of Dialectic of Enlightenment added after initial publication, contained the
4As a member of the sociology department, Robert Lynd was influential in obtaining
space for the Institute at Columbia University. He later became an object of Horkheimers
criticism for advocating the interjection into the objectivity and detachment of philosophy
and social science, that science help search out the content and modes of expression of
shared loyalties. See Lynd (1964: 239); for Horkheimers criticism, see 1974a: 185. For
an assessment of the Lyndss work and methods over all the Middletown Studies, see
Caccamo 2000.
theme of the entire book (Jay 1980: 143144) but The Authoritarian
Personality, clearly devoted to issues of antisemitism and racism, was the
only widely accessible work he produced on these topics. In that text
Adorno and his co-researchers attempted to lay the foundations that
would rebut antisemitic thinking, and provide an argument against irrationalism and against the recurrence of fascism. This alludes, at least, to a
practical outcome Adorno hoped for with such empirical studies but
which retained his desired dissonance between theory and practice.
Adornos studies were, of course, quite distant from a politically-driven
polemic designed to outline an explicit strategy for the exposure and
defeat of irrational thinking. Nevertheless, making connections between
his studies of irrationalism and antisemitism on the one hand, and some
of his other philosophical and cultural works provides both crucial links
between the two and an imperative that dialectical thinking is a precondition for neutralizing irrationalist propaganda.
Such a practical program of how consciousness or certain modes of
thinking might be changed was more implied or hoped for than intentionally organized (Adorno 1994c). But Adorno nevertheless declared unequivocally that this was a goal toward the end of Negative Dialectics: the fact of
Auschwitz is seen as the buttress against its recurrence. A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler on unfree mankind: to arrange
their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that
nothing similar will happen (1973: 365).5 While the imperative may carry
the explicit and emphatic meaning, Never Again, it is not a comprehensive demand for the quality of structural change that would ensure the
prevention of a repetition.
A major focus of Adorno and Lowenthal during the inter-war and postwar periods, was the irrationalist basis of antisemitic and fascist propaganda. They insisted that this form of irrationalism was compounded with
rationality. Antisemitic and pro-fascist forms of propaganda, while irrational in substance and effect, were nevertheless calculated, planned and
organized. According to Adorno, fascist propaganda builds up an imagery
of the Jew, or the Communist and tears it to pieces without caring how
much this imagery is related to reality; such propaganda used an oratorical style that might be called an organized flight of ideas (1994b: 222223).
He referred to irrationalist propaganda as a kind of emotional planning
5It must be said that this statement is leaps ahead of Adornos rhetorical question of
despair and passivity, Can one write poetry after Auschwitz? He subsequently revised the
statement.
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that Lowenthal argued was facilitated through the rationalization of values (Adorno 2000b: 29; Lowenthal and Guterman 1987: 28).
Propagandists and agitators6 attempted to make their ideas popular as
a new normative frame of meaning and social interaction, and as the sustaining values of institutional arrangements. To achieve this, agitators
exploited the feelings of dissatisfaction, dislocation, instability and insecurity. While Adorno and others focused on the public efforts of specific
ideologues, the background to their analyses was capitalism, its ideology of
individualism, the competitiveness central to economic development and
interpersonal relations, exploitation as a source of wealth-production, and
the reduction of language and thought to the communication strategies of
advertising. Because many irrationalist philosophers and pro-fascist agitators held occupations of status in academia, politics and religion, Adorno
and Lowenthal viewed irrationalism as the underpinning of capitalisms
culture industry.
In one of his most incisive literary critiques, Lowenthal identified irrationalism as, among other things, the pagan awe of unlimited and unintelligible forces of nature, the mystique of blood and race, the abrogation
of individual responsibility [and] anti-intellectualism (1986a: 185).
Reliance on what the individual experiences and what she can learn from
it reinforces the belief that sufficient knowledge is obtained through ones
defense of existing society and that a fundamental condition of truth is the
absence of an imperative to discover it (Horkheimer and Adorno 1982:
144). This means that people need not extend their interests beyond what
they think they know of existing circumstances or advocate alternative
social conditions. Adorno referred to this as the adoration of the existent,
the unreflective reverence for what is deemed factually existing at any
moment in the minds of the consumers of propaganda. He considered this
a psychological process that may set the stage for the more obvious
effects (2000b: 4445) such as the need to advocate for re-establishing
social conditions that affirm a state of affairs perceived to have been the
natural foundation of society but which have been lost or usurped by others. In the period of Adorno and Lowenthals research, these others were
Jews, New Deal advocates and European exiles.
6Lowenthal used this term to distinguish reactionaries and fascists (or pro-fascists)
from reformers and revolutionaries; see Leo Lowenthal and Guterman 1987: 1521.
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The crucial point is the decision to cease inquiry and settle for an emotionally satisfying explanation of reality. He asked the question, what happens if thought stops short of the difficulties and shies away from them
[or] hypostasizes the inability of specific concepts to comprehend a specific reality into the inability of thought to master the essence of reality
intellectually? (1980: 100). What happens, he continues, if a virtue is then
made of this necessity and the inability to comprehend the world intellectually is presented as higher perception, as faith, intuition ? (The
relation between irrationalism and hate propaganda is further developed
in Lanning 2012.)
For Hegel this limitation on thinking made it a merely subjective and
formal activity, and the objective world that confronts thinking counts as
something fixed and present in its own right (qu. in Anderson 1995: 68).
8See also Wolin 2004: 3.
9The phrase from Hegel, quoted by Lukcs (1980: 97), is from the Hegels Logic (i.e. the
Shorter Logic) where it is translated as a beginning and a trace of rationality (Hegel 1975:
231).
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and then to divert his followers from any rational attempt to regain health
(1987b: 151).
In contrast to Adornos study of Martin Luther Thomas, Lowenthal provides a more consistent sociological analysis that establishes the relations
of the problem complex. There is no sense of a residual formalism or categorical thinking in his approach that reifies the masses, nor is the antisemite simply a construction of modernity or a clever and persistent
speaker with a pocketful of devices. Lowenthals interest in the possibility
that there is a desire for learning, for knowledge is an allusion to the necessary alternative to antisemitism that the masses can appropriate and
develop a form of education that leads to self-consciousness in Hegels
sense of recognizing the other.
Adornos Study of Martin Luther Thomas
In his content analysis of Martin Luther Thomas radio broadcasts, Adorno
purports to analyse the tactics of the pro-fascist agitator, to illuminate the
means by which Thomas creates a bond that portrays himself as a trustworthy messenger. His audience, from whom he seeks support for the
message and which seeks from Thomas, in exchange, a salve for their frustrations, are to see him as only one of many communicators of the same
message.
The study of Thomas broadcasts was written between 1938 and 1943
(Jenemann 2007: 52) and was likely intended as a part of the Institutes
larger project on antisemitism. While Lowenthal, in his Prophets of Deceit,
covered the speeches and texts of fourteen agitators, Adorno concentrated on Thomas alone. Like the jazz essays discussed in the previous
chapter, but unlike Lowenthals research, Adorno provides no historical
context to Thomas speeches, his radio program, his connections with specific Protestant denominations or the fascist movement in the United
States. Adornos contextualization consists only of footnotes as citations
for the dates of Thomas addresses quoted or referred to. Waggoner, who
is sympathetic to Adornos project nevertheless notes the neglect of historical contextualization, such as the absence of distinction between
Christian fundamentalism and Pentacostalism. However, he does not
consider the charge of bad history to be valid; the more important issue
is that Adorno, Waggoner rationalizes, had philosophical and critical
concerns that outweighed expectations of fidelity to someones opinions
about what actually happened, about the timing or the conceptuality of
Here, the term masses is not qualified but appears to refer to, as we noted
in chapter four, everyone below the level of the bourgeois class. The whole
of the masses need not be in attendance to be characterized in the same
way as Thomas audience; the masses are identical with it. The audience
cannot think is too weak to maintain a continuous process of making
deductions (Adorno 2000b: 34). His later distinction of large sectors of
the population affirms the points of identification: lower education,
manual labor, and unsophisticated personality and mode of behaviour
(2000b: 53). He would use the same generalizations of cognitive ability
and lack of education to characterize those who sought guidance and
gratification from astrology (1994a: 61). That much of Adornos commentary mimics Thomas approach to the masses, and this is not stated fri
volously, he contributes to the credibility of the pro-fascist form of
communication in America by imputing attributes to the audience that
he sees as facilitating their reception of Thomas message. This is distinctly
different than Lowenthals approach.
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What the audience hears from Thomas are scripted forms of revelation
and action. The revelations can be divided into two components. The first
concerns who the agitator is and why he does what he does, while the
second contains information about the problems he projects to the audience that reveal factors that undermine their sense of individualism and
freedom. The perceived viability of the second component enhances the
audiences feelings about the character of the messenger. This sense of
solidarity allows Thomas to request minimal action that mostly concerns
support for his mission; the most important category of action, then, is
faith. The questions he proposes are introductions to the revelatory
knowledge he provides and are followed by prepared answers he provides
for his audience; together these purport to reveal the insight into trends in
politics and the economy, the truth about who controls policy, manufacturing and other aspects of social life. The solutions to these problems are
not explicit; Thomas proposed solutions are not plans of action to be
taken up by the audience. Rather, he and other agitators were content
with the acts of faith that provided them with unquestioning spectators
equipped with a stock of scripted responses for service at the kitchen
table, the office party and the factory lunch room. In order to achieve their
goals, agitators relied on what Adorno referred to as devices or tricks that
were designed to draw the audience to the propaganda. It is only necessary to cite a few examples here from Adornos study. The lone wolf
device with which Adorno opens the study (2000b: 46), projects the agitators lonely but passionate drive to inform; Thomas is a man detached
from everything big and powerful, his message is from one little man to
another. The fait accompli technique (2000b: 4247) most clearly represents the scripting of the message and response in that it refers to
the assumed agreement between the agitator and the audience that
the issue is one that previously had been decided (2000b: 42); consequently, there is no need to think about choices. This device turns the
feeling of impotence into a feeling of power by giving up ones relatively
independent will to assume a spot on the winning side. Not surprisingly,
Adorno sees this technique embedded more broadly throughout modern
mass culture, particularly in the cinema (2000b: 44). The communists
and bankers device (2000b: 108113) collapses two presumably antagonistic groups as schemers undermining the property and security of ordinary people; it succeeds because Thomas avoids an explanation of
bourgeois property relations or the proposed socialization of property by
communists.
