Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth

In chapter 1 we sought to clarify what Adorno understood concepts to be. We found that concepts, for Adorno, were “idea-tools,” and their use was necessary due to our pragmatic commitment to self-preservation and the control of our environment. With this account in hand, we can now proceed to better understand why concepts, on Adorno’s view, stand between the world and us, and distort and obfuscate the truth. We will then have further finessed our model of what experience is, for Adorno, and why the structure of that experience prevents us from easily accessing truth. What we will find is that the tendency of concepts to obscure the world—to cause us to make epistemic and ethical errors in dealing with the world and indeed ourselves—will be importantly bound up with the way our society is. Indeed, we will find that the specific errors concepts exhibit are at the same time caused by and evidence of social problems, in Adorno’s view. It is absolutely crucial that we make sense of this. Art’s and philosophy’s being true is internally related, for Adorno, to their taking up a critical stance toward society. And this critical stance, as we will see, is often (in the case of art, is always) indirect, achieved through manipulation and criticism of concepts, experience, and forms of thought. So we must move to clarify and understand the interrelation between conceptual and social content, if we are to understand not only how art and philosophy can be true at all—we need a theory of concepts to have a theory of truth—but also how this truth can be somehow bound up with society as we find it. With these clarifications in hand, we can then turn to consider just what truth might be for Adorno, and more importantly how philosophy and art might hope to attain it.

As we have seen, Adorno believed that the conceptual mediation of experience was pragmatically necessary, rather than unqualifiedly necessary. Concepts were held to be working in service of heteronomous, pragmatic projects (self-preservation and its derivative projects), rather than in service of an autonomous drive toward truth. Given that, for Adorno, concepts mediate experience with a view to addressing the demands of self-preservation with which the subject is faced, this does open the possibility that the concept might mediate the object incompletely or in a distorted form. All that is required is the possibility that the object might have certain properties or potentials that are not germane or are harmful to the subject’s project of self-preservation. In such a case, the object would be communicated to the experience of the consciousness only insofar as it was pragmatically necessary; the other properties of the object would not be picked up or made manifest in experience. Adorno takes it that this possibility does in fact exist, and that it is realized in the present day. Concepts remain driven by self-preservation, and their self-preserving activities obscure the genuine constitution of objects.

This is Adorno’s position, and there is no shortage of problems with it. Not least of these is Adorno’s confidence that a historical account of the origin of basic conceptual distinctions (appearance and essence, cause and effect, and so on) gives us warrant for making claims about the contemporary use of complex concepts. Even if it were true that concepts were originally formed out of self-preserving projects, why should we think that this says anything informative about concepts today, especially given that many concepts appear to have little to no relationship to our self-preservation? These problems are important, and considering them allows us to see that Adorno’s account has enough flexibility to account for them (though we will have to do some reconstructive work on his behalf).

All this, however, presupposes that the fundamental move of the Dialectic—positing concepts as offshoots of pragmatic requirements—is cogent. But there is good reason to think that the account we delivered in chapter 1 is not cogent, due to its apparent clash with one other core commitment to be found in both Adorno’s aesthetics and his philosophy more generally. This other “core commitment” that causes such trouble is a presupposition that stands at the base of the entirety of Adorno’s work. Adorno relies on the idea that his analyses of phenomena belonging to various domains—including the philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic—draw out problems and criticisms that have universal validity. By this I mean he takes it for granted that they come out as true and binding on all members of society, regardless of their position, culture, or class. (This universal validity is relative to our sociohistorical location—Adorno accepts that conceptual problems change over time, as we will see. This universal validity obtains until sufficient changes in society or history occur that generate new conceptual problematics.)

Examples of this are not hard to find. For example, in Minima Moralia, we have the bullish assertion that a capacity for readily taking aesthetic enjoyment in one’s environment shows “resignation [of the] critical faculties and of the interpreting imagination inseparable from them.”¹ This putative quirk of the aesthetic faculty is not held to be a local feature of aesthetic experience specific to Adorno’s milieu, or even his country; it is rather asserted as a fact that obtains for all subjects. While Minima Moralia is often written with an eye to psychoanalytic issues, and so could be said to draw its confidence in the universality of its assertions from some fundamental psychoanalytic set of facts, the same cannot be said of, for example, Negative Dialectics. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno frequently analyses problems in the application of concepts. These problems are not merely specific to the philosophy in which they are found, but rather flag up problems that he thinks holds externally to the concept, universally, for all subjects in our time who wish to use this concept.

As an example of this, we can look to Adorno’s analysis of Kant’s conception of freedom. Adorno picks out a familiar difficulty with Kant’s conception of freedom, namely, that this freedom is incompatible with the phenomenal realm (as Kant himself concedes), and yet freedom cannot be allotted to the noumenal realm simpliciter without that conception of freedom losing its relevance to the subject: “To warrant freedom to empirical human beings as if their will were demonstrably free even in theoretical philosophy, in the philosophy of nature—this takes an immense effort on Kant’s part; for if the moral law were downright incommensurable to those people, there would be no point to the moral philosophy.”² This antinomy represents, in Adorno’s view, a suppressed strain in Kant’s philosophy. If freedom, the basis of autonomy and Kant’s moral law, is placed entirely in the noumenal realm only, then it ceases to have clear application to the phenomenal realm and becomes “incommensurable.” The moral law ceases to be practical reason, in Kant’s sense, as it cannot govern and intercede into the phenomenal realm, where moral law must be exercised. Kant, of course, is aware of this problem, and seeks to solve it by reintroducing freedom as a kind of compulsion. We are compelled to act “under the idea of freedom,”³ this compulsion, in Kant’s view, nonetheless amounting to genuine freedom. It amounts to freedom, in Kant’s view, as the laws that this compulsion effects are in parallel with those that a will “declared free also in itself” would set for itself. ⁴

In Adorno’s view this “turns [freedom] into a paradox; it comes to be incorporated in the causality of the phenomenal world that is incompatible with the Kantian idea of freedom.”⁵ The concept of autonomy becomes internally contradictory. We are compelled to assert the existence of autonomy in order to hold on to moral law and moral accountability. However, examination of the phenomenal realm (governed as it is, for Kant, by causal chains) demonstrates that this autonomy is an unsustainable ideal; there are strong determining factors that prevent the exercise of true autonomy. Yet again, we cannot simply comply with a deterministic model of agency—that which is best about human life (justice, morality) demands that we resist the reduction of agency to the determining relations of the phenomenal realm.

As a result, Kant’s conception of autonomy is at an impasse, and his proposed solution is not internally coherent, but rather paradoxical. This analysis of Kant, however, is not intended by Adorno to simply model some problems in Kant’s philosophy that happen to hold. On the contrary, he understands this incoherence to testify to the strength of Kant’s philosophy, and its capacity to model philosophical problems that hold with universal validity:

The paralogism that Kant’s theory of freedom entails is not merely, on Adorno’s view, a problem internal to Kant’s specific conception of freedom. The problem that Kant identifies corresponds, Adorno asserts, to “reality.” (This is the “metalogical” aspect of this philosophical problem.)⁷ And, correlatively, Kant’s problems with the proper conception and understanding of freedom and autonomy are not specific to him, but are rather an intrinsic feature of our thought about these issues now. The “antithesis” Kant identifies, then, is not “removable for thinking.” This analysis of Kant raises some concerns that will become germane. (What precisely does Adorno mean when he says “philosophy and society are interrelated” in philosophy’s “core”? How can he justify this?) For now, the important aspect of Adorno’s treatment of Kant is that specific philosophies are being mined in order to deliver analyses of concepts that hold universally, for all thinkers. By the conclusion of Adorno’s treatment of Kant, we are left in no doubt that the identified difficulty in reconciling freedom with the apparent determinations that the subject undergoes is meant to be an objective problem in the application of the concept. As such, Adorno is relying on the idea that concepts have, objectively, internal problems that now show up in the course of their application, regardless of who is putting the concept to use. ⁸ Accordingly, Adorno is here giving an analysis of a conceptual problematic that has universal scope; it is not limited to Kant himself, or to Kant’s contemporaries, but rather is held to be a feature of the application of this concept, for all users of this concept.

It is this kind of analysis, which terminates in universal-scope assertions about the employment and status of concepts, that stands in tension with the account of conceptuality given in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The account given in the Dialectic grounds the concepts applied, and the manner in which those concepts are applied, in the demands of self-preservation germane to the individual. We do not as yet have any reason to think that these self-preserving demands will be qualitatively identical across all individuals—what I must do to survive at this moment is plausibly different from that which an Alaskan survivalist must do. Accordingly, Adorno’s confidence both that all subjects will be equipped with the same concepts and that these concepts will be related in the same fashion is puzzling. There seems to be the clear possibility either that different subjects will acquire different concepts (since, unlike Kant, Adorno does not have a Metaphysical Deduction that can serve to limit the possible forms of judgment that can serve as concepts to mediate experience, and since there is also reason to think that Adorno has a more promiscuous account of what can serve as a category in the Kantian sense, as I will show), or that a subject may be in possession of the same set of concepts, but with the relations between these concepts generating alternative problematics to those traced in Adorno’s analyses. In short, then, there seems to be a justificatory shortfall. Adorno is confident that concepts, and the problematics internal to those concepts, obtain universally at given times. ⁹ Adorno’s theory of the concept (as elaborated in the last chapter) seems to stand in tension with this assumption; indeed, given the account in Dialectic, we should expect divergences in the concepts generated, just due to the divergences in the pragmatic structures in which individuals have to exercise their self-preserving drives.