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are thoroughly convinced that others (or some unknown agency) ought to
know more about themselves and what they should do than they can
decide for themselves (1994a: 52). The astrologists and the agitators message, rarely if ever adequately express social or psychological reality, but
manipulate the readers [or listeners] ideas of such matters in a definite
direction (1994a: 52). The astrology advice suggested to readers that they
experienced situations they could not manage on their own nor could
these situations be explained beyond the understanding imputed by the
astrologist (1994a: 74). Despite his assertion that the astrologist and the
agitator manipulate the newspaper reader or audience, Adorno had
already established the fertile field of his criticism the absence of intellectual ability among the audience members or newspaper readers.
Hence, the ground of receptivity was primarily a problem of the masses
themselves, not the manipulative talents of others.
This is consistent with the irrationalist denial of the knowability of the
external world. The status of the individual is not determined or conditioned by identifiable social conditions but by fate. Giving priority to fate
over relative autonomy facilitates the irrational dependence on authority
and on the existing social relations, neither of which, it is claimed, have a
knowable origin other than an unarticulated tradition or the immediacy
of experience. To the agitator and his or her audience, social scientific
investigation and explanation are of no help (Hodges 1970: 89; Adorno
2000b: 43). But, again, both the agitator and Adorno impute this aspect of
irrationalism to the masses.
The irrationalism of pro-fascist ideas often involves an accommodation
of normative, reasonable behaviour consistent with social expectations,
but also accepting at least at the level of communication intolerant,
even ruthless messages. Adornos analysis of astrology as an irrationalist
backdrop to popular culture shows how superficial reasonableness of
argument and the neutrality of an underdeveloped sociology at once
argue for social conformism and acknowledge at least two aspects of irrationalism discussed here, its claim that there are limits to knowledge and
its appeal to authority:
The continuous encouragement to talk things over with others appeals to
the conviction of many people mentioned previously, that others know
more about them and their own difficulties than they know themselves an
all-pervasive sense of self-alienation. It is in this connection that the concept
of understanding crops up in the [astrology] column. Sociologically the
stress on understanding, being understood as well as understanding others,
probably reflects social atomization, the reverse and concomitant of collectivization. (Adorno 1994a, 130131)
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against which the idea of fact was originally coined (Adorno 2000b: 45).
As with the concept, Adorno is being consistent here in registering fact as
more than it is in itself, something that has a history of being made, and
which cannot be explained by the fact alone. However, as noted above,
the immediacy of such facts of experience exhibits a rational character in
the mind of the agitator and the listener that is, as a rational element of
irrationalismwhere it is perceived as a problem to be solved. Problem
and solved are in quotation marks because they occur in the presentation
of agitators and in the minds or actions of their audience, but the meaning
of these terms in such contexts is consistent with Lukcs analysis of the
terms in the hands of the irrationalist who absolutizes the problem and
renders it artificially insoluble (Lukcs 1980: 9798). Jews, Negroes and
foreigners are problems for some of the interviewees in The Authoritarian
Personality because the interviewees are interested in limiting (if not eliminating) their presence and influence. Recognition of a problem provides
a veil of rationality that shows the agitator or listener to have come to a
conclusion that there is a problem through hard thinking and mature
experience. The term problem is taken over from the sphere of science,
writes Adorno (1982: 312), and is used to give the impression of searching,
responsible deliberation and, therefore, an object of thought that has an
element of relativism, the selective consideration and affirmation of two
(at least) sides of any problem. The equivocal character of the term, problem, implies a rational working through the elements of an issue but actually suggests to Adorno a pattern of conformist sensibleness [that] lends
itself very easily to the defense of various kinds of irrationality (1982: 313)
such as the apologetic comments that there are good and bad Jews e.g.
the white and the kike (1982: 316, 360). It is a sensibleness, a reasonableness that allows for a conformist, unproblematic functioning of the
individual in society (Adorno1994a: 80).
The compulsive reaction to adopt the propagandists message is not
entirely devoid of self-interest to forego a level of relative autonomy.
Discussing the loss of self-control Adorno allows his already established
conclusions about the working class to denigrate whatever degree of
actual choice they may have without an adequate analysis of the range
of alternatives. The choice is divided in two parts in the Thomas study,
the psychological manifestation of social and cultural pressure and
economically by becoming an employee (rather than remaining a selfsustaining social unit) (2000b: 9). The last of these is inexplicable; remaining a self-sustaining social unit by not becoming an employee was, then
and now, a rarity under modern industrial and commercial conditions. It
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For Adorno, the problem is that the agitator indirectly praises this fact.
More seriously, however, he echoes Thomas, taking the fact as a given
reflection of reality. That there were and still are segments of the
population willing to give themselves over to violence and cruelty may
be evident, but in his usual style Adorno not only chooses not to distinguish, but by ignoring the anti-fascist movements assumes that the consciousness manipulated by fascist propagandists is a consciousness that
cannot develop in an alternative direction and would choose not to go
there if it could.
The Thomas study might well have been published with more developed material but was not during Adornos lifetime. The short essay,
Antisemitism and Fascist Propaganda, published originally in 1946 is
largely a summary of his discussion of the devices and tactics of Thomas,
described there as one of the West Coast agitators. The essay is devoid of
vilification of the masses that are found throughout the Thomas
study, and is devoid of the ungrounded statements that make the Thomas
study problematic, except for one passage in which consumer behavior
11I will not discuss it here, but Fromms 1941 Escape from Freedom was also a more thorough and nuanced analysis.
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It is an important part of the argument that the rationalization and control of the economy in industrial society causes people to believe they are
objects of processes which they often fail to understand and which are
utterly beyond their control (Adorno 2000b: 43). But it is the continuous
reduction to psychological attributes of all decisions regarding leadership
and responses to objective economic conditions that allows Adorno to
address this as a problem of the indiscriminate masses rather than a more
complex social and political problem. He does this in the Thomas study
through a report of the content, without other data and argument to support his contentions. However, when he did have a collection of data his
solution was essentially the same. The Authoritarian Personality provided
Adorno and his colleagues with interview responses from people from a
range of socio-economic backgrounds. But here, too, the project was centered on personality traits, such as stereotypy, emotional coldness, identification with power, and general destructiveness to be addressed as
such rather than explicit connection with [h]istorical factors or economic
forces that were beyond the scope of our study. The absence of elaboration on what is meant by rational arguments and efforts to address discrimination toward a particular group sows doubt about any solution
based in educational efforts and/or consciousness-raising that Adorno
and his colleagues implicitly proposed. Such doubt is evident among the
concluding statements of the study:
[C]loser association with members of minority groups can hardly be
expected to influence people who are largely characterized by the inability
to have experience, and liking for particular groups or individuals is very
difficult to establish in people whose structure is such that they cannot
really like anybody; and if we should succeed in diverting hostility from one
minority group we should be prevented from taking satisfaction by the
knowledge that the hostility will now very probably be directed against
some other group. (Adorno, et al. 1982: 477)
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CHAPTER SIX
MEDIATION
Aspects of Marxist and Hegelian conceptions of mediation have been discussed in chapter two. Of concern here is, one the one hand, Adornos
assertion of the necessity of mediation, and on the other, the fact that far
less employment of this aspect of dialectics is evident in much of the work
under discussion here. Perhaps nowhere does the concern regarding his
use of mediation more importantly arise than in his remarks on one of
Benjamins Baudelaire essays submitted to and rejected by the editors of
the Institutes journal. The disagreements Adorno had with Benjamin
regarding The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire are well known.
However, despite the assertion of Rainer Rochlitz (1996: 194195) that the
dispute between them and their respective cultural and political positions
are not current anymore that dispute should be at the center of any discussion about the dialectical component of their respective writings and,
specifically, the place of mediation in their use of the dialectical method.
What interests us in the first part of this chapter are those aspects of the
essays on which Adorno commented and which can be compared to his
own work.
Without rising to an unqualified defense of Benjamins work on
Baudelaire, the Second Empire essay and On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
reflect a difference between Benjamins self-direction in the former, its
structure and content that defines its place in his larger project, and the
second essay as a response to editorial directives framed, in part, by
Horkheimers and Adornos concerns about political exposure. The differences between Benjamin and the other two do remain important as does
the impact on Benjamin in his dire circumstances at the time.
The two essays are significantly different. It is a difference that is more
pronounced considering Adornos reasons for rejecting the earlier essay
and why the later one was finally published in the Institutes journal.
Rochlitz (1996: 194) simply states that the Motifs was the more explicitly
theoretical essay. Brodersen (1997, 240) suggests more accurately that it
showed the influence of those who had commissioned it. Lowenthal
(1989b: 74) supported the publication of the Second Empire essay and
maintained that the shift of emphasis in Motifs gave the first essay a
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weight of its own. Brecht, frustrated by the criticisms and the hesitance of
the Institute to publish the work, offered to have it published in Das Wort,
the German exile journal. Once Motifs was completed and submitted,
Benjamin remarked in a letter to Margarete Steffin: Now Im awaiting the
storm clouds that will break over my head over this text (Wizisla 2009:
172; emphasis in original).
Benjamin wrote and submitted his essay in a period of time in which
Horkheimer and Adorno were eschewing their tenuous connection with
Marxism and keeping their options open with respect to their security in
America. Aspects of Adornos politics that may have contributed to this
dispute are evident in his attitude toward Benjamins relationship with
Brecht, as well as Benjamins interest in working class politics, and his
sometime interest in the USSR and communist party membership. BuckMorss (1977: various, but esp. 139150) has noted the differences in
Benjamins relationships with Scholem, Brecht and Adorno each possessing a certain importance for Benjamin and each influencing him differently and reacting differently to him. It is of little wonder that Benjamin
kept these relationships insulated from each other for it was in each that
he found a distinct kind of intellectual support, dialogue and criticism for
his interests. Hannah Arendt cites Adornos suggestion that Benjamin
tried to outdo Brecht in radicalism with his Work of Art essay; but, she
notes, it was likely that Benjamin feared Adorno (Arendt 1969: 52, note 5;
Wizisla 2009: 1517), a fear that may have been linked to Adornos gatekeeping powers in the Institute. Perhaps it was because of the distance of
each of these friendships that Benjamin found himself thoroughly isolated
in 1939 unsuccessfully seeking the relative security that each of the others
had found in Palestine, Denmark and America. Whatever the problematic
character of his relations with Scholem and Brecht, perhaps Benjamin had
put too much stock in his relationship with Adorno and others in the
Institute hoping that the first Baudelaire essay would solidify their support and provide a way out of the European quagmire. That was not to be,
and it was Adornos self-serving reaction to the essay that became another
brick in the wall for Benjamin.
The basis of Adornos rejection of Second Empire was, in his view, the
absence of sufficient mediation. He put his criticisms in terms of concern
for Benjamins reputation, suggesting that the use of Marxist categories
were neither suited to Marxism nor to Benjamin.
[I]t would also be most beneficial to the cause of dialectical materialism and
the theoretical interests represented by the institute if you surrendered to
your specific insights and conclusions without combining them with other
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ingredients, which you obviously find so distasteful to swallow that I really
cannot expect anything good to come of it. (Adorno 2003: 103)
This comment implies that Adorno himself employed materialist dialectics; it also suggests a paternalistic projection of what he believed Benjamin
actually wanted. In the end, there is more of that one truth in Nietzsches
Genealogy of Morals than in Bukarins ABC [of Communism] (Adorno
2003: 103).
What were Adornos objections to the Second Empire essay? First, his
concerns built on his initial intellectual reaction to Benjamins style and
his own commitment to the theoretical approach Benjamin had employed
in the Trauerspiel, aspects of which have been discussed in chapter three,
and much of which had been surpassed by the time of his work on
Baudelaire. In his letter to Benjamin of 10 November 1938, Adorno references criticisms and concerns he had registered with Benjamin about his
work over the years. He seemed to be offended as much by his elder associates lack of adherence to his advice as he was about the content of the
essay, which he criticized as having unelaborated theoretical support for
the motifs in the study (Adorno 2003: 100, 102). It is interesting that Adorno
focused on sections he considered lacking in explanation and elaboration,
for as myself and others have argued, it is just such a style that Adorno
intentionally adopted to maintain the esoteric character of his own work
and serve as a buttress against political engagement. Further, the essay
contains its own theoretical component and actually appears more like
Horkheimer had imagined his and Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment:
filled to the bursting point with historical and economic material
(Claussen 2008: 142).
Among other passages in the Second Empire essay, Adorno objected
to Benjamins inclusion of Marxs comments on Napoleons wine tax from
his Class Struggles in France. Marx was reflecting the reality of the time,
including the establishment of customs offices (toll houses) at town
boundaries that reflected Napoleons legislation and which changed
every town into a foreign country (Marx, qu. in Benjamin 2003a: 7).
Benjamin used the themes of poverty and waste in Baudelaires The
Ragpickers Wine to reflect on the broader contextualization of the burden of taxation on wine and other commodities over a longer period of
time. Marx had noted the political use of taxation from Bonaparte forward, its effect on the peasantry and on the economy more generally in
France of the period (Marx 1978: 4950, 6061). But Adorno objected to
Benjamin exhibiting a tendency to relate the pragmatic content of
Baudelaires work directly to adjacent features in the social history of his
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time, especially economic ones. For Adorno, this passage showed evidence of artificiality, a particular and apparently peculiar concreteness, that suggested the direct connection drawn between the wine tax
and L Ame du Vin [The Soul of Wine] ascribes to phenomena the very
spontaneity, tangibility and density that capitalism has stripped from
them (Adorno 2003: 101). Benjamins treatment of Baudelaires correspondances were seen by Adorno, and later Arendt, as having an immediate,
direct link, but each of them accepted the value of these in a different
manner, Adorno as a limitation, Arendt as legitimation of Benjamins
interest in small, even minute things (Arendt 1968: 11; Adorno 2003: 101).
Adornos criticism that Benjamins essay was not mediated through the
process as a whole (2003: 101)1 may strike one as a contradiction given
Adornos rejection of totality as a philosophical concept of identity. Despite
the admonition to Benjamin that he had obscured the mediation by
materialist-historiographic invocation (Adorno 2003: 102), much of the
Second Empire essay is actually mediated by the core of social development, the growth of the commodity economy, in the social process as a
whole. The materialistic-historiographic is Adornos reference to
Benjamins Marxist approach. For Adorno, this necessitated the rejection
of Benjamins preference for citing economic features to which Adorno
gives no more weight than adjacent [to] the social history of
[Baudelaires] time while Benjamin treated them as integral. Because
mediation by economic factors is diffused throughout society, as Marx
argued, specifically in relation to the system of production (1986a: 107109),
it does not follow that mediation of particular phenomena either must
have an immediate and perceptible effect on the social totality, nor does it
follow that such mediating factors cannot have such an effect. This is what
we have referred to in chapter two as the general domain of mediation
economic activity governing the relations of capitalism that will effect
particular phenomena, but the immediate visibility of those specific effects
are, at the same time, somewhat obscured by that very generalization.
What strikes the attentive reader is the interest Benjamin has in contextualizing the Second Empire essay within a broad array of events and
political concepts rather than images. Images can be drawn from what he
writes, but the events and concepts he employs are weightier in their use
in materialist analysis. In this he has clearly moved away from the theoretical outline of the first chapter of the Trauerspiel. While we may not
1In another translation of the 10 Nov letter, (Adorno, et al., 2007c: 129) the phrase is
total social process.
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conclude that Benjamins connections in this essay are modeled strictly
on Marxs method, his work does not rely on the interpretive model he
initiated nor from Adornos adoption of it. Rather his sociocritical method
is grounded in an examination of concrete material conditions about
which Baudelaire wrote; it is comparative, providing a more complete picture of the atmosphere of the time through Saint Beuve, Hugo and others.
The comparative approach, nominal though it was, was intended to illuminate the atmosphere much like his concentration on objects in The
Arcades Project and an approach that avoided simply pitting one poet, or
one commentator against another, such as Marx, Engels or Poe.
Benjamin was implementing what he had argued in his 1934 talk, The
Author as Producer as an attitude toward literary criticism. There he
expressed a kind of tendentiousness, applicable to poetry as much as to
literary criticism, being able to make clear connections between
Baudelaires sympathies and his own illumination of them. The illumination is not the flash of a completed constellation as Adorno would have it
but is established by weaving concrete connections through historical
reality. The method exhibits a political tendency that need not be or result
in an expressed revolutionary commitment or resolution (Benjamin did
not, after all, consider Baudelaire to be a revolutionary poet) while it nevertheless may show evidence of an important moral relation to the working class. The political tendency is achieved, Benjamin argues, through the
process of specialization that links that tendency to the quality of the
work. The specialist of this kind develops out of the employment of his or
her artistic interest, writing for a purpose adapt[ing] this [productive]
apparatus [of artistic quality] to the purposes of the proletarian revolution (Benjamin 1999c: 780). This is a mediating activity between the artists talent, technical skill and interest, and its development or
transformation into revolutionary practice. Such mediating activity is significant because of the potential for positive results (sublation) that may
emerge from the partial settling, at least, of a contradiction between class
origin and political tendency.
Throughout the Second Empire essay Benjamin cites economic
changes that mediated transformation in public activity, literature (popular and belles lettres), political interventions, and the structure of urban
space the development of modernity and the task of shaping it that
Baudelaire gave to himself (Benjamin 2003a: 49). New forms of advertising
and abbreviated writing such as the physiologies and short news items
were mediated in their development, in part, by changes in the pattern of
daily life the boulevard press, the stretching of daytime activities into
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Although Adorno claims that he will demonstrate the error of
Benjamins analysis, there is little of this; his criticisms are intended to be
sufficient and self-explanatory, especially his criticism of Benjamin
directly relating historical occurrences to Baudelaires poem that demonstrates the absence of mediation. Adornos complaint against the
materialistic-historiographic and his projection of its distastefulness
upon Benjamin characterizes the relationship as purely causal; that is,
unmediated. In short, Adorno erroneously imputes to Benjamin a cause
and effect relationship typical of vulgar Marxism: capitalism causes wine
tax causes poverty causes despair causes waste.
The perceived absence of mediation that is at issue for Adorno is but a
cover for his attitude toward Benjamins choice of Marx as a resource and
the clarity of the complex of the poets imagination and emotions, and the
critics (Benjamins) analysis. These concretizations are indicative of
Adornos later conclusion that an integral relation between theory and
practice is impossible without theory suffering a loss of status. While
Benjamins analysis could be further developed by extending the mediations, what is there makes Adornos comment all the more suspect, that
Materialist determination of cultural characteristics is possible only
when mediated through the process as a whole (Adorno 2003: 101). Adorno
himself refrains from such clarity relying instead on the story he constructs to support his constellations.
There are other examples of the use of such mediation both in terms of
its general domain and its specific effects. As noted earlier, Lowenthal
argued for the publication of the Second Empire essay based on its own
significance alongside Motifs (Lowenthal 1989b: 74). His own work on
Knut Hamsun (1986a) (published in 1934) exhibited literary criticism in
the ideological connections between Hamsuns novels and fascist ideas.
Lowenthal set up his critique, in part, as a constellation made up of solitude, the middle class, the relation of the sexes, anti-intellectualism, and
so on. Unlike Adorno, he made connections through the internal relations
of these components that were evident or implied in passages from
Hamsuns work and the underlying ideology that informed the basis of
National Socialism. Lowenthals analysis is deeper than Benjamins
Second Empire but in an excursus to a later essay on Shakespeares The
Tempest (1986b, 1986c) he takes a form closer to Benjamins. There
Lowenthal correlated characters, speech and social functions in the drama
with changing and developing class forces. In his Excursus on Act I,
Scene 1 (1986c), he used the characters and their interactions to argue that
Shakespeare was demonstrating the historical movement from feudalism
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man of leisure to a drunken cab driver and Baudelaires Cain and Abel
(Benjamin 2003a: 910). Benjamin makes the connection between Cain as
the ancestor of the disinherited in Baudelaires poem and de Cassagnacs
writing on the origin of the proletariat. He did not know whether
Baudelaire was aware of the latters work but he believed Marx was
and had parried de Cassagnacs racial theory in Capital, citing the
proletariat as the peculiar race of commodity-owners (2003a: 910; Marx
1967: 682). Further, Benjamin suggests that from between the lines of
Satanic Litanies Blanquis head emerges in Baudelaires own radical
rejection of those in power (2003a: 56), but this is only partly an independent correlation of Benjamins since he was aware that Baudelaire had
drawn Blanquis head on a manuscript page.
Benjamins approach is complicated by what can be seen as residual
influences of his theological and allegorical methods in earlier works, as
well as his surrealist pursuits and his own excursus into the attraction of
corresponding elements in nature and history.3 These approaches share
the problem of excessive directness of art and its meaning, and connections, inherent or imputed, to aspects of reality. For this and other reasons
his efforts tend to tease and run from a systematic analysis that he desires.