Here is the central issue: Adorno’s account of concepts formed from and in the requirements of self-preservation implies a kind of conceptual relativism; it implies that concepts might differ in structure and relationships if the pragmatic structures in play differ across individuals. (If, counterfactually, a pragmatic environment required radically different concepts to be understood and manipulated—suppose it exhibited radically different causal and temporal ordering—then per Adorno’s account we would expect radically different concepts to be formed in response.) Why should we not think that more fine-grained differences than this could also be possible in response to more fine-grained differences in pragmatic context? However, this relativism about concept formation does not seem to cohere with the universal validity Adorno presupposes his analyses have—that they hold as true without qualification, for all reasoners within the same sociohistorical context.

Addressing this issue will be a surprisingly complex task—Adorno relies on a number of kinds of universal validity in his work that I should like to keep separate, as each requires a different kind of justification. The first of these kinds is his reliance on the idea that all subjects will be possessed of an identical set of concepts. For convenience, I will term this a conceptual set.

There is the further oddity that, while Adorno seems to think that conceptual sets are fairly robust and persist for long periods of intellectual history, the problems internal to that set are generated by metalogical influences and often change, without there being any change in the set itself. That being the case, conceptual set a at time t1 may have a flawless, internally consistent account of the relation between freedom and causality, whereas conceptual set a at time t2 may have acquired internal inconsistencies in the relation between those concepts. ¹⁰ The relationships between concepts, and the mutually antagonistic, contradictory character these relationships can take on, are understood by Adorno to be distinct from the concepts themselves, and to be sociohistorically determined. The existence of a conceptual set, together with its specific internal conceptual problematic, I will call a conceptual array.

The more fundamental kind of universality that Adorno makes use of, which I will address first, is the universality of conceptual employment. Subtending Adorno’s use of universal conceptual sets and conceptual arrays is his presumption that concept use and, correlatively, all concepts themselves are determined by the desire for self-preservation. The account given in support of this in Dialectic of Enlightenment was certainly cogent, if unusual, but nonetheless appears to be linked to a historically specific event—namely, some original “cry of terror” undergone in the distant past. It is not clear why this historical event should have any explanatory value when describing contemporary concept use.

It does not help matters that Adorno and Horkheimer phrase their account as applying to “primitive man,”¹¹ but then nonetheless extend this account across all conceptual thought up to the present day. The manner in which they extend this account is quite troubling. For example, “The primitive experiences [the] supernatural…. The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. The doubling of nature into appearance and essence… springs from human fear.”¹² In referring to the relationship between horror and holiness, the authors are here referring to their thesis of the continuity of contemporary thought and science with primitive religion. In either case, they claim, the incomprehensible features of experience that cannot be captured and synthesized by concepts are rejected in favor of a rational consistency that excludes these experiential features. ¹³ Science shares with primitive religion a horrified rejection of those features of experience that cannot be captured by the consistent application of universals. In the quotation above, Adorno explains this link between primitive religious behavior and modern thought by claiming that the historical event that occasioned primitive religious behavior “permanently” linked reason to this intolerance of unsystematizable phenomena. This seems to be a genetic fallacy.

The phylogenetic register of Adorno’s account makes it very difficult to take seriously and, notwithstanding the force of several of the historical analyses made elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment and other works, casts considerable doubt on the sustainability of Adorno’s approach. However, it is possible to rework this aspect of Adorno’s account into a more plausible ontogenetic, sociologically grounded position by means of following some of the implications of Adorno’s various commitments.

Although the Dialectic presents its argument in such a way that historical events appear to be phylogenetically fixing features of rationality, there is in fact much more support for understanding Adorno’s account in another way. Instead of seeing features of modern thought as caused by long-past historical events, we can see them as drawn from present-day features of consciousness that importantly re-create certain features, processes, and problems that also arose in primitive consciousness. In other words, we can understand the argument as ontogenetic, tracing intrinsic patterns of rational development and formation in consciousness. (Correlatively, we will therefore also see the Dialectic as substantially proposing an ideal rather than a real history of the generation of thought.)

The support for such a reading can be found in thinking again about what the account in the Dialectic purports to show. The Dialectic bases its account on the thought that the primitive consciousness was devoid of “dialectical” concepts (that is, devoid of universals capable of judgmentally unifying discrete experiences of the same object). As such, conceptuality (in the conventional sense) is clearly not innate, as far as Adorno is concerned. If this is the case, then clearly no putative historical event is capable of making such concepts innate. As such, the initial problem that Dialectic of Enlightenment picks out (the terrifying discontinuity of experience that occasions the generation of universals) should be a fixed feature in the beginning of each subject’s life. The “primitive consciousness” ceases to refer to a historically fixed human being and instead refers to an early, undifferentiated form of consciousness present in the personal history of each human life.

In common with a fairly widespread fault with Dialectic of Enlightenment, the occasional crudity in argumentative elaboration presses the reader into speculatively attempting to go beyond the text and restructure the assertions made. This property of Adorno’s work in general, that it demands genuine philosophical work from its reader, has often (rightly) been understood an essential feature of Adorno’s philosophical practice. However, in the case of the Dialectic we often encounter not the kind of unity of rhetoric and argument (of the kind found in Negative Dialectics, and which I shall further explain in chapter 3), but rather a breakdown in the transmission of philosophical content to the rhetorical aspect of the work. (This kind of breakdown is again found in the “Paralipomena” section, which possesses neither the epigrammatic strength of Minima Moralia’s fragments, nor the deceptively meandering long-form arguments of Negative Dialectics or Aesthetic Theory.) This general thought, that the Dialectic is rhetorically imperfect at points, is reinforced by the fact that my reading of the Dialectic’s account as ontogenetic rather than phylogenetic is directly supported by the text itself in apparent contradiction with the phylogenetic claims it advances elsewhere. In favor of my claim that the initial encounter of primitive consciousness with transcendent, nonconceptual nature is repeated for every individual, rather than only occurring once in some distant historical past, we find the following claim: “Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self—the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings—was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.”¹⁴ “The identical, purpose-directed” form of consciousness is made possible only by the introduction of universalizable concepts. It is intriguing that at this point we are informed that the generation of these concepts is not merely epistemologically harmful (insofar as objects are concealed, even as these universals begin to mediate them), but in fact causes “terrible injuries.” In an example of the good use of rhetoric in the Dialectic, this glancing reference informs the reader of a number of things, namely, that the generation of conceptuality is understood to be not only the opening of an epistemological problem (in the simultaneous disclosure and concealment of objects) but also the beginning of a moral degeneration. Adorno is tightly linking together the employment of universals and moral forms of injury. This is a fixed feature of Adorno’s work (Minima Moralia is almost nothing but the elaboration of this theme) and by far the most problematic. ¹⁵ For the present, it suffices to note that this epistemological-cum-moral injury is seen both as present at the beginning of “humanity” (phylogenetic) and as “repeated in every childhood” (ontogenetic). This means that the “primitive consciousness” does not describe a distant historical period, but rather the initial stage that all consciousness goes through.

If this is true, then we can say that some basic set of concepts obtains universally, for every consciousness. Each primitive consciousness will be in an identical epistemological position, undergoing discontinuous experience, and we can take it that there is a determinate, limited set of concepts that must be applied in order to lend continuity to experience (as the “cry of terror” demands). This basic set of concepts (which probably maps onto the set of forms of judgment given by Kant in the Metaphysical Deduction) will therefore be generated by all consciousnesses universally, due to the universal drive for self-preservation, and the necessary role of these basic concepts in making continuous experience possible. This serves to start to do away with the genetic fallacy in Dialectic of Enlightenment. We can say that each consciousness will share a basic conceptual set, and that this basic conceptual set is related to and constituted by self-preservation, just due to the common features all consciousness initially shares.

However, this does not stave off the genetic fallacy for long. Even with our ontogenetic account in tow, we can still have worries about how to explain Adorno’s conviction that higher-level concepts (like cultural concepts, for example) continue to be determined by and responsive to self-preservation. How do we explain this? Regardless of whether we appeal to the phylogenetic (historical) or ontogenetic (developmental) pictures, a genetic fallacy would occur.

If Adorno intended to deliver a reductive account of conceptuality, in which concepts were entirely determined by and reflective of the needs of self-preservation, this problem would disappear. Taking a psychological tack (perhaps in line with his frequent recourse to Freud), Adorno could posit concepts as essentially heteronomous, having no determining autonomy of their own. Concepts would then become mere epiphenomena, being entirely formed—in both their constitution and their employment—by the demands of self-preservation. Although such an account would be cogent, Adorno refuses it. Rather than seeing concepts as purely autonomous, or purely heteronomously determined, Adorno opts for an intermediate, “dialectical” position. While concepts assuredly spring from and are partly determined by self-preservation (and so do not have the absolute autonomy they pretend to), they nonetheless have some autonomy. This autonomy is found in the concept’s intrinsic abstraction. By virtue of being abstract, abstracting from both their objects and the drives that created them, concepts are capable of outstripping both those drives and objects, and thereby set in place modes of thought that are not merely instinctive, but rather rational. Concepts disclose the possibility of freedom just because they are not reducible to the impulses that constitute them. ¹⁶ To clarify: concepts originate in a self-preserving act of abstraction, in which abstract concepts are created and applied to discontinuous experience in order to lend it continuity. Although abstraction originates in self-preservation, in its application it increasingly leads cognition into practices governed by their own abstract logic, rather than governed by the self-preserving impulses that originally occasioned abstraction.

As Adorno sees concepts as determined both by their autonomy and by the heteronomous determinations that help bring about that autonomy, a reductive reading of concepts is not available. So, given that concepts have at least some autonomy, we are entitled to inquire into why self-preservation persists in determining the concept: What prevents the partial autonomy of the concept becoming absolute? To solve this problem, we need to return again to the Kantian distinction between transcendental and empirical concepts.

It is perfectly possible to lend continuity to one’s experience solely through the application of basic dichotomies (cause/effect, appearance/essence, and so on). Typing concepts—like those that pick out natural kinds—would then come later, and would serve to further finesse our comprehension of our environment. Just this, roughly, would be a distinction between transcendental and empirical concepts, between concepts that serve as the foundation of continuous experience, and those subsequent concepts that add further epistemic detail to that experience. Transcendental concepts would be primary, and typing concepts tertiary. Adorno, however, reverses this order, and also refuses to put in place a limited, basic set of Kantian transcendental categories that would be capable of lending continuity to experience. Adorno locates the generation of the kind of fundamental distinctions Kant would understand as involving transcendental concepts (distinctions between “appearance and essence,” “effect and force”)¹⁷ as following from, and driven by, the generation of a language equipped with typing concepts capable of articulating the commonality of types of objects. For Adorno, typing concepts are primary, both in mediating experience and in making knowledge possible. It is the fear of the specific object, and the drive to comprehend it, that motivates the formation of categorial distinctions for Adorno. As such, for Adorno typing concepts are primary, in facilitating experience of particulars—the more abstract conceptual categories appear to be built on the epistemic practices that typing concepts make possible. This difference between Kant and Adorno—the former’s separating the transcendental from the empirical concepts, and the latter’s apparent collapse of the distinction between the two—can be understood by returning to the difference in transcendental motivation in each case.

A Kantian cognizer’s motivation is to create an optimally structured epistemological viewpoint that is capable of providing phenomenal knowledge. This being the case, the formation of the categories is the chief transcendental task, upon which can be based the lesser project of forming epistemological concepts of natural kinds. By contrast, the motivation of the Adornian consciousness is, above all, terror of the particular. The chief project of the Adornian consciousness is the rapid reduction of the radical particularity of objects to recognizable regularities. The mediation of experience is therefore produced by all the concepts that are germane to the experienced particular at any given instant; while this will of course include the familiar conceptual distinctions from Kant, the chief role is allotted to the typing concepts that are capable of mediating the experience of particulars such that they are reduced to tokens of types. An object that is not “predigested” by the universal—mediated so as to appear identical to its governing concept—appears as the terrifying alterity against which concepts were generated as a bulwark: “The individual has no experience, nor any so-called empirical material, that the universal has not pre-digested and supplied.”¹⁸ The “so-called” is perhaps suggestive. For Adorno, there is no true empirical material, as there is, by contrast, for Kant. Phenomenal experience for Kant receives its preliminary manipulation by the categorial manifold; this prevents the noumena from being knowable, but nonetheless does not beyond this distort the nature of empirical experience. The phenomenal existents, such as they are, are directly knowable. For Adorno, by contrast, there is no such transparently available empirical experience—the phenomena are distorted by their “cover concepts,” which serve to prevent full empirical knowledge of their genuine phenomenal constitution. ¹⁹

As Adorno does not have a fixed, basic set of concepts that are responsible for the passive mediation of experience, but rather allots the mediation of experience to all concepts equally, this raises the question of what determining influence ensures that the higher-level concepts, generated not by a “cry of terror” but rather in more relaxed circumstances by the mature consciousness, are employed in line with the demands of self-preservation.

It is at this reasonably critical juncture that, perhaps surprisingly, Adorno’s metaphilosophical position on the nature of concepts gets bolstered by his empirical work. As is perhaps recognized more readily by the sociological establishment than the philosophical, Adorno’s engagement with empirical sociology was sophisticated and redounded to the strength of his philosophical account. While not as extensive as, say, his writings on music, Adorno nonetheless wrote reasonably prolifically on sociological themes. The fundamental principle of Adorno’s sociology, which he sought to confirm and elaborate in all of his sociological work, concerned social structure. Adorno understood societies to be wholes; these wholes were not constituted by liberal consensus, or by negotiating the demands of various specific groups and subcultures. On the contrary, the social whole (along with its attendant structures, relations of production, and so on) is held by Adorno to be explanatorily prior to the individual constituents of that society. The social whole is integrated sufficiently that Adorno often refers to it as a “totality,” having a univocal, uniform character that is imposed, from the top down, onto its constituents. Drawing on an extended tradition of the use of the concept of totality (which is drawn out by Jay in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept, and in Adorno’s case most likely derives from Lukács in the first instance), Adorno understands the individual to have little to no content that is not determined by this social totality. ²⁰ While I think we should indeed be skeptical of the extent to which Adorno derived this position from empirical investigation, as opposed to bringing it to the data in order to find it confirmed, nonetheless this sociological account of social influence was empirically put to work by Adorno, with qualified success. ²¹

This core commitment, to society’s absolute capability to coerce the thought, behavior, and mental content of its constituents, is a fixed feature of Adorno’s work. ²² In Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in close temporal proximity to Adorno’s most thorough engagement with empirically informed sociology, Adorno provides the foundation of an account of how this social totality is capable of enforcing universally identical concept use. This account posits self-preserving conceptual employment as necessary (at all times) as the social totality manipulates the pragmatic context of all individuals such that self-preservation is an ever-present concern. While Adorno appears to concede that, outside of the initial formation of concepts by primitive consciousness, there is no intrinsic necessity that forces the self-preserving use of concepts, Adorno is able to find a universally obtaining extrinsic necessity. This is the social totality continuously pressing self-preservation as a germane concern, through manipulating and constituting the social structures within which the individual lives.

The social totality “subordinat[es] life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation.”²³ Evidently, this self-preservation is different in form from that which motivated the primitive consciousness. The primitive consciousness was confronted by a superlative complexity that it was unable to manipulate in order to secure its own pragmatic needs. Given that the nonprimitive consciousness is equipped with dialectical concepts that are able to make the subject’s experience amenable to conceptual subsumption, that kind of self-preserving impetus (the need to fix a discontinuous experiential field) is no longer in play. And this raises the question of how the social whole is capable of impressing a continual need for self-preservation onto these nonprimitive consciousnesses.

While I do not think Adorno (or Horkheimer) addresses this issue directly, it is nonetheless central to the very thesis of the existence of a “dialectic of enlightenment,” of there being a structural similarity across thought in both primitive and modern forms of life. The Dialectic provides a hint toward the correct understanding of this problem: “The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behaviour on the individual as the only natural, decent and rational one…. [The individual’s] criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the schemata assigned to it.”²⁴ It is the very proliferation of social structures, the opacity of their relationship to the individual, and that individual’s reliance on those social structures for the provision of their livelihood that imposes a continual concern with self-preservation. We are confronted by a complex of social structures and processes, whose determining interrelations are beyond our understanding. We, qua members of a capitalist society, must continually appeal to and employ these extant social structures in order to earn money, and thereby provide for our self-preservation. While the primitive consciousness sets up dialectical concepts and social structures in order to clarify and make concrete methods of controlling one’s environment, these same concepts and social structures have become overdetermined and overcomplex, such that they are now set up over against the individual and compel self-preserving behavior at every juncture in order to remain safely in conformity with those structures.

Adorno is confident that self-preserving behavior is compelled in every instance by the social totality, which stands over and against its constitutive individuals. However, it is logically possible to be continually pressed into self-preserving behavior, and yet have the operation of one’s concepts (the internal function of those concepts) unaffected by that fact. In truth, this is an explanatory gap that Adorno never, to my knowledge, satisfactorily fills by argument. He is happy to cross the gap between compelled behavior and compelled conceptual use by assertion. A particularly egregious example of this is found, again, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The exclusivity of logical laws stems from… obdurate adherence to function, and ultimately to the compulsive character of self-preservation. The latter is constantly magnified into the choice between survival and doom, a choice which is reflected even in the principle that, of two contradictory positions, only one can be true and the other false.”²⁵ The point being made here is, presumably by design, outwardly outrageous. With no argumentative support, Adorno claims that the law of noncontradiction is contingent on self-preservation. This is outrageous just because it is very tempting to see the logical law of noncontradiction as deriving from ahistorical facts about what it is possible to think or simultaneously imagine; and this in turn seems amply explained by both the fabric of experience and the limits of cognition. If we hold to this intuition, Adorno’s assertion that the logical rule derives its force from extraconceptual behaviors or phenomena appears deeply unsatisfactory. And at this point Adorno’s account of the interrelation between conceptual content and self-preservation looks unsupported, and so perhaps unappealing.

This criticism should be accepted in spirit, as Adorno is often prone to make justificatory slides between apparently discrete domains of inquiry, and Adorno should not be exempt from providing explanations and justifications for these slides. ²⁶ While explanatory gaps of this kind should be addressed, here one should pause and reconsider what an explanation or justification of this particular move by Adorno would look like. Adorno is taking it as explanatorily basic that concepts are emergent epistemological entities, both continuous with and capable of critical reflection on the pragmatic contexts and forms of life from which they emerged. Adorno is capable of pointing to supporting evidence that shores up this account of the concept. For example, the sociohistorical contingency of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical life is held to be explained by the nature of the concepts that make possible those domains. Similarly, the internal contradictions that Adorno traces in those concepts are themselves held to originate not merely in the concepts themselves, but in the objective social contradictions that gave rise to those concepts.