Despite a degree of eclecticism, Benjamin is here and elsewhere committed to a critique of capitalism and its dominance in and over culture. That
he is hesitant then committed then hesitant again may have been an
aspect of his personality, but the Second Empire essay offers an amalgam, not a compromise of these forces or motivations to produce a critique of Baudelaire that does not avoid the broader historical context.
The doctrine of the superstructure is attractive for Benjamin, in part,
because of his commitment to observation. The perceived unmediated
observances aside for the moment, the superstructural component that
drove this commitment was consciousness. Such texts as One-way Street,
A Berlin Childhood, Moscow, Marseilles and others concern the
intention behind the use of sight and hearing, the intention to be aware
and to be conscious of hidden relations. At first blush and beyond, these
are potential or actual everyday occurrences that could benefit in their
comprehensive development in consciousness from a clear analysis thatis
secondary to observation itself through Marxs method. Notwithstanding
its ultimate value, a ready-made orthodox approach need not accompany
the everyday occurrence of observation and correspondence. On the
2Marx did not cite de Cassagnac specifically.
3See On the Mimetic Faculty.
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delineated and drawn together in consciousness to affect specific relations
but which also retain the full sense of totality. Totality gives us the complex of relations and determinants, dialectics provides the means by which
these can be understood to interact in contradiction and sublation. Here
mediation needs to be discussed in terms of its quality. In our expression
of mediation as reciprocation, mediation occurs by way of the interaction
of the qualities inherent in two phenomena, the sublation arising directly
out of this relation. But we also noted that mediation has a cognitive component in that the analyst or activist can move or shape determinants, as
contingent relations or by bringing them together into a contradictory or
antagonistic relation as an intervention. Like the intervention of Hegels
plough something may be introduced into a previously oppositional relation but which has initially arisen as a result of that opposition, particularly the consciousness and imagination of the subjects involved.
However, in Adornos view, Benjamins work lacks mediation altogether. Benjamin relates Baudelaires work to contextual features of his
time as correlations, as Arendt remarked, but not with a sense of determinism. Adornos orientation to mediation as something that can be illuminated only through the total social process disallows correlation of
such particulars. He effectively says that Baudelaires ragpicker poem
could not be mediated by Napoleons wine laws, or by the enjoyment of
drunkenness, or the virtual insulation, as Marx suggested, of every town
bound by a series of customs booths. Benjamin appears to be saying that
out of a particular instance of history and experience we can see that the
ragpickers wine is made from the fruit of Napoleons law; that the law, the
custom booth, the ragpicker himself emerge from and are mediated by
particular historical and economic circumstances, oppositions created by
the wine laws and the market relations of capitalism, and from which no
intervention but the salve of cheap wine emerges. Benjamin, as we have
noted, includes many aspects of the economy and the superstructure, but
he does not name them all, to do so would reduce the poets and the critics imagination to a shopping list, and would be over-concretized, an
issue about which Adorno was also concerned.
Benjamin writes to develop the correspondances and correlations into
more than an image.
When the new industrial processes gave refuse a certain value, ragpickers
appeared in the cities in larger numbers. They worked for middlemen and
constituted a sort of cottage industry located in the streets. The eyes of the
first investigators of pauperism were fixed on him with the moot question:
Where does the limit of human misery lie? (Benjamin 2003a, 8)
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Many more instances of Benjamins style could be cited, but the historical
element and intention behind the mediations he chose were almost
entirely beyond Adornos interest.
Baudelaire, poet of despair though he is, unwittingly ends up with
Benjamin as the champion of his subjects. The poet, uncertain of what he
can do against the pressures of reality, must nevertheless provide some
explanation in poetic form for the thoughts and actions of the people
about whom he writes. His consciousness will allow him to go only so far,
to a correspondence with another aspect of reality, but not beyond. The
critic, Benjamin, takes us there, rescues Baudelaire from himself and saves
us from the poets limitations. He does not tell us that the half-drunk family is one devoid of the intellectual capacities that the pro-fascists audience lacked, according to Adorno. Nor does he tell us that such a family
will inevitably appear on the barricades when such a need is driven to the
surface. But Benjamin does tell us where the possible connections to consciousness are: How did the tax laws come about?, What is the nature of a
covered walkway in modern life?, What led the Bohme to see only a
flawed memory of themselves in the ragpicker?
Hegelian Mediation
In Hegels discussion of Lord and Bondsman in the Phenomenology his
expression of mediation differs from that of the later Science of Logic
in which the example of the plough is located. In the Phenomenology,
one expression of mediation is in terms of reciprocation, interaction
out of which sublation occurs. This expression merely operates without
the intervention of a distinguishable, quasi-independent third element;
mediation in this case is the interaction between two entities. Hegels
comment was noted in chapter two, Each is the mediating term to the
other (1977: 112). Notwithstanding the mediating interventions that
come about historically Hegels plough or the intervention of political
parties through their slogans or actions in-itself the relation between
master and bondsman is one of opposition, yet their relationship is constructed and mediated through the changes brought about and actively
manifested by the relationship of each to the other. The lord is the consciousness that exists for itself [but] is mediated with itself through an
other consciousness. Developing consciousness as he does, the bondsman is nevertheless held in subordination. One has mastery over his
existence, the other does not (1977: 115). Each mediates the other existing
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as an immediate being on its own account only through this mediation
(1977: 112). In Hegels terms, the mediation of one with the other is transformative in that each does to the other what it does to itself. In this
unequal relation the entity that was and remains master nevertheless discovers its dependence on the other who, through the transformative
mediation of the two, has become an independent consciousness in
relation to and in opposition to the master. The roles are by no means
reversed but are nevertheless changed in relation to each other.
What caused the change? At one moment it is the masters capacity to
relate to the other both immediately and mediately; at a subsequent
moment the master recognizes that dependence is no longer exclusive
to the bondsman yet the bondsmans oppression, while still secure, is not
the same oppressive state as before but a bondage seeded with a degree
of self-consciousness, the potential for independence. The central element of this transformation is the bondsmans self-activity, at one time
the fear of the master that was the beginning of wisdom, but later the
self-activity of the bondsmans own labor that forms and shapes the
thing in the environment of this pair and, ultimately, the consciousness
of each (Hegel 1977: 118). Inherent characteristics of each of the lord and
bondsman mediate the relation as consciousnesses, and, beyond Hegel,
as social qualities bound to economic relations. Hegels lord subordinates
the bondsmans human qualities, except for that of physical labor; the
bondsman is made an object of the masters needs which can only, in a
Marxist sense, be expressed by consciousness in social terms.
Simply put, the master brings to the relationship resources of land,
capital and the need for labor; the bondsman brings his capacity to labor
and his desire for survival. Even in the simple relation of master and servant the complex of determinants for each is greater than we have noted
here for illustrative purposes. In any case, the needs or desires of the master are readily apparent and determine the origin of the relation. On the
other hand, the servant, unable to liberate himself but being a selfconsciousnessin the broad sense works on the relation, shapes his
self-consciousness and his potential liberation through labor, the positive consequence, of this mediation (Hegel 1977: 115116, 118119), the sublation of the contradiction, by no means the absolute resolution of it.
There is an element in this relation of self-activity that Marx would later
develop, and while Hegel recognizes the limits to this, the negative consequence of the mediation, fear, and the contradictions in the relation,
cannot be resolved in a way that results in an end to the servants social
condition.
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external to oneself or ones other in the not-yet, but developing self-consciousness, or each mediating the other.
Adornos Mediation
One of the problems that arises in trying to discern Adornos use of mediation is the virtual absence of a place for labor and consciousness as we find
in Hegels pair, unified in their opposition. One instance of this problem is
in his discussion of Hegels concept of spirit where it is understood by
Adorno to be society and social labor. These are not completely invalid
understandings of Hegels concept but to arrive at these leaps must be
taken at the expense of not only Hegels complex meaning but the material site of that meaning namely, the action and development of the individual. For Hegel, the in and for itself that is the essence of being, which
becomes conscious of itself, is spirit, ethical substance, the unmoved
solid ground and starting point for the action of all (1977: 263264).
Spirit, then, is consciousness in general which embraces sense-certainty,
perception, and the Understanding, in so far as in its self-analysis Spirit holds
fast to the moment of being an objectively existent actuality to itself, and
ignores the fact that this actuality is its own being for self. (Hegel 1977: 264)
Consciousness in general covers much ground so, clearly, social labor and
eventually through development, society, can be manifestations of spirit.
Adorno (1993: 17, 18) cites Hegels definition of spirit in the Encyclopedia
as essentially active, productive and affirming Marxs (1975b: 333) view of
Hegels consciousness of the objectivity of labor. In the context of the discussion immediately above, the bondsmans labor, the masters need of
it and the active relation of the two beings arising from their relation,
we have an example of spirit as active, productive.
But Adorno leaps from the introduction of spirit to spirit as social labor
to spirit as society neither of which are given a developmental context of
consciousness. In Marxs terms social labor is active within a social division
of labor, it is not labor for the immediate use-value for the laborer (Marx
1985: 121122). Adornos leap cannot accommodate Spinozas complex of
thinking and extension as one (1949: 8384, Prop 7). Adorno sees society
as spirit to be a change to an alien experience within Hegels philosophy,
a shift to something of a different kind incompatible with the sense of
Hegels philosophy (1993: 19). Spirits identification with society does
not fully develop the mediating factor of labor which, as Adorno says, is
what humans use to reproduce the life of the species, things that come
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Adorno suggests that this intolerance was historically dictated by the
threat of nature (1973: 172) and the Dialectic of Enlightenment indicated
the totalitarian culprit in his own period was the culture industry. The
former solidifies his emphasis on identity and identity-thinking. In fear,
bondage to nature is perpetuated by a thinking that identifies, that equalizes everything unequal (Adorno 1973: 172).
But here Adorno steps further back, to the threat of nature, than is
required. The reference backward that is necessary is to the origin and
development of self-consciousness. That is, itself, an opposition to an earlier subordination to the master who believes he has built himself from
nature and from god, to all subordinations between and beyond them. If
from his objective idealist position, Hegel can discern the bondsmans
potentiality and the material conditions from which it will arise, it is
incumbent on Adorno to draw this forward to the wine-drinking workers,
the ragpicker and the trumpeter of Negro music. Each is mediated by the
total social process of the general domain of mediation but also by way of
particulars of it: Napoleons wine laws, the refuse of the marketplace, and
the immediacy of the cabaret. Hegel is cognizant of the servants potential; his analysis recognizes the subordinate subject through its development of the self-consciousness of its actions in relation to the master that
are the counterparts of the masters actions toward him. Adorno requires
us to take a step backward from the resistance within consciousness
where Hegel recognized the fruit of an objective idealist relation at the
threshold of materialism he was vaguely aware of, yet marginally enacted.
The point is that the concepts Adorno uses must also be subject to his and
Hegels inquiry: how much do concepts adhere to the reality they purport
to define and what moves them away from adherence to their definitions;
or, in other words, makes their definitions larger and more complex?
If we take, for example, dominance and subordination, personify them
as master and bondsman, respectively, and denote the two as a relation, it
becomes a task to understand how each of them, and their relation ceases
to be, in and of itself, what it appears to be, or by what is immediately
known about it. The bondsman is an alienated being and exists in conditions of alienation; the bondsman is the individual manifestation of a condition of the total social process. It is the bondsmans relations with the
master that are key to overcoming this condition, not by eliminating such
conditions but using them as a springboard for the development of selfconsciousness. Hegels narrative is of one master, one bondsman; it is both
the social condition of alienation and the relations developed by this or
that bondsman that will shape the development. (Of course, the caveat
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here is that the bondsman acts without the benefit and power of a broad
organization of bondsmen.) That development occurs, in part, as a consequence of the greatest problem for the human subject, the fear of death
(Hegel 1977: 117), a fear that emerged from the goal of master and servant
alike, that each seeks the death of the other (1977: 113), not merely as the
physical death of the body, but the death that is a life without recognition
as an independent self-consciousness (Hegel 1977: 114), an emphasis on
the need for the other.
On this point of mediation as a total process and/or the effect of particular phenomena, Lowenthal argued that the social process in its totality exploited by fascist agitators, explained the social malaise that was a
blend of [d]istrust, dependence, exclusion, anxiety and disillusionment (Lowenthal and Guterman 1987: 2426). He also several times cited
this as a problem for the individual psyche. Social malaise as a general
domain of mediation may engulf the society as a whole creating a backdrop for the environment of interaction that promotes the decision to
attend a fascist rally or read an antisemitic newsletter. But such a backdrop to all possible social activities does not result in all possible members
of society making the same decision. The individuals reaction to, acceptance or rejection of distrust, dependence and so on, whether singularly or
in association with others, confirms the effects of these conditions on the
distinct psychological and social conditions of members of the population. Thus, the critic must push him or herself to inquire as to the possible
mediations of the potential for reaction or for progress.
Hegel would like to give the relation between master and servant more
meaning for potential development of each than Adorno does for the
makers of jazz music. Hegel would consider the corporate executive and
the trumpeter as a pair that possesses that component of the masterbondsman relation that is the refusal of each to recognize the other
beyond the categorical and superficial meaning of what each is to the
other, but which, in the end, they are forced to recognize because of their
co-dependence. However, Adornos relation of the jazz musician and the
popular music audience, with the personnel of the culture industry, does
not consider how they may begin to act on their mutual struggle for recognition and to achieve self-consciousness, a struggle that is both within
each and between them. The central element in such a relation is the
interaction of a mediating element: work [that] forms and shapes the
thing. Hegel continues:
The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence.
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This negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the
individuality or the pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the
work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way,
therefore, that consciousness, qua worker comes to see in the independent
being [of the object] its own independence. (Hegel 1977: 118)
It is this process, and the resulting relative autonomy achieved, that moves
the concepts off their respective pedestals of reified meaning and shows
them to be alive and, themselves, integral to the struggle for recognition.
In the final chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment the authors discuss the historical development of the ego, projection.
The real ego is the most recent constant product of projection. In a process
that could only be completed historically with the powers of the human
physiological constitution, it developed as a unified and at the same time
eccentric function. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1982: 189)
Mediation for the purpose of reconciliation takes place as conscious projection and self-reflection (Horkheimer and Adorno 1982: 189). Here the
cognitive element in mediation is evident. In Negative Dialectics, selfreflection is cogitation (1973: 148), the meaning of which includes both
reflection and mediation; thus, to reflect is to think and to mediate,
through thinking, ones relation to an object or to the historical element of
the ego. Now, if we return to Adornos criticism of Benjamin for failing to
see that mediation takes place through the whole social process we must
wonder why the latters individual objects or historical developments are
insufficient, that is, are not capable of making the connections that lead to
the whole social process, when the ego of Horkheimer and Adornos presentation begins with a meaningless sensation and overcoming the
whole of nature to return to the full productivity of thought. I grant that
the full productivity of thought may envelope the social process as a
whole. But, the key point here, I believe, is the qualification, if thought
proceeds positivistically. If we are correct about the dialectical interrelations of phenomena and, indeed, our remarks about the superstructure
we can connect the whole social process if we follow the internal relations
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that link the phenomena; this appears to be what the authors have done
in this case, and to find the difference from Benjamins efforts in the
Baudelaire essay, one would have to locate the positivistic elements of his
connections mediated by the wine laws, economic conditions, and so on.
Further, building on his comment in Negative Dialectics on the impossibility of a meaningful relation between theory and practice, Adorno
seems to entrench that impossibility with his distinction between immediate occasions and mediating causes. He does so by constructing constellations touching on historical events from the French Revolution to the
Second World War, the rationale for slum clearing (bombing German cities), the development of stronger families, colonialism in Latin America,
and other factors. The motive appears to be to illustrate the fate of deeper
causes regardless of which side of the political spectrum they may arise.
Occasion and mediation in his discussion are not to be considered outside the whole social process. While it remains true that on one level such
moments [occasions] derive their potency from that historical entirety
alone (1973: 302), the potency that Adorno claims of those moments is
given no historical ground. It serves, largely, to justify the unfettered
(Kracauer) negativity of his dialectics, that it would free dialectics from
[the] affirmative traits that emerge from negation (Adorno 1973: xix).
Because Adorno refuses a necessary link between theory and practice
his concept of mediation remains only at the theoretical level and rarely,
such as in the case of the ego and self-reflection, explores what is mediated and the process of it. This approach disallows the specifying of a single mediating element that would identify and trace backward the
formation and development of phenomena until it can assemble the
internal relations that form the totality. Further, it disallows the critic
space to impute the motivation and outcome of cogitation as a choice of
mediating elements. It must be clear that this choice is neither individualistic nor relativistic, but permits the critic to begin analysis at, or continue it from any point with the examination of a concept.
Adorno holds that mediation lies in a materials history, the closest he
comes to acknowledging something like the philosophy of internal relations. For idealism, the inner history is immediacy; for materialism, it is
the measure of the immediacy in being (1973: 52). The becoming of an
object, like pure negativity, is never settled until its dissolution and therefore the language of the concept the concept itself is not capable of
completely or continuously representing the object; neither language nor
the concept is ever adequate to reality. This, writes Adorno, applies to
Benjamin, whose use of concepts tends to an authoritarian concealment
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of their conceptuality (1973: 53). The implication is that Benjamin
thought what he was seeing in his concepts, what he was seeing in history,
was immediate truth, unmediated by the becoming of reality from
beneath the cover of inadequate language. A closer examination reveals
otherwise.
Adorno is theoretically correct about the limits of language with respect
to its incapacity to lock-in and continuously, accurately, identify a moving
object. But like the perpetual negativity of his dialectics, he thus renders
the use of language inert, for the constant reminder of its inadequacy
leads to muted voices and stalled practice, people hesitant to speak for
fear that reality has overtaken their word. Like his negative center of dialectics, practice can never catch up to the uninterrupted insufficiency of
the spoken or thought word that momentarily tells the tale the speaker
spoke or the thinker thought. Adornos perspective here as elsewhere is
dialectical up to the point of its reification as theory in fear of practice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
point at which social conditions and human agency can move toward
and attempt that negation. The logical possibilities of a new set of relations must be fully developed through mediation. We are not approaching dialectics as an abstract thought process alone, but as a process that
includes human subjects, their conditions and interests. Human subjects, were they to consent to a continuous, uninterrupted series of
negations would find themselves in a process of adjustment that
required an immediate transformation of their achievements; that is,
from an actual achievement to an immediate sense of its inadequacy. To
some degree, this is what happens in the everyday life of political challenge, but it is how the subject experiences change and challenge to
commitment as both satisfaction and desire for further advancement
and resolution that guides the material intervention of dialectical
thought. Time and social conditions must be considered which are, in
themselves, affirmations of movement; consciousness must be addressed
and developed where it can be. All this and more is implicit recognition
that the need to negate another contradiction is, if not inevitable, then
objectively probable. It is with the complexity and quality of the concept of change in dialectics that contests the separateness and rigidity
of formal logical thinking.
Further, it is possible that continuous negativity may lead to the perspective that the path toward development and/or dissolution is a linear
one. But a dialectical approach to the movement and development of
social reality would necessarily provide an understanding that while the
partial resolution of contradictions may appear as moving ahead, moving
forward, may in fact require that the path allows for movement sideways
and backwards. Positions change and once an advance is made from them
no full return is actually possible. This is what we have seen in Blochs
analysis of the German lower and middle classes before and through the
establishment of a fascist regime. But an attempt to return to a position is
not always a regression or a retreat. The loop from the linear path may
well be the recovery of the adequate resources necessary for forwardthinking and the positive moment of a negation, however temporary that
moment should be.
Adornos argument in Negative Dialectics thus begins:
Negative Dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negations; the thought
figure of a negation of the negation later became the succinct term. This
book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing
its determinacy. (1973: xix)
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For Marcuse, it must become political (1960, xiii), its relation to practice
must become necessary and integral; not to do so is to consign thought and
practice to the unfree world (1960: xii), to the power of the given facts.
The negative in thought is directed against the facts upon which immediacy stands and thrives as an ideology. Thus, Adorno writes, Thought as
such, before all particular contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to
that which is forced upon it. But the revolt against being importuned
to bow to every immediate thing (Adorno 1973: 19) is not alone a condition of negative thinking for it is the interest, the conscious need to revolt
against it that moves thought toward a moment of sublation before it
moves to comprehend and then challenge a newly found contradiction.
Adorno suggests something of this when he writes that thinking is not
only spiritualized control of nature but also heeds a potential that waits
in the object (1973: 19). What is missing is some sense of the weight of this
perspective on nature and potential in relation to each other, but more
importantly the practical, mediating measures to be taken in the presence
of slumbering potential. One is always reminded that Adorno is writing of
his conception of philosophy as interpretation, a view inconsistent with
Marxs eleventh thesis.