These phenomena fit Adorno’s theory of the concept; but they are multiply construable. Other accounts of the concept are also able to accommodate these features, with varying degrees of fit (internal contradictions are contingent failures on the part of the philosophers in question, sociohistorical development in culture merely is a product of the constant thirst for novelty, and so on). The conventional theory of concepts (that they are autonomous and immune to mediation in Adorno’s sense) is similarly placed beyond argumentation. Phenomena can be appealed to in favor of the conventional account (the apparent immutability of logic, the continuity of philosophical inquiry), but Adorno is capable of accommodating these also (logic is seen as contingently necessary,²⁷ the continuity of philosophical concerns is explained by the continuity of the subtending structure expressed by the dialectic of enlightenment). In either case, the fundamental claim about the nature of the concept serves as the beginning of philosophical inquiry and debate, and is not itself derivable from that debate. It rather serves as an enabling condition of it.

Adorno is able to provide an argument of reasonable strength concerning the universal incidence of self-preserving behavior, deriving from his theory of society as a totality. The transition from the universal incidence of self-preserving behavior to the claim that, accordingly, concepts will universally be employed in a self-preserving fashion cannot be argued for in the same way. It relies on a metaepistemic claim about concepts being porous to their pragmatic context—and it is just these kinds of claims that cannot be conclusively proved, as the evidence in play is multiply construable. ²⁸

With this in mind, Adorno is able to simply build in the transition from self-preserving practices to self-preserving concepts by fiat, thanks to his chosen account of what concepts are. He holds concepts to be intrinsically emergent from, contingent on, and determined by self-preserving practices. No further explanation of this is possible; only further argument over whether we should want to choose this account of conceptuality.

It is Adorno’s sociological work, then, that can answer the question of why concepts continue to be used in a self-preserving manner. The social totality compels self-preserving behavior, in Adorno’s view, at every level of society. Once we add to this Adorno’s understanding of concepts—as emergent from and determined by pragmatic features of experience—this entails that concepts will, throughout society, continuously be entangled with and determined by the requirements of self-preservation.

Adorno gives us no intrinsic constraint on which concepts will be formed in response to the drive for self-preservation. This introduces contingency into concept formation—unlike for Kant, there is no finite collection of forms of judgment that the agent can make use of. The only constraint is that the chosen forms of judgment, the selected concepts, serve self-preservation. And we might intuitively think (and I will go on to firm up this intuition) that there are a plurality of ways in which concepts could be formed in order to structure experience, not all of which will match up to how we, as a matter of fact, conceptually structure experience. In other words, then, Adorno’s account of concept formation leaves a lot of room for contingency—for the possibility of there being a multiplicity of ways in which primitive consciousness could construct concepts. However, Adorno’s account requires this contingency to be resolved in an identical form for each individual within any specific sociohistorical period, for the universal validity of his claims to carry. The worry at present is that Adorno has no way of ensuring this.

One promising avenue for finding such a constraint would be through looking for commonalities in self-preservation itself. Self-preservation is always expressed through the physical complement of the consciousness, namely, the human body, and it seems plausible to derive a set of necessary basic concepts from the influence of the human body on the exercise of self-preservation. This would roughly complement the results of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction—we might find that concepts of extension, relation, duration, and the like are inescapably required for beings of our corporeal organization. We can return to Adorno’s account of the emergence of conceptual dichotomies in the Dialectic as suggestive on this score: “The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name…. The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force… springs from human fear.”²⁹ Adorno posits the emergence of these conceptual dichotomies—“appearance and essence” and “effect and force,” which can, with some justification, be mapped onto the categories of substance and accident, and causality, respectively—as deriving straightforwardly from the introduction of dialectical conceptuality. As soon as consciousness grapples with “human fear,” and seeks to make use of dialectical concepts, Adorno suggests that these dichotomies immediately “spring from” this project. Although this evidence is not conclusive, it is at least plausible that Adorno saw these conceptual distinctions as significantly more basic, and inescapable, than other eligible universals. And, accordingly, that there was some form of constraint that entailed their being inescapable in this way.

We could understand this constraint to be the nature of the human body itself. If this were so, the confrontation of the primitive consciousness with its discontinuous environment would acquire a constraint that determines which concepts the primitive consciousness must initially form. The material constitution of the body necessitates the formation of a limited set of concepts, a basic conceptual set that forms the functional preconditions for the acquisition and formation of more developed, nonbasic concepts. Due to simple features of being embodied, we might think that certain concepts—like extension, cause and effect, appearance and essence—are ineliminable features of a conceptually articulated understanding of both one’s own body and one’s immediate environment.

A pragmatic constraint like this—by virtue of appealing to universal features of embodiment—could allow us to see some basic conceptual set as socially universal. It is the pragmatic structure of the situation of the embodied primitive consciousness that lends itself to the universality of basic concepts. Perhaps this outline—as brisk as it is—shows an appreciable way in which Adorno could be entitled to see some basic conceptual set as holding universally.

Given that this distinction is to be found in Adorno’s work, there must be a means of fixing not only the conceptual set as obtaining with universal validity, but the conceptual array, too. If Adorno’s theory that the social totality is able to enforce a “monadological character”³⁰ on its members is to have any traction, there must be an available means of ensuring the social universality of the conceptual arrays in play. (Correlatively, Adorno understands given sociohistorical periods to exhibit philosophical antinomies universally, across the thought of all the intellectuals working at the given time. ³¹ This is a point of view that equally requires a guarantee of the social universality of conceptual arrays.)

This is a problem that must be considered at both the basic and the nonbasic level. It is important that every primitive consciousness forms an identical conceptual array, given that these basic arrays will have an influence on what higher-level concepts are available, and in what way. We then need to find a guarantee that nonbasic conceptual arrays (those conceptual arrays held by mature consciousnesses) are also socially universal, given that Adorno’s analyses require this in order to hold with universal validity. I will consider these two problems in turn, beginning with the basic conceptual arrays formed by primitive consciousnesses.

In the chapter “Sounds” of his book Individuals, Strawson attempts to consider whether the fact that we take material objects as primary in the identification of particulars in our “conceptual scheme as it is”³² could not be usurped in some other possible conceptual scheme, wherein the identification of particulars does not proceed by taking material bodies as primary. In other words, Strawson tries to show that the epistemological viewpoint that takes “material particulars”³³ as primary for comprehending “objective particulars”³⁴ (that is, objects that are identified via one’s experience, which however exist outside of that experience)³⁵ is contingent. Strawson outlines a different epistemological process (and hence a differing conceptual array), which is able to satisfy the requirement of identifying objective particulars, without needing to posit materiality as primary. What makes this attempt of Strawson’s, which I shall detail below, so interesting and dangerous for Adorno is precisely that Strawson does not achieve his goal of a radically different epistemological setup by means of introducing new concepts. Rather, Strawson retains the standard concepts and retools the relationships between them. Strawson posits a new conceptual array (by reordering the primacy allotted to material particulars in achieving an understanding of objective particulars), which satisfies the requirement of providing continuous experience just as well as the standard array (which continues to take material particularity as primary).

To compress his account considerably, Strawson maintains the concept of objective particulars while jettisoning extension, by, as he puts it, creating an “analogy” of material space within which to house these objective particulars. What Strawson is concerned with is that the comprehension of objects as objective (that is, as not being exhausted by one’s perceiving them, but being capable of existing without being perceived) necessarily entails a given “housing”³⁶ in which they can be seen to be sustained, regardless of our perception of them. Having jettisoned material space—within which we usually understand objects as being housed—Strawson creates an analogy of space with what he calls a “master sound,”³⁷ with different pitches of which audible particulars are correlated. ³⁸ This, Strawson argues, delivers a sufficient housing to allow for the agent to take themself to be reidentifying particulars (the same particular sounds). Just as one may walk into a room that contains a sound, leave momentarily, and return, and thereby take oneself to have two experiences of one sound particular, so one might experience a sound particular at master-sound pitch a, move to master-sound pitch b where it is not, and then return to pitch a and take oneself, due to the housing of the master-sound pitches, to be reidentifying the same sound particular. This master sound, then, provides us with the concept of particulars having “absence and presence” at a given location. ³⁹

With this account in tow, Strawson is able to reposition a basic feature of continuous experience (the identification of objective particulars across time) out of the conventional conceptual array, and into a radically different conceptual array while retaining the same conceptual set. ⁴⁰ This loosens the necessity of the basic conceptual array initially formed by the primitive consciousness. While we can continue to grant to Adorno that a single conceptual set is pragmatically necessary, it would appear, from Strawson’s example, that the conjunction of that basic conceptual set and the pragmatic goal of self-preservation could nonetheless result in any number of radically differing conceptual arrays. We need an explanation, then, as to why there are no sound-world infants—how do we explain the universality of the basic conceptual array?⁴¹

I believe we can answer this question by reconsidering the context in which basic conceptual sets and basic conceptual arrays are formed. Prior to the formation of the basic conceptual set, the primitive consciousness was incapable of communication with other consciousnesses; the absence of mediating concepts prevented continuous experience, and derivatively prevented the experience of other consciousnesses as other consciousnesses. It would seem the initial conceptual set is formed more or less solipsistically, in this sense.

However, once this initial conceptual set is formed, and primitive consciousness is capable of recognizing and interacting with particulars over time, consciousness is then opened up to intersubjective interaction (in this case, as the primitive consciousness will belong to a child, to interaction with its parents). This gives us a means of finding some external constraint that could govern and influence how the relations between the basic concepts are formed. We can appeal to developmental psychology as a means of explaining the way a child’s consciousness is molded into a given method of pragmatically interacting with and, by extension, conceptualizing his or her environment. We would need an account of intersubjective interaction and development that would explain how the structure of an early consciousness’ thought could become synchronized to that of its parents or careers. The desired intersubjective account would have much in common with the object-relations theory of Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein, et al. It would allow for the collaborative formation of cognitive content, conceptualization, and self-image in the infant.