The Positive Moment in Dialectics
In chapter two Hegels concept of positivity and the object of critical theory, positivism, were examined. We concluded that the distinction
between the two was substantial. Hegels positivity, certainly after it transformation into alienation and externality, could not have been, as Adorno
implied, the positivism Hegel fought against in his youth. Even Hegels
negative as an outcome of dialectics that is simultaneously a positive is,
for Adorno, an overly positive speculation (Adorno 1973: 1516). But
Hegels was a negative philosophy, for negativity constitutes the genuine
dialectical element (1969: 55, 442), but it must be recalled that his negative dialectical element (noted in chapter two) is also intended to bring
out and develop immanent connection and necessity (Hegel 1973: 81).
Hegels negativity was a counterthrust to any form of positivism (Marcuse
1960: vii, 27), to any common sense reliance on the facts as immediately
presented.
The meaning of negation is not the simple negative with respect to one
thing cancelling out another; nor does it mean doing away with or eliminating an other. Every kind of thing therefore has a peculiar way of being
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establishes itself as an authority over the subject as, for example, the
authority of commodity fetishism (Marx) or the culture industry (Adorno).
Alternatively, consciousness of this continuing condition of contradiction
may force a further intervention.
In Marxist discussions of dialectics the phrase most commonly used to
denote different but related phenomena is unity of opposites, which does
not necessitate identity where identity is taken to mean non-contradiction. We noted earlier Hegels important caution to the use of the term
unity, that unfortunate word, and his preference for unseparatedness
or inseparability (1969: 91). Notwithstanding this caution, the real issue
is the process, the historical moments of interaction where unity, unification, can retain the dynamism that is assumed in dialectics as a whole
but lies in the essence of the relation between or among phenomena
which is one of inseparability. In this sense, a degree of non-identity
within unity is retained. Unity does not imply a neutralizing or dissolution
of differences, nor does it necessitate that once dialectical unification is
achieved, differences will be subsumed entirely under the resulting entity.
Unity is a dynamic relation between phenomena, a relation that is more
or less active and which is realized through the subsequent sublation of
objects in opposition. Contradictory elements unify only in the sense
that they come into or are brought into a relation; the unity in contradiction exists until the moment of sublation (and residually thereafter),
which completes the dialectical relationship of the moment resolving the
contradiction but not foreclosing the possibility of another arising. Since
Hegels caution suggests all logical relations are already in existence, to
say that contradictory elements come into or are brought into relation
references the cognitive and/or practical act that heightens or sharpens
the import of a specific contradiction at a particular juncture. The moment
of sublation should be the foundation of the full expression of mediation
which, from a vantage point that sees what initially emerges from the contradiction, a choice is made to press one or another force against the
opposing elements that then moves the opposition toward some degree of
resolution. Adornos emphasis on non-identity is to continuously anticipate and guard against relations he believes are taken to be equivalent.
But in the emphasis on non-identity he comes close to reifying this concept as the only acceptable and permanent relation between phenomena
because, as we will discuss below, the concept of identity that should be
at the center of concern is the term that represents acquiescence to conditions and relations as they are. As an aspect of his negative dialectics,
it is the continuous negative relation that identity disallows. However,
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concept and reality, carries a legitimacy that is an offense against contradictions in reality.
Adorno recognizes the capacity of dialectics to reveal what is incompatible with a relation deemed to be one of identity. He locates the origin
of identity in thinking commanded by formal logic that tolerates nothing
that is not like itself, (1973: 142143) and, simultaneously, in the fear of
nature. Such an historical orientation to identity in formal logic makes its
use normative; where it is continuous beyond the epoch of history in
which its decline was pressed by Hegel and Marx, at least, it becomes
the false consciousness of the thinking subject. When Adorno states,
Contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity (1973: 5), his
reference is to the total identity of formal logic, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle. In formal logic there is no way of legitimately accounting for the conceptualization of a thing as both itself and
something other in its development, limiting the content of thought by
requiring its adjustment to the existent as primary and singular.
In the Enlightenment period, the dominant mode of thinking was
that of formal logic so much so that Enlightenment thinkers moved the
formation of bourgeois society by way of quantification (Horkheimer
and Adorno 1982: 7). Production and the division of labor in the development of capitalism are expressions of the formal logic that governs it
(Horkheimer 1982: 216). The goal to which traditional thinking is directed
is to the exclusion of antagonism and contradiction in thought (Adorno
1973: 149; Horkheimer 1974a: 167), the exclusion of non-identity. In traditional thinking the element of changeability or transformation through
contradiction is suppressed (Adorno 1973: 142). Thus, Adorno writes,
Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity (1973: 5). That is, nonidentity is not an aspect of the immediacy presented by logic in thought or
reality. If that is the case, non-identity must be discovered and developed.
Thus, if dialectics includes the excluded middle (the thing that is both
A and not-A, as discussed in chapter two) then the essence of dialectics is
its capacity to know change as a condition of an object or event given its
relations and the mediations to which it is subjected, the activation of
contingencies. Hegel remarks that the contradiction is the negative as
determined in the sphere of essence, the principle of all self-movement.
Implicitly referencing the principle of Zenos paradox, he remarks on the
similarities for the condition of external and internal self-movement: that
something is, in one and the same respect, self-contained and deficient, the
negative of itself (Hegel 1969: 440). However, the very notion of something
being and not being itself, begs the question as to what, or where, a thing
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sustained in their effect on the subordinate of bourgeois society. His position is that these effects are inevitable given the structure and conditions
of bourgeois society, and that these are insurmountable conditions. In
terms of his approach, the immediate appearance of reality and its effect
is an identity, a one-to-one correspondence: bourgeois society equals
domination which, in turn, equals oppression. It is an interesting proposition that has its parallels in liberal sociology such as W.I. Thomas definition of the situation: if situations are defined as real they are real in their
consequences.
Adornos use of identity in his dialectics contradicts Marxs in a way
that diminishes the dynamic character of the concept. The relation
between human beings and nature, for example, is a dialectical relation of
natural science and the science of man, two distinct categories nevertheless identical in the realization of the essential powers of human beings
in the objects of nature (Marx 1975b: 304). As Ollman points out, when
Marx uses the term identity, as in Theories of Surplus Value, for example, it
is a reference to a [different] expression of the same fact (Ollman 1993:
42; Marx 1968: 41011), and thus can only point to the dialectical integrity
of distinct objects or phenomena. This is possible, Ollman argues, because
of Marxs employment of a philosophy of internal relations to articulate
the unity of phenomena despite their distinctions or differences. Perhaps
Marxs most frequently cited instance of identity in this sense is that of
production and consumption, to which we have referred in the chapter on
mediation. However, this is not identity simply put; rather it is identity in
difference, or as Marx put it later (1968: 505) it is the unity of these two
phases, production and consumption. It is possible to see this if one
accepts two aspects of Marxs method: internal relations of phenomena
and totality. With respect to the former, Ollman argues that there must be
a commitment to view parts as identical even before they have been
abstracted from the whole. With respect to totality, differences discovered in the components of phenomena do not contradict the initial
assumption of identity, that each part through internal relations can
express the same whole (Ollman 1993: 43, emphasis added). The flexibility offered by the relations of Marxs categories indicates that any one
aspect of reality is integrally related to others. In order to retain the whole,
Marx requires the totality of relations, the abstraction of components
to discover their distinctions from others, even while they retain their
identity, their potential unity in difference, with all other components of
the whole. Marxs concept of identity is no absolute, rigid or reified concept, but one that retains its dialectical relations, its internal relations, its
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presents itself initially; that is, the mystery is the expected form of the
observation and experience of the commodity. The resolution of the mystery is clearly detailed in the commodity chapter of Capital as is the observation and inadequate understanding of the commodity as demonstrated
by Barbon, Smith, Ricardo and others. Additionally, Marx notes that circulation appears to be simply a never-ending process: commodity exchanged
for money, money exchanged for commodity ad infinitum; the immediacy of appearance is central to his exposition. It is, however, quite incorrect to proceed as do the economists: as soon as the contradictions of the
money system emerge suddenly to focus only on the end results, forgetting the process which mediates them, seeing only the unity without difference, the affirmation without the negation (Marx 1968: 132).
Although he alludes to false consciousness in some places in his work
(e.g. 1973: 52, 171172, 186, 302) Adorno does not explore this problem; it is
evident from discussions in chapters five and six that this is considered an
insurmountable condition. In discussing identity in the context of capitalism and its mode of production, one must consider the importance to
capitalism that its subjects appropriate the exchange of commodities as a
legitimate identity of one for the other. Similarly, one must consider that
among the most efficient skills useful for production and one that is
among the most socially stabilizing elements of capitalism is a diminished
quality of consciousness, a consciousness that does not or chooses not to
fully comprehend the character of capitalist relations, a consciousness
that is content with the immediate satisfactions provided by work and its
remuneration, and which accepts that radical, long-term social change is
not feasible. Such a diminished quality of consciousness is the essential
meaning of false consciousness. False consciousness, where it exists and
it does not exist universally is a mental component of labor power and is
as vital to capitalism as any muscle or brain power, or any specialized
knowledge of machinery and technology.
That social classes are major expressions of social development requires
us to see erroneous, incomplete, and unsubstantiated views of social and
economic relations as class-conditioned (Lukcs 1971: 52). False consciousness is not a permanent state of the individual or the class as a
whole but a discoverable condition that can be altered. Alternatively, we
may see aspects of social reality reflecting accurate and complete understanding of the organization of society, at least with respect to objective
historical developments. Thus, to argue that a viewpoint regarding
exchange relations, for example, is an expression of false consciousness is
not simply a claim that another view is correct; to be a valid claim it must
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immanent in a tree, but a tree contains inherent qualities that make its
use in wagon-making valuable. Once it is known that flat boards can be
derived from a standing tree, its use-value in wagon-making also becomes
known. Different qualities of objects lend those objects to different uses.
Some species of cacti can stand as high and as thick as a useful tree for
wagon-making, but its wagon-making qualities are nil. Hence, Use-values
become a reality only by use or consumption (Marx 1967: 44). No one
with the remotest knowledge of the structural requirements of a wagon
would confuse the tree and the cactus for the purpose of wagon-making; it
is readily recognized and accepted that there is no equivalence between
the two for that purpose. An examination of these two objects shows they
are not equal in terms of strength, density and durability. The standard of
measure is a matter of convention (Marx 1967: 43); knowledge of commensurability requires knowledge of social relations as well as, in this
case, knowledge of the structure of natural objects. Thus, it is objective
knowledge of properties that becomes conventional strength and durability are standards by which we choose appropriate wagon-making materials; it is conventional that we decide that labor-time cutting the tree
and transforming the raw timber into lumber is the means by which we
will determine the economic value of the wagon. In this way we determine in actuality, not by imputing identity to the relation, that two things
are equivalent to each other precisely because of this conventional measurement. To emphasize the point, in reality objects can be equivalent in
terms of their economic value; to claim that they are identical because
one thing can be exchanged for another merely reflects reification and
false consciousness and ignores the origin and conditions of their possible
exchangeableness.
While some of what Adorno says about equivalence has a degree of
veracity in that it reflects only the alienated and reified condition of bourgeois society; it illuminates a problem at the level of criticism rarely rising
to the level of a thorough dialectical critique of capitalist society. What is
different is equalized. That is the verdict which critically determines the
limits of possible experience (Adorno 1973: 12). The references to Marx, in
Capital, indicate there is substance to this view. Commodity fetishism, reification, in reducing all relations to relations between things, is the expression of this reduction of qualities to quantities. But the solution to the
problem is not simply its presentation, a demonstration of awareness; the
question of conscious development of experience has yet to be answered.
For Adorno, the expression of exchange in the context of capitalism
concerns relations that are not merely economic but serve to buttress the
ideology necessary to repel recognition and consideration of contradictions in the reality of economic activity. Exchange accomplishes this by
shaping the manner and extent of peoples interest beyond the immediacy of the economic relations by which they manage everyday life. The
equivalence of things, commodities, relations in thought manifested by
way of exchange in the context of concrete economic activity serves also
to ensure the subjects acquiescence to the dominance of capitalist relations in terms of authority, inter-personal relations, and the subjects cognitive development and expression, as well as the class character active in
all such relations. Exchange relations accomplish this by way of identifying what is bought with what is sold; two entities exchanged are equal to
one another. The difference between the two commodities is subsumed
by the equivalence of their exchange values, or as Adorno would have it,
their identity via exchange value. The obvious elements of these relations
are the labor equal to an amount of wages, the exchange of an amount
of wages equal to a period of labor necessary for the production of a commodity. Consistent with Lukcs use of reification, exchange relations
under capitalism turns human beings into objects and creates, in turn,
false consciousness about the origin and organization of such relations.
Ultimately, the human subject becomes identical with this impersonal
exchange of commodities through its own commodification, the valuing
of each of the subjects marketable fragments: labor, time, needs, disposition, and so on. Identity in exchange relations is the form cognition takes
that provides the means of survival in the immediacy of those relations
despite their actual social and economic contradictions. But as a structure
it is dependent on the absence of the recognition of contradictions in
those relations, specifically in the equivalence of objects (commodities)
and activity (labor) thus appearing to the subject to be a necessary set of
relations sufficiently attractive to reduce the subjects interest in thinking
through the contradictions of those relations. To do so would be an
impediment to a stable experience in capitalism, but collectively might
put the survival of capitalism at risk.
Thus, exchange value as a concept covers the non-identity between
things, not only covering over their difference but, by obscuring or excluding the unnamed contradictions, it distinguishes the naming of their identity in exchange and the entire exchange relation as separable from other
aspects of reality. Marx alludes to the static character of identity-thinking
in his discussion of exchange relations by noting that people begin their
understanding of these relations at the end of the process; that is, at
the moment of the presence of the commodity, taking a course directly
202
chapter seven
Historically, the diffusion of the identity principle through economic relations constrains human development and reifies thought in its relation to
that development. Human activity is levelled by the barter principle,
negating individual spontaneities and qualities as helplessly dependent on the whole (1973: 178).
Adornos assumption here is that the singular factor of labor-time, identified by Marx as the measure of value, contains no divisions. If Adornos
assumption is correct, the relation of each laborer to his or her production, and to the objects of consumption (the producing and purchasing of
values), would be absolutely identical with the process of the exchange of
values his barter principle. This would, in effect, be a simple one-for-one
exchange, money in exchange for a commodity as well as for the labor
required for its production.
One could speculate on what moves Adornos Tausch closer to the connotation of barter rather than exchange. Given what we have said above
concerning his orientation to the masses and related issues, one notices
there is no division of labor, or status divisions, operable anywhere in his
discussion; there are no class divisions, only categorical capitalism, categorical cultural industries, and the categorical masses. Neither are there
divisions in what Marx called the productiveness of labour such as the
average amount of skill the state of science the social organization of
production among other things that qualify that singular measure of
value (1967: 47). How can exchange be seen as an exchange of equivalents
without also considering the possibility of these differing conditions?
Perhaps, Adornos performances (1973: 146) is an attempt to address differentiations in skill but that is not clear.
One of the most important conditions of production Marx was concerned about was the matter of surplus labor, that for which the worker
was not paid, or as he puts it, the extortion of unpaid labour. The value
contained in a commodity is equal to the labour-time expended in its production, and the sum of this labour consists of paid and unpaid portions
(Marx 1971a: 42, 4445). Thus, the standard of measure is retained but is
qualified by an economic and social condition, the social condition the
division of labor and classes that if treated as a mystery merely sustains
the valuation of commodities, whether objects bought and sold on the
market, and especially one of such exchangeables in this case, laborpower. In Adornos use, labor as the unconditional measure of the value of
commodities allows for the assumption of a convenient identity, equally
an imputation of false consciousness in the masses where the mystery of
the commodity like the mystery of fascist oratory is said to be incapable of
analysis.
He and Horkheimer argued that the exchange of gifts stands for the
principle of equivalence. Even where there is no one-to-one exchange of
gifts the presentation of a gift by one person earns a gift from the other at
a later time or indirectly through a gift to a relative or associate (1982: 49).
204
chapter seven
immediacy of the exchange act, an immediacy similar to that of false consciousness, to buying and selling in the modern marketplace. But such
appearance is a matter of consciousness which Adorno does not address
as a false but malleable consciousness.
Adornos equation of capitalist economic relations and those of barter
attempt to reinforce the identity principle which is, at this stage, the barter principle, Tauschprinzip. Marx confirms the similarity of the two with
regard to the introduction of money as the third element whether in the
barter system or in international trade (1986a: 80). Further, Marx is more
clear that the exchange value of a commodity expressed in money has a
special existence alongside the commodity (1986a: 79, 85); that is, it is not
directly and immediately identified with it, while Adornos concentration
on the subjects acquiescence to the identity principle in economic relations leaves little space for considering the distinction between money
and the commodity.
Adorno does imply that identity thinking and the inequality of existing
relations should be overcome. His position is worth quoting at length.
When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought,
we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only
a pretext. If no man had part of his labour held from him any more, rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking. This comes close enough to Hegel. The dividing line
from him is scarcely drawn by individual distinctions. It is drawn by our
intent: whether in our consciousness, theoretically and in the resulting practice, we maintain that identity is the ultimate that we want to reinforce
it or whether we feel that identity is the universal coercive mechanism
which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from universal coercion.
(Adorno 1973: 147)
206
chapter seven
CHAPTER EIGHT
CONCLUSION
Much of Adornos material that has been discussed here could not be considered his major works, with the exception of Negative Dialectics. But the
latter, as has been noted, does carry on the essential philosophical and
political orientation of some of his earlier work, work that may not be the
most important of his career but work that has garnered much attention
since the revival of critical theory by the New Left in the 1960s. The earlier
material, though some of it unfinished such as the Martin Luther Thomas
study, nevertheless provides a perspective of its authors consistent view
of such phenomena as jazz, popular music, the masses and provides
insight to Adornos perspective on the problems of capitalism. His methodological orientation, the agglomeration of aspects of reality into constellations, remains a problem as well for an unclear and essentially
subjectivist approach to philosophical and social analysis.
The focus here has been the way in which Adorno and others analyzed
aspects of modernity from a dialectical perspective. Some of those others
were his colleagues, others not, some his intellectual companions but
with significant differences. We must think here of Bloch and Kracauer,
particularly their approach to the encroachments of fascism, its historical
development, its relation to the masses.
What is missing or insufficient in Adornos work discussed here? The
enduring effect of his approach has been to provide a position from which
criticism of capitalism and its culture industries can be undertaken without an obligation to see within them some of the resources integral to the
movement and change that materialist dialectics can provide. That this
perspective is underdeveloped reveals only a rather superficial exposure
of capitalisms inherent contradictions, and at the same time it exposes
the absence of mediation to develop such contradictions to the point of
the sublation of them. When such an absence is evident in reality, it should
be regarded as momentary, historically speaking, as an instance in the
development of a consciousness and, therefore, the internal and contingent relations that would that would allow for the superseding of the contradiction. For Adorno, the absence is too often expressed categorically
as a permanent feature. That he consciously avoided searching out and
208
chapter eight
conclusion209
political action and social change among other things have been among
the matters of discussion here. Another issue is that Adorno devotes no
significant space and importance to consciousness, particularly its place
in the development of the individual and consequent social expressions.
I have noted earlier what I consider to be problematic leaps in his conception of Hegels spirit that virtually abandons the individual consciousness
for spirit as society and social labor. This means that the individual is left
without means by which to establish the kinds of relations necessary to
transcend the mentality Adorno ascribes to the masses. That mentality
may be real in the sense that Goldmann attributed to it, that it describes
what people actually think in particular circumstances at any point in
time. But such a position ignores what changes are likely to occur
(Goldmann 1977: 3233) given opportunities for self-development as well
as mediating interventions.