Now, when Adorno himself tried to develop his psychological account of intersubjectivity, he characteristically did so in terms of Freud’s libidinal economy. Freud’s account of the neonate’s formation of his or her psychological and epistemic structure is, as has been repeatedly pointed out, solipsistic, in that the parents and interaction partners merely provide occasions for the working out of the internal logic of the neonate’s libidinal economy. ⁴² In this sense, the Freudian account is only minimally intersubjective, and is certainly not a collaborative picture of the formation of the structure of thought and experience. For this reason, I do not wish to suggest that Adorno (with his heavily Freudian approach) had a Winnicott-style object-relations account explicitly in mind. But there are significant benefits to positing an intersubjective process of determination like this. Not least of these is that it provides an additional justification for Adorno’s claim that social wholes are internally homogenous. Once we expand out our account of the maturation of consciousness to include the determining power of the texture of the relationship between the infant and its parents and the cultural norms that are invariably embedded in that texture, we find an additional means of understanding how a society could maintain the level of internal cultural and epistemic homogeneity Adorno’s account requires.

On top of this appeal, there is also a distantly related interpretive move presently popular in Adorno scholarship, namely, the attempt to understand Adorno’s work as continuous with Axel Honneth’s recognitive philosophy. Honneth himself in his work on reification has attempted to see Adorno as centrally invested in the project of expanding and enriching recognitive relations,⁴³ as against the “forgetting” of those relations that Honneth takes reification to represent. ⁴⁴ Axel Honneth, drawing on Hegel, Winnicott, and Mead (in the main, although Mead has latterly been replaced with more emphasis on the work of Hobson and Tomasello), understands all self-knowledge as achieved through recognitive relations. The core thought is that in order to understand myself as having a given status, I require my communication partners to recognize this status through their modifying their behavior visibly to reflect my having that status. (For example, if I am to be conscious of myself as a Kantian autonomous self-legislator, I require having this status recognized, in the other’s refraining from interfering with the exercise of my autonomy.) Honneth attempts to read recognition as a fundamental tenet of Adorno’s work, and thereby problematically attempts to circumvent Adorno’s negativistic, apophatic ethics. ⁴⁵ All the same, Honneth’s attempt nonetheless has qualified success in picking out Adorno’s reliance on the notion of intersubjective determination of epistemological processes. ⁴⁶

Reliance on intersubjective determination to ensure the social universality of nonbasic concepts is unworkable (as I will go on to show) not least due to the proliferation of pragmatically and culturally diverse groups in social wholes. However, employing intersubjective determination at the level of basic conceptual arrays does not run into this problem of differentiation. Object-relations understands the determination of the conceptual capacities of the infant to be parasitic on reasonably thin forms of interaction, in which the mother attends to the needs of the child in a “holding phase,” which makes possible the development of a body schema, together with a delusion on the part of the child that it has omnipotent control over the satisfaction of its needs. ⁴⁷ As the child cognitively develops and is capable of differentiating between itself and its environment, so too does the mother begin to withdraw her care to a degree, no longer instantaneously satisfying the child’s needs. This “graduated de-adaptation,” negotiated through the infant’s attempt to destroy its mother through aggressive behavior, eventually discloses to the child both the objectivity of its mother and its own self-confidence in its own integrity and the loving care which that mother provides. ⁴⁸

While this process entails some reasonably fine-grained distinctions being formed for the child, the relationship that furnishes the child with these distinctions is minimally structured. The mere presence and interaction (“holding”) of the parent serve to inculcate the infant into certain conceptual practices. The interactions that facilitate these conceptual practices are thin, in that they serve to acclimatize the infant to employing its concepts in particular ways just by virtue of familiarizing the infant with the pragmatic structure of intersubjective interaction as it develops into a properly dialogical, rather than symbiotic, form. There is no way to distort or incorrectly perform the mother/child interactions that Winnicott picks out, short of not performing them at all. Once again, intrinsic pragmatic structures (shored up in somatic structures) take the place of theoretic transcendental structures. The interaction between the parent and the child inculcates the child in specific forms of self-conception, affective understanding, and, correlatively, epistemic behavior. This dialogical interaction provides a means for the transmission of the parent’s form of life to the child, in the synchronization of the child’s consciousness to the parent’s.

This account serves to fix the basic conceptual array for infants. While the infant forms its conceptual set in isolation, the dialogical relationship with the parent provides a mediating influence that determines the manner in which that conceptual set is put to work. As an obvious example, the interaction between parent and child discloses that cognition of the world should be primarily conducted along visual lines—in terms of negotiating and comprehending the objective environment and the visual cues that the parent’s face provides the child in terms of affection and reassurance—due to the parent’s practices, into which the child is invited, being so constituted. The array relations between concepts are fixed in this manner.

The question of how this basic conceptual array is sustained, once this early determining relation is concluded, is answerable through appeal to the behaviors that such inculcated conceptual relations would bring about. Adorno understands concepts to be formed in reaction to self-preservation, and molded to the pragmatic structures in which this drive is expressed. ⁴⁹ The conceptual arrays fixed after birth (for example, the modalities of the senses settling in a conventional rather than “sound-world” fashion) are self-sustaining, in that the behavior and social structures they recommend in turn bolster the resilience of these arrays as the individual matures.

Plugging in a broadly object-relations picture of the parental determination of basic conceptual arrays is sufficiently in line with the psychoanalytic approach that Adorno repeatedly makes use of that one can regard this as an addition significantly in the spirit of Adorno’s work, which serves to close off a significant difficulty. It also has the core benefit that understanding basic conceptual arrays as fixed by familial intersubjective influence makes the basic conceptual set fall out as necessary but the conceptual array fall out as contingently necessary. The necessity of the basic conceptual array is contingent on the pragmatic sociological structures that enduringly compel self-preserving behavior and more importantly the pragmatic structures that channel and mold the epistemological upshot of this self-preserving behavior.

This contingent necessity is deeply important. Adorno posits the conceptual mediation of perception as pragmatically necessary, and seems to also concede that certain conceptual sets are necessary for continuous experience to take place at all. It is the obtaining employment and determining relations that obtain between these concepts that Adorno’s philosophy explicitly sets out to critique. It is only if the necessity of the universally obtaining conceptual array of these determining relations and employments—these conceptual arrays—is defeasible that critique has a normative impetus, or indeed a point. Adorno requires the social universality of conceptual arrays to be contingently necessary, with there being some method in which dialectical philosophy and authentic art can intervene in that determining contingency and break the necessity it generates. The present account of the social universality of basic conceptual arrays provides this contingency, by denying that those array relations are intrinsically necessary. They are rather generated through familial interaction, and then go on to be sustained by cultural modes of behavior and the social totality’s imposition of self-preserving behavior. Intervention in these sociocultural relations (or in the concepts themselves) is therefore possible, in order to overcome this necessity and bend concepts into new employments and new forms. This will go on to be centrally important to our account of the truth of art and philosophy—in either case, we will find that the truth is accomplished by loosening these contingent necessities and allowing for concepts (and experience) to be briefly forced into new structures and forms.

As Adorno makes clear in Negative Dialectics, experiences of individual objects, analyzed properly, are revelatory of their social whole and the conceptual problematics that are extant in that social whole. What makes this claim philosophically interesting is that Adorno holds that these experiences, and attendant analyses, are not merely true for the relevant individual, but are rather instructive for all members of that individual’s sociohistorical context. ⁵⁰ While Adorno’s reliance on this universality is most often cashed like this—in presenting analyses of experiences of objective particulars—Adorno also makes use of it in analyses of purely subjective phenomena. For example, Adorno feels entitled to claim that apparently subjective phenomena, such as one’s feelings about one’s gender,⁵¹ are reflective of a social whole. Adorno, then, sees nonbasic conceptual arrays as holding with universal validity, and also as determining even the most apparently private and subjective parts of our experience. Quite aside from our intuitive resistance to this kind of idea, we can see that it also runs into trouble thanks to Adorno’s sociology.

Thanks to a uniformity in the pragmatic structures and material needs bound up with embodiment, we were able to build in a social universality for basic conceptual sets (and developmental psychology took care of the universality of basic conceptual arrays). The uniformity of the pragmatic structures gave us a uniformity of conceptual structure.

However, the pragmatic structures at work in a structurally differentiated society don’t look like they underwrite a universality in the set or array of the nonbasic concepts formed in response to them. Rather—on Adorno’s own account—they seem to necessitate divergence, or even contradiction, between conceptual structures. For example, Adorno sees social wholes as functionally divergent at class levels. Philosophers, for example, bear the guilt that they only have sufficient exemption from manual labor to think due to their “class relationship.”⁵² Relatedly, Adorno understands the division of labor as setting up importantly different modes of life (part of the “guilt” of this division being the decreased potential for autonomy under certain elements of this division). If Adorno understands concepts to emerge in response to pragmatic demands, and to be importantly “molded” to the pragmatic contexts in which these demands can be exercised, it is reasonable to expect that, for example, the class-derived divergences in pragmatic contexts will entail divergences in conceptual arrays. Indeed one might expect that such a thought would be appealing to Adorno, representing as it does a variant of the idea of class-consciousness. Lukács’s Reification and Class-Consciousness, the influence of which on Adorno’s thought cannot be underestimated, in fact makes a very similar move, deriving important epistemological differences from the material divergences represented by the differences in the constitution of each class’s “class situation.”⁵³ Further reason to think that such a line of thought might have appeared appealing to Adorno comes from Adorno’s close association with, and approval of, the work of Sohn-Rethel. Sohn-Rethl sought to understand conceptual abstraction as deriving from exchange relations, going so far as to derive the abstract categories of space and time from the conditions of long-distance exchange of money for goods. ⁵⁴ Sohn-Rethel himself notes in his introduction the alacrity with which Adorno defended his work, also noting that Adorno himself “in his own manner was on the same track.”⁵⁵ Adorno’s correspondence finds Adorno confirming Sohn-Rethel’s self-proclaimed philosophical proximity to Adorno. ⁵⁶ Given both Adorno’s own presuppositions and his explicit philosophical associations, this represents a serious problem for Adorno’s account. His commitment to interweaving philosophical and materialist/pragmatic problematics seems to entail a conceptual pluralism once we reach the level of nonbasic concepts. The upshot of this pluralism would be nothing less than a full-blooded relativism about conceptual problematics and, most likely, a reinvigoration of class-consciousness rhetoric. Adorno treats each of these with suspicion:

Despite all of the strong structural tendencies toward a kind of conceptual pluralism in his work, then, Adorno holds fast to the principle that analysis of an isolated particular, properly carried out, will be universally revelatory and critical of its social context. Given the problems we have just explored, Adorno cannot base the social universality of nonbasic concepts on sociological or straightforwardly pragmatic grounds. Working with the understanding of determination that has been employed so far (in which determination applies to the individual by virtue of their specific properties), Adorno has no way of explaining how a determining influence could create social universality at the nonbasic conceptual level (in either sets or arrays). However, this is not the only model of determination that is available.

Lukács, too, sees the specific features of the individual and his or her situation as bringing about the reification (and hence misconstrual) of his or her experienced environment. Both Lukács’s and Honneth’s employment of the term “reification,” although importantly different from each other, testify to the persistence with which broadly Marxist social philosophies make use of rich determination—which is to say, determination that applies itself through the affective, relational, and pragmatic specificity of individuals. Both Honneth and Lukács understand this determination to be effected through the structure of the individual’s environment, which compels the individual to certain kinds of cognitive behavior, or to relating to that environment in a certain way. Apart from the intuitive appeal of this notion, the other main source of this enduring conception of determination is probably Marx himself. Marx’s analysis of the commodity form in chapter 1 of Capital has a plausible claim to form the foundation of the Marxist tradition, both orthodox and heterodox, by providing a theoretical platform for analysis of concealed relations of determination and an explanation of the ability of these relations to occlude social facts. It is no coincidence that the structure of Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, in line with the determination relations that later Marxists formulated, is predicated on a form of rich determination. Commodities, for Marx, are objects that have come to be seen not primarily as bearers of “use-value” but “exchange-value.” Use-values are relative to specific projects (things we intend to do) and the specific features of objects (how well they serve to realize these projects). ⁶² “Exchange-value,” by contrast, is entirely abstract and relational. A commodity’s exchange-value is not determined in a qualitative relation to the concrete demands of human life, but rather in a quantitative relation to the exchange relations that obtain between commodities. A diamond has (high) exchange-value as it can be exchanged for a great quantity of goods, for example. Objects become commodities once they are invested with this exchange-value; and this investiture causes us to perceive them primarily in abstract, nonsensuous terms. ⁶³

Crucially, it is participation in exchange that brings about this change in the experienced object. It is only when an agent comes to be directly engaged in commodity exchange that this conversion of the object into commodity takes place; the determination is rich, as it takes place through the specificity of the agent’s behavior and situation. It is the specific structure of the exchange relations with which the agent is engaged that serves to determine the contents of his or her consciousness and the phenomenal aspect of the commodity. It is only through explanation of the specific features of the exchange relationship in which the individual is engaged, and the determining influence these specific features have on the consciousness of the participants, that Marx can construct his theory of the generation of commodity fetishism. ⁶⁴ And it is on the basis of this rich determination—conducted through the texture of social economic interaction—that Marx explains the determination of other spheres of social life. ⁶⁵

Rich determination has been an enduring feature of critical Marxist social philosophy. This endurance is in no small part attributable to its intuitive clarity. If we consider, prereflectively, when and how people can be induced to do and think things—to have their autonomy compromised—we might naturally consider the role of enticements, threats, and situational impediments. Accordingly, Marxists have conventionally understood class consciousness, ideology, and reification as deriving from social structures that limit the possibilities for agents to exercise their autonomy, or alternatively as deriving from the ability of inducements or threats to channel people’s activity and thought.

Whatever his other failings, Benjamin was able to trace social influences in cultural phenomena as abstruse as architecture and fine art, and as prosaic as mannequins and furniture. These objects were seen to be physiognomies, which had social facts sedimented and embedded in their apparent properties. Cashing out this idea of the physiognomic aspect of objects—and the attendant idea that social structures found expression in such objects—was plainly problematic for Benjamin. The bullish orthodox Marxist assertions one repeatedly finds in his work are syncopated with a variety of exogenous incunabula, intended to provide the medium able to conduct the influence of social structures into apparently autonomous domains, such that the objects in these domains could become physiognomic models of those social structures. This reaches its apotheosis in the Arcades Project, where Benjamin appeals to the existence of a collective unconsciousness, itself a manifestation of the latent “collective revolutionary subject” that is present in each historical epoch. Buck-Morss understands the introduction of this notion to be primarily motivated by Benjamin’s political concerns ⁶⁶—as it provides a clear way of introducing a positive method of describing revolutionary praxis by aligning it to the demands of this collective subject—and this is surely correct, as far as it goes. However, this move—which Adorno was so concerned by—can also be understood as a response to an anxiety concerning the justificatory grounds for the kinds of micro- and macroanalyses that the Arcades Project would comprise. The quasi-Jungian notion of a collective subject is intended to provide an explanation of how Parisian architectural and cultural artifacts, which were created in an apparently autonomous fashion, came to reflect philosophically (and politically) germane historical developments in society at large.

This move by Benjamin is significant simply because it represents an awareness of the limit of conventional psychological models of determination. Conventional psychological models are for the most part rich determinations, which explain the endurance of social structures through their manipulation of the psychological and affective specificity of individuals. Benjamin, by contrast, moves tentatively to a model of what I will call “thin” determination: the collective unconsciousness applies itself to the behavior of the various constituent members of the social whole without regard for their specific commitments and affective properties. Its application is indiscriminate and equally effective for every individual. This makes it a variant of thin determination. Unlike rich determination, thin determination allows for the determination of the individual by the social whole without that determination being mediated through the individual’s specificity. I will cash this out in some more detail as we go.

Adorno was certainly unwilling to put in place an extravagant psychological mechanism like a collective unconsciousness. Nonetheless, it is clear that Adorno was, if anything, more aware than Benjamin of the problems of a rich determination model. Like Benjamin, Adorno relies on the existence of thin determination; unlike Benjamin, this thin determination is not cashed out in psychological terms. One clear example of Adorno’s reliance on the existence of thin determination comes from his Nachlass, specifically his work on Beethoven, which took place late in his life. Adorno asserts, working from a number of specific features of Beethoven’s compositional practices, that Beethoven’s music is Hegelian in substance. ⁶⁷ It is, of course, precisely these kinds of claims (concerning concealed determinations that create commonality in various cultural domains due to sociohistorical determination) that rich determination is unable to cogently explain. Adorno recognizes this weakness and understands social determination to conduct itself not through influence or any relationship immediately apparent to the consciousness, but rather by a determination that is “behind the back” of consciousness. Writing in the context of an analysis of Beethoven’s music (an analysis I will return to at the close of this book), Adorno says: “The history of ideas, and thus the history of music, is an autarchic motivational context insofar as the social law, on the one hand, produces the formation of spheres screened off against each other, and on the other hand, as the law of totality, still comes to light in each sphere as the same law.”⁶⁸ This “social law” is posited as at work in a multiplicity of social spheres, and as expressing itself with equal determining strength in each. As the dispassionate, abstract language indicates, the operation of what Adorno here calls a “social law” (and elsewhere will simply refer to as “mediation”) is a nonpersonal, universally effective determining process. This is a relation of thin determination.

We can see further evidence of Adorno breaking with rich determination accounts in his account of reification. As we saw, for Lukács and Honneth reification is understood to be a kind of rich determination. Adorno does not understand reification to operate in this way. He rather understands reification to be an epistemological tendency of the agent. Reification, for Adorno, is the propensity of the individual to accept concepts as exhaustively modeling their object. In other words, reification is for Adorno equivalent to what he calls “identity thinking”—the exclusion and forgetting of that which does not correspond to the concept. ⁶⁹ Jarvis characterizes reification for Adorno as “the conversion of a process into a thing; particularly the presentation of social process as the property of a thing.”⁷⁰ What Jarvis does not note is that this misidentification, the occlusion of the mediating process in the object, can only be a product of the agents taking the concept to exhaust its object. A founding principle of Adorno’s analyses of social phenomena is that objects, if attended to with full attention, reveal the full complex of the social relations they are imbricated with. ⁷¹ As such, the conventional model of reification, in which social processes congeal into natural properties and are thereby concealed, cannot directly apply to Adorno’s work, simply because full experience of the object would undo this congelation. There needs to be an additional constraint, then, that prevents the agent’s undergoing this “full, unreduced experience.”⁷²

Marx attempts to understand reification (though he does not use this term) as the consequence of a material process, which results in processes becoming “stamped upon” objects, reified into apparent properties of objects. ⁷³ For Marx, the experience of objects is mystified and obscured just due to this material process. However, as we have said, Adorno cannot understand reification in this way. The object, for Adorno, is an antireifying force (if experienced fully). This means that reification cannot be identified with some property of material processes (or properties of objects, resulting from these processes). It rather needs to be some kind of epistemological error that blinds us to the true nature of those material processes and the physiognomic objects that testify to them. For Adorno, then, the translation of mediacy into immediacy that reification refers to is not the consequence of some material process in Marx’s sense, but is more generally an epistemological flaw in the concept that entails a neglect of the true nature of the object.