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INDEX
Adorno, Theodor passim
alienation36, 8687, 94, 97, 104, 118, 137
animals6869, 7374
astrology85, 124, 133, 136138
attitude toward others2527
barter203, 204206
Bilderverbot7782
concepts4, 9, 39, 80, 87, 150, 167,
193194, 206
consciousness4, 31, 67, 91, 98, 116, 125,
142, 149, 165167, 188, 205
constellations17, 20, 22, 28, 112, 157, 170,
174, 195, 207 See also method under
Adorno
culture industry1011, 18, 31, 74, 8386,
91, 96, 109, 111, 112, 118, 126, 150, 167, 168,
179, 190, 208
dialectics (including negative)12, 3, 4,
5, 7, 8, 12, 17, 21, 30, 33, 47, 62, 65, 67,
76, 87, 150, 153, 171, 172176, 179, 180,
184, 185187, 189, 191, 192, 193
equivalence94, 193, 194, 200201
fascism91, 97, 125, 140
fact140141
Hegel63
historical materialism62, 91
identity (identity-thinking)25, 8, 24,
29, 30, 32, 39, 47, 67, 154, 167, 174,
184195, 201203, 205, 206, 208
images9, 19, 63, 64, 67, 76, 7779, 81,
164, 208
immanent character3940
immanent critique6, 7, 92
interpretation (philosophy)1, 7, 12,
6164, 66, 68, 75, 77, 86, 176
jazz
commodity9395, 102
customers99101
obedience97
place of Blacks in102, 106
standardization9596
subjection of the masses9798
labor165, 166
Marxism91, 152
Martin Luther Thomas124125, 129,
132143
mediation151, 152, 154, 157, 161, 165171,
189, 207, 208
method6182
music91
popular92
serious92
symphonic116117
negative thought86, 172176
non-identity2, 5, 7, 8, 20, 2425, 3233,
46, 66, 69, 150, 174, 179180, 186, 189,
191, 193
ordinary thinking45
philosophy67 See also Adorno,
interpretation
positive moment4647 See also
dialectics
positivism50, 62 See also positivism
style1721, 84 See also Adorno, method
working class912, 112, 150
See also jazz, Negro music under
African Americans, Princeton Radio
Research Project
African Americans99101
musical influence90, 105111
Negro Music83, 89, 96, 98
alienation35, 36, 37, 4749, 8688, 9495,
96, 97, 101, 103, 104, 118, 130, 135, 137, 156,
164, 167, 175, 176, 182184, 195, 205
Allen, James S.28
American Federation of Labor (AFL)27
Anderson, Kevin128, 177178
antisemitism11, 14, 26, 120125, 130,
131132, 140, 143
Antisemitism Project, Institute for Social
Research120123
Appadurai, Arjun204
Arendt, Hannah152, 154, 158, 161
Arnold, Abraham J.78n5
Auschwitz125
authority4749, 118, 122, 127, 129, 130131,
137, 143
Babbie, Earl123n
Baldwin, Neil124
barter199, 202, 204 See also Adorno
Baudelaire, Charles12, 62, 151162
Becker, Helmut11, 117, 129
Benjamin, Walter14, 2526, 85
Baudelaire essays12, 151162
commodification156
220
index
concepts21
consciousness159160, 162
constellations22, 6162, 7577
mediation75
method155
modernity156, 160
radio117118
style1719
becoming34, 37, 41, 4244, 5053, 166,
170171, 172
being3, 24, 32, 35, 3742, 45, 50, 51, 57,
103, 109, 163167, 169170, 172, 176,
181182, 186
Bernstein, Richard J.10
Biale, David78
Blesh, Rudi99
Bloch, Ernst3, 14, 2324, 26
anti-fascist writings135, 144,
146148, 173
dialectics32, 33, 146
non-contemporaniety147148
philosophy7
style1719
Bologh, Rosalyn195
Bonosky, Phillip28
Bonss, Wolfgang12, 26, 143
Boyer, Richard O.28
Brecht, Berthold15, 2526, 152
Brodersen, Momme151
Bronner, Stephen Eric121
Browning, Christopher148n
Buck-Morss, Susan7, 12, 1415, 20, 29, 30,
63, 64, 66, 7073, 76, 84, 92, 152
Caccamo, Rita124n
Campbell, Jan26
capitalism1, 58, 911, 16, 109, 126, 145, 146,
154, 156, 157, 159, 161, 174, 182184, 186,
190, 196, 197204, 207, 208
Carlson, John Roy124
Ceplair, Larry139n
class conflict5960, 127
class consciousness10, 36, 104
Claussen, Detlev10, 11, 14, 24, 26, 82, 83,
84, 153
Cohen, Robert28
Comay, Rebecca80
commodification11, 13, 91, 93, 100, 104, 107,
119, 131, 156, 201
commodity5, 30, 64, 66, 70, 71, 84, 91, 93,
9496, 98, 101102, 105, 109, 110, 145, 154,
156, 159, 175, 179, 195203, 205
Communist Party (US)26, 27, 139, 149, 152
communists27, 28, 134, 191
index221
Genovese, Eugene D.106
Geoghegan, Vincent135, 146
Gerdes, Paulus41
Gettleman, Marvin E.28
Gilloch, Graeme143
Gioia, Ted106
Goldfarb, Michael81n
Goldmann, Lucien60, 189, 209
Goldstein, Leonard202
Gordon, Gene28
Gracyk, Theodore A.89, 91
Healey, Dorothy Ray139n10
hate propaganda120, 128
Hecht, Ben124
Hegel, G.W.F.
alienation35, 37, 4748, 49, 167, 176
being3, 34, 35, 40, 41, 163164, 165, 167,
169, 172, 181
becoming3, 34, 41, 4244, 50, 51, 166
concepts42, 48, 167, 169, 193
consciousness1, 8, 35, 57, 162163, 169
contradiction4445, 48, 128, 150, 163,
177, 178, 179, 186
determinate being3, 4245
dialectics1, 3, 43, 5051, 147, 176
externalization37, 4749, 177
fact34
formalism3233
formal logic32, 50, 184
identity8, 42, 50, 184
inseparability/unseparatedness
(unity)3940, 4243, 179180
intelligent reflection4546, 150
mediation42, 5257, 59, 161, 162165,
168169
objective idealism33, 41, 167, 172, 175
ordinary thinking45, 150
positive religion4749
positivity4650, 176, 177
rationality53, 128n9
self-consciousness35, 3742, 132, 163,
164, 166, 167168
speculative thought8, 32
sublation (aufhebung)44, 48, 51,
163, 182
Heidegger, Martin65
Herskovits, Melville J.89, 106
Herzog, Herta113
Hilberg, Raul148n
historical materialism15, 18, 62, 63, 76,
84, 91, 100, 108, 114, 118, 190
Hitler, Adolph25, 125, 138
Hoare, Quintin144n13
Hobsbawm, Eric89
Hobson, Walter92, 102, 105
Hodges, H.A.137
Holocaust13
Horkheimer, Max56, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
19, 22, 25, 26, 30, 31, 47, 68, 69, 74, 79, 81,
8486, 92, 94, 98, 111, 112, 114, 124n, 126,
129, 135, 143, 151, 152, 153, 169, 181, 185, 186,
191, 193, 194, 203, 204
Hudson, Wayne146147
Hurston, Nora Zeale101
Husserl, Edmund65, 72
identity See Adorno, Hegel
identity-thinking30, 32
Ilyenenkov, E.V.24, 32, 37, 72
International Ladies Garment Workers
Union115116
immanent critique67 See also Adorno
immediacy44, 50, 52, 58, 71, 83, 94, 98,
128, 137, 140, 141, 166, 167, 170, 174, 176,
178, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 195,
197, 201, 205
individual5, 31, 3437, 39, 40, 42, 45, 59,
100, 101, 103, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117,
121, 126, 129131, 133, 137, 138, 141, 145,
164, 165, 168, 183, 191, 197, 198, 202,
206, 209
internal relations1, 5, 25, 39, 43, 44, 46, 57,
58, 61, 63, 66, 69, 7273, 84, 87, 94, 105,
108, 157, 160, 169170, 178, 180, 185, 189,
192, 206, 208
irrationalism33, 125126, 127130, 133,
137, 141
Isserman, Maurice139n
Jackson, Mahalia99
Jameson, Fredric6870
Jay, Martin21, 22, 26, 7879, 124, 125
jazz83111
Jenemann, David14, 98, 102, 111, 116,
118, 132
Jewish Messianism8182
Judaism7782
Kalbus, Mark12
Kang, Jaeho143
Kant, Immanuel3, 8, 21, 43n, 67, 71, 117, 138
Kaplan, Judy28
Kater, Michael83, 9091
Kelley, Robin D. G.28
Kodat, Catherine Gunther106
Kolakowski, Leszek20
Korsch, Karl18
222
index
Kosak, Hadassa28
Kracauer, Siegfried26, 33, 86n, 88, 101, 121,
130, 135, 142146, 170, 172, 184, 207
Lanning, Robert10, 23n1, 128
Lapavitsas, Costas204
Lazarsfeld, Paul F.20, 112114, 123
Lee, Alfred McClung124
Lee, Elizabeth Briant124
Lenin, V.I.37, 60, 87, 144n12
Leslie, Esther15
Levine, June28
Lifshitz, Mikhail110
Lotz, Rainer90
Lowenthal, Leo14, 1920, 25, 121, 124, 125,
126, 129, 151, 158, 168
anti-fascist writings129132, 133, 135,
140, 157
Lubasz, Heinz12, 23n2
Lukcs, Georg16, 18, 23, 25, 29, 3435, 38,
41, 48, 51, 65, 7172, 104, 107108, 128
becoming42, 44
being40, 42, 44
irrationalism127128, 141
positivity49
Lynd, Helen Merrell123
Lynd, Robert S.123, 124n
MacDonald, J. Fred114, 115
Magonet, Jonathan78
Maimonides78
Mann, Thomas14, 147
Marcus, Judith15
Marcuse, Herbert9, 14, 34, 47, 121, 175176
dialectics8, 32
Markovi, Mihailo5, 8
Marquit, Erwin45, 5051
Marx, Karl5, 7, 25, 37, 47, 66, 153, 159,
alienation103, 110
art105106, 110
being/species being37, 39, 42, 103,
110, 183
commodity66, 70, 71, 94, 109, 156, 159,
179, 195200, 201202, 203, 205
consciousness8, 37, 74, 165
consumption5660, 107, 192, 200, 203,
205
determinations44, 65, 183
dialectics1, 43, 46, 51, 71, 172, 178,
179, 199
exchange/ exchange value55, 70, 84,
9495, 103, 182, 195200, 205206
exploitation100, 110, 182
human senses102103, 104105, 107
index223
Rose, Gillian15, 1920, 166n
Rosenberg, David139n
Rotenstreich, Nathan43
Sandmel, Samuel78
Sargeant, Winthrop96, 99
Scholem, Gershom75, 152
Sekles, Bernhard91
Seldes, George124
self-activity24, 28, 36, 163
self-consciousness3742, 44, 58 See also
Hegel, Marx
Seymour, David129
Shapiro, Linn28
Sherratt, Yvonne86
Sinclair, Upton116
Smith, Gerald L.K.129
Smith, Wonderful115
social change5, 8, 9, 11, 18, 23, 30, 31, 34,
35, 46, 67, 79, 91, 96, 172, 191, 197,
208209
socialism1, 2224, 26, 81, 83, 98, 101, 127,
144n12, 150, 183
Socialist Party (Austria)112
Solomon, Mark28
Somerville, John180
Southern, Eileen106107
Spinoza, Baruch165
spiritual production109110, 111
Starosta, Guido182
Steffin, Margarete152
Steiner, George129
Stepan-Norris, Judith28
Storch, Randi28
subjective9, 20, 37, 42, 62, 64, 6568, 71,
73, 77, 86, 103, 105, 121, 128, 138, 146,
148, 166, 185, 196, 198