If reification is for Adorno an epistemological tendency (to identify objects with their concepts), then reification is not the upshot of social structures interacting with the practical commitments or psychological states of the agent. Rather, reification is identified by Adorno with an epistemological tendency of the agent that subtends the affective and pragmatic specificity of that agent. This subtending epistemological tendency is just the agent’s propensity to identify concepts and particulars (that is, identity thinking). This project of identifying concepts with particulars is the upshot of the ongoing self-preserving comportment of the agent (which, as Adorno’s sociology purports to show, is enforced as an ever-present concern by social structures). Reification acquires its force—society and the form of thought in society has become predominantly reified—just because reification is the immediate upshot of self-preservation. Reification identifies an object with its concept—it is a vouchsafe of control over that object; it assuages the anxiety that the environment creates in the self-preserver. As the social totality has increasingly compelled self-preservation as a pressing task, and in an increasingly intense way, reification is a sociohistorical phenomenon, which accordingly obtains with increasingly universal scope.

My interpretation of Adorno’s use of the term “reification,” although heterodox, is also found in Gillian Rose’s The Melancholy Science. Rose understands reification to take place by means of the identification of the concept with its object:

Rose ties in reification with the agent’s propensity to take the concept to exhaust the object. Rose correctly identifies Adorno’s heterodox understanding of reification as a form of thin determination, which subtends the specificity of the individual. As Rose brings out, reification for Adorno is not contingent, but is rather an inherent property of self-hood. Adorno himself gestures toward this conception of reification in Aesthetic Theory: “The correlative of intention is reification.”⁷⁶ This tight relation between reification and intention is explicable in terms of the pragmatic context in which concepts are put to use. Concepts are bulwarks against the threatening discontinuity of experience not mediated by universals. Concepts are generated by the primitive consciousness to provide understanding and control of the environment, with a view to satisfying the drive to self-preservation. In order to be assured that one’s actions will provide control, there must in turn be an assurance that one’s manipulation of the phenomena is a manipulation of those factors that are genuinely germane to one’s survival. In other words, one must take these conceptual mediations to be a genuine reflection of the structure of the world, rather than a mere delusion; one must identify the concept and the particular. Accordingly, intention and reification become correlates, as the latter is the precondition for the exercise of the former. Reification is not a form of social influence or determination intrinsically, but is rather a necessary correlate with the individual’s attempt to employ concepts in order to cognize the world.

Adorno’s treatment of reification represents a further recognition on his part that rich determination models are unable to provide the universality that his account will require. The deeper problem that Benjamin recognized and that thin determination models are intended to address is the difficulty of understanding recondite cultural domains (which are internally differentiated) as being universally determined by some subtending determining process. We have already seen—in the context of his remarks on Beethoven—that Adorno points toward the existence of thin determination, which mediates social “spheres” without conducting this determination through the specificity of the members of these social spheres. ⁷⁷ We need now to expand on this idea of thin determination, in order to make clear how Adorno is able to confidently assert the social universality of nonbasic conceptual arrays. Adorno is scarcely forthcoming at all on this issue, most often simply attempting to close this explanatory gap through exhortation and analogy.

Adorno’s understanding of reification will be important in developing the thin determination relation that Adorno relies on. But it is clear that the explanatory force of reification in isolation is relatively meager. Reification for Adorno is only a resilient propensity to identify concepts with the particulars that fall under them, and so it has no determining influence on which concepts the agent forms; it can only determine how these concepts are understood and employed by the subject. What we need is an account of how the social whole is capable of influencing which concepts the subject comes to form; these concepts will then, via reification, go on to be mistakenly identified with their objects. This will give us an explanation of how people can universally bear concepts with identical array relations.

A picture like this would side step the problem of differentiated pragmatic contexts in social wholes generating differentiated kinds of conceptual array (the problem of “class consciousness” we looked at above). It would also dovetail nicely with Adorno’s account of the role and generation of concepts, and keep his strong emphasis on the importance of self-preservation. The clearest problem with this account is that it relies on a wholly mysterious notion, namely, the idea that society is somehow capable of determining the nature of the phenomenal experience in response to which concepts are formed. By placing social determination beneath the level of individual specificity—in applying to the regularities that objects exhibit—I have also made this thin determination very difficult to explain or comprehend. The question is: How can social structures, or social processes of determination, come into contact with and thereby determine the “exhibited regularities” from which concepts are continually being generated, and to which concepts are continually being calibrated?

In the course of his materialist revision of theories of consciousness, Adorno posits the consciousness as neither material nor immaterial. ⁸⁰ Analogously, Adorno is here collapsing the oppositions between the individual and the social in his account of the generation of consciousness. There is a collective substrate that provides the precondition for even the most basic operations of the individual consciousness, it is claimed. One would struggle to call this more than a sketch of a revised conception of consciousness, in moving social structures from being opposed to the isolated consciousness to instead being continuous and imbricated with individual consciousnesses at the most fundamental level. While not being without difficulties of its own, this sketch of a revised conception of the grounds for consciousness has the virtue that the explanatory gap between social structures and the phenomenal texture of immediate experience ceases to be a gap; the phenomenal texture of immediate experience is claimed to be intrinsically predicated on, and hence open to determination by, supraindividual structures.

This can only be offered as a peremptory overview of a possible method of further developing Adorno’s conception of consciousness. Regardless of whether this particular method of covering the explanatory gap works, it is nonetheless clear that Adorno relies on a thin determination model. In particular, Adorno in fact explicitly relies on the notion that social structures are capable of determining the phenomenal character of immediate experience.

Brian O’Connor, in his monograph Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, provides an alternative method of getting at this aspect of Adorno’s account. O’Connor notes that Adorno holds the social totality to have “a determinative influence on objects.”⁸¹ Prior to the application of this determinative influence, objects are bereft of “inherent conceptuality.”⁸² Working with the reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment adumbrated in the previous chapter, we can understand the object’s lack of inherent conceptuality to consist in the object’s radical particularity: its inability to present properties that are not entirely specific to it. The object, then, is incapable of providing any phenomenal aspects that recommend one universal rather than another. ⁸³ As has been seen, at the outset this lack of phenomenal features that could guide concept formation is overcome by simple fiat. The urgency of the terror of self-preservation for the primitive consciousness impels the subject to impose concepts onto its experience. However, concept formation is an ongoing process, which continues throughout the life of the consciousness. Concepts are continually abstracted from and confirmed in immediate experience. While the complete absence of guiding phenomenal features in the primitive consciousness stage is not now a problem—we are now in possession of at least the basic set of concepts formed by the primitive consciousness and usually a far larger set than this—there is nonetheless potentially an open-ended, multiply realizable set of phenomenal features (made possible by the basic concepts) that could compel various conceptual arrays. In other words, once equipped with a set of basic concepts, we enter an experiential world populated by objects that could be conceptualized in a multiplicity of ways. It is at this stage that O’Connor claims social determination is applied. As O’Connor puts it, society forms the “theater” in which objects are invested with determinate concepts, the social totality having the capacity to enforce the formation of concepts of objects. ⁸⁴ As O’Connor brings out, the application of social determination at this stage (to the object itself, prior to the concepts being derived from or checked against the object) allows for conceptuality at all levels (whether basic or nonbasic) to be identically compelled by the social whole. O’Connor does not put it in these terms, but the determination that he identifies as structurally central for Adorno’s negative dialectics is thin determination.

Outside of this issue of whether Adorno does make use of thin determination, there are compelling reasons why Adorno should make use of thin, rather than rich, determination. Adorno himself claims: “The whole which theory expresses is contained in the individual object to be analysed. What links the two is a matter of substance: the social totality.”⁸⁵ The use of the term “substance” is intentionally provocative. The phenomenal object’s substance (essence) is the social totality, just because the social totality constitutes the phenomenal object’s phenomenal character. This intercession of the social into the phenomenal shows that the structure of Adorno’s account features the kind of thin determination O’Connor and I identified as necessary. ⁸⁶

Putting this thin determination into place shores up Adorno’s commitment to the social universality of nonbasic conceptual arrays. Concept formation at every level (both basic and nonbasic) has its mechanisms determined by self-preservation, with social structures enforcing self-preservation as an ever-present concern. For basic conceptual sets and arrays, social universality is enforced in the first place by the universally obtaining pragmatic structures disclosed by the structure of the human body, and in the second place by the universal intersubjective mechanisms disclosed by object-relations theory. For nonbasic conceptual sets and arrays, the mechanism of concept formation is fixed by self-preservation. In addition, the phenomenal materials worked by this mechanism are also fixed to be the same for all individuals, by the thin determination that is applied by the social totality to objects. As a result, we can be confident that conceptual arrays will be formed in the same way, with the same structure, for everyone. Both the process and that which is subjected to the process are forced by society to be the same in every case.

This contingent necessity will be modulated across time, as the sociohistorical structures that thinly determine phenomenal objects undergo change, and thus the “substance” of those phenomenal objects will in turn alter. This will bring new conceptual arrays into being; this underwrites Adorno’s claim that concepts and conceptual problems are sociohistorically relative. The relation between sociohistorical content and conceptuality, which Adorno makes frequent use of but rarely seeks to justify, can be understood now as a tight determining relation. This tight determining relation also intrinsically leads to a dialectical theory of history. The social totality determines objects and, by extension, concepts. However, as Adorno notes, concepts have a normative surplus. ⁸⁷ This normative surplus is entailed by concepts being abstract—as they are not reducible to the impulses and influences that create them, they retain the ability to abstract away from them. This lends concepts a semantic and critical content all of their own, which gives concepts the ability to develop this content, and critically posit new normative conceptions that outstrip the states of affairs that these concepts apply to. Social totalities determine concepts but do not thereby wholly nullify their critical moment. The full exercise of the normative surplus contained in concepts is capable of interceding in the social totality that created them and bringing about change in it. Such a change in the social structure will in turn lead to a change in the determination of the phenomenal object and (by extension) the concept, bringing into existence new normative surpluses that are capable of criticizing and interceding in the social structures that brought those new concepts into existence. While the social totality determines concepts, then, concepts nonetheless themselves in turn determine and constrain the social totality; each is capable of compelling alteration in the other.

With this account of thin determination, we have given a solution to the problem of the universal validity that Adorno grants to his conceptual analyses. Even though concepts are based on mere self-preservation, there are determining constraints at every social level that make conceptual arrays fall out as the same in each case, with contingent necessity. This has allowed us to clarify Adorno’s theory of the concept and of society and his theory of the way in which these two spheres interrelate and alter each other. And we have seen, on this account, that criticism looks to be possible with universal scope, and that criticism has the capacity to create change in both concepts and society. We have also seen that conceptual problems are intrinsically interwoven with social structures—as we will see, this will allow us to transfer descriptions in either of these domains (the conceptual, the social) into the other. This will have significant consequences when we turn, in the next chapter, to the question of truth. It will also have significant consequences when we turn to Adorno’s philosophy of art and aesthetic experience. For Adorno, authentic artworks are entirely autonomous and hermetically sealed off against heteronomous states of affairs in the societies external to them. However, it is, Adorno claims, through this very hermeticity—this very refusal of any attempt to know or reflect society—that artworks reflect and criticize the rationality and social structure outside of them. The notion of thin determination we have developed in this chapter will be invaluable in making clear how this is possible; and our account of the universality of conceptual arrays will, in addition, be vital in understanding how artworks, for Adorno, can be true.

Before we turn to the next chapter, in which we begin to address Adorno’s theory of truth, at the close of this chapter we finally need to clarify an important point of detail in this idea of “thin determination” that I have been developing.

There is, therefore, an ambiguity in Adorno’s conception of determination; it appears to have two contradictory effects, being capable of either making apparent the whole in the part or investing the part with an ideological phenomenal character that obscures the true constitution of the social totality that gave rise to it. Thin determination is understood by Adorno, then, as having two distinct characters—there is delusive determination, which serves to occlude the true nature of objects and the determining processes that determine those objects, and revelatory determination, in which the determining relations are transparently visible in the object and thereby allow the object to metonymically display features of the social totality.

We saw that Adorno straightforwardly posits all immediate experience to be determined by the social totality that serves as the “substance” of the phenomenal object: “Things of the mind are not constituted by the cognitive intentionality of consciousness, but are based objectively, far beyond the individual author, on the collective life of the mind, in accordance with its imminent laws.”⁹⁰ Given that the social totality determines the phenomenal character of the object, delusive determination appears to be a pressing difficulty. Adorno requires an account of how the determining relations that, in some circumstances, transparently testify to the true nature of the object and determining social totality can, in other circumstances, serve to occlude the true nature of the object and social totality.

Fittingly, given Adorno’s emphasis on both terms throughout his work, one can provide an explanation of this aspect of Adorno’s account by virtue of appealing to Adorno’s theory of reification and self-preservation. Reification prompts the subject to take the concept’s application to be an exhaustive modeling of its object, rather than merely a pragmatic construct. The application of a concept is determined both by the pragmatic structures within which the agent is embedded and by the thin determination of the object’s immediate phenomenal character. If for any object its relevance to the subject’s self-preservation has no reference to, or diverges from, its true constitution, the resultant concept (modeling the exhibited regularities only with relevance to self-preservation) will be delusive, as it will not take in the object’s broader constitution, which is not immediately relevant to self-preservation.

One can see an example of this in Marx’s analysis of “free” labor. For the subject, the absence of obvious coercion and the reciprocal signing of a contract upon starting work appear to constitute a free exchange of labor. ⁹¹ Most importantly, in the context of Adorno’s philosophy, it is imperative to the agent’s survival (as well as that of society) that they behave as if their labor truly were free. ⁹² Society compels the formation of a concept of labor that is arrayed with the idea of its being free. But this is wrong; the “free exchange” of labor is asymmetrical—the purchaser of labor needs to make their purchase only in order to enlarge their capital,⁹³ whereas the laborer must sell their labor in order to provide for their own subsistence. ⁹⁴ The genuine legal freedom that both laborer and employer enjoy (which is reflected in the contract each signs of their own volition) conceals the compulsion under which the laborer makes this contract and the social organization that enforces this compulsion. With this test case from Marx, one can see that if an object is, in its immediacy, determined by the social whole, then the concept of the object becomes delusive just because the individual’s processing of that immediacy only has relevance to their immediate self-interest (selling their labor), which ignores the larger social whole in which they and the object are imbricated (the social organization that makes the workers’ selling their labor linked to their survival).

This is in line with the founding thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment (which is carried throughout Adorno’s oeuvre) that the form of dialectical conceptuality that has served to secure the self-preservation of the individual is in fact increasingly undermining the prospects for self-preservation and of proper comprehension of one’s environment. The dialectical irony is that fixation on self-preservation forces the subject to be incapable of properly comprehending the constitution of its cultural environment. As the complexity of social structure develops—in line with but in advance of the development of our rational faculties—increasingly we fail to be able to understand and keep in view the full structural context in which we live and work. The very drive for self-preservation that generated conceptuality serves as a constraint that frustrates the true goal of conceptuality—to model its object without remainder.

So, delusive determination results from the diremption between the full complexity of the object’s constitution and the object’s constitution as captured by the concept. This diremption is caused by the self-preserving impetus that determines the concept’s operation and causes it to only model those aspects of the object that are immediately salient for the self-preservation of the subject. Given Adorno’s claim that self-preservation is continually pressed as a going concern by the social totality, it is clear that delusive determination is the standard epistemological relation the subject stands in to the object.

The object, however, immediately testifies to the true constitution of both itself and the social totality that produces it, bearing this content “on its face” as it were. Betraying the strong influence Benjamin had on Adorno’s terminology (if not the use to which this terminology was put), Adorno often terms this the object’s “physiognomic” character. ⁹⁵ The object has a physiognomic character, just because its phenomenal character is determined by the sociohistorical whole in which the object is encountered, and the object accordingly bears the traces of these social processes in the texture of experience of that object. This gives the object the capacity to disclose information not merely about its own constitution, but about the structure of the social whole that constituted it. This is the object’s revelatory determination. It is the conjunction of this revelatory determination with the constraints of reification and self-preservation that generates delusive determination. While the phenomenal object physiognomically testifies to the society that determined it, the concept is forced to only partially model it.

The revelation of the object’s true ground amounts to undoing the effects of the conjunction of reification and self-preservation, and rediscovering the true immediacy of the object. This true immediacy—this phenomenal character—is created by the thin determination of the social totality. This means that a full investigation of the object in its full immediacy in fact leads us to see it as mediated, and leads us to try to comprehend the mediating relations that created the phenomenal object. As Adorno puts it: “To dialectics, immediacy does not maintain its immediate pose. Instead of becoming the ground it becomes a moment.”⁹⁶

Thin determination has emerged as the grounds for Adorno’s confidence in the social universality of his analyses. Thin determination also serves to provide a warrant for Adorno’s assertion that objects serve as physiognomies of their social context and, thereby, are capable of disclosing conceptual critiques through “full, unreduced experience” of those objects. The core problem that we have now found is the antagonism between delusive and revelatory determination. It is now an important question as to how delusive determination can be overcome. The putative “overcoming” of delusive determination is clearly understood by Adorno to be multiply realizable. There is, of course, a strong line of thought in Adorno’s philosophy that the unorthodox employment of concepts in philosophy can be sufficient to undo the delusive nature of these concepts, and to lead the reader into comprehension of truths and also (to anticipate) into experience of the nonidentical. On the other hand, there is the more elusive claim in Adorno’s aesthetic writings (but paradigmatically in Aesthetic Theory) that “authentic” art is likewise capable of breaking through delusive determination and yielding up truths. The production of truth—the undoing of delusive determination—is very different in the case of art, as art is incapable of directly employing concepts and conceptual materials in the same way as philosophy.

By the close of this chapter, then, we can see that art and philosophy share an identical, and demanding, task, namely, to undo the effects of delusive determination—to break through the self-preserving and reifying concept in order to make a form of experience possible in which the phenomenal object and its true mediation are made manifest. Both art and philosophy are obliged to take very different approaches to realizing this. Art is not philosophy—it is not a discursive medium that advances arguments in the same way, nor (as we will see) does art comprise the same materials as philosophy. (This will be true for Adorno even in the case of literature, where we might think that concepts can be directly used in the text.) Given these differences, we cannot consider art’s and philosophy’s treatment of this problem at the same time or run them in parallel as we go. This would conflate what are significantly different approaches to a shared problem. We will find that, added to this, Adorno often makes bold claims about art’s being a genuine form of knowledge, its making (heterodox) use of concepts, and its having a rational character.

In the following two chapters, then, I will give an account of how Adorno understands truth to be instantiated in philosophy. Chapter 3 will cover Adorno’s unusual idea of “texture” in philosophy and rhetorical form (which will have very significant consequences for our understanding of how aesthetic structures can be conceptual and sociohistorically critical). In chapter 4, we will then move to Adorno’s claim that this texture must be conjoined to a “performance” in the consciousness—a cognitive complement and manipulation of this texture. Again, this will have significant consequences for our understanding of Adorno’s theory of the “shudder” in aesthetic experience and its linkage with the nonidentical.