A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique

IN THE previous chapter I explored Lukács’s diagnosis of reification as a dissociative and spectatorial stance taken by individuals in capitalist society toward the social world, a stance that results in the misrecognition of their own activity as unengaged and contemplative rather than world constituting. Yet, although Lukács’s work moves us in the direction of an experientially focused critique of political economy that theorizes forms of resistance to contemporary neoliberalism, the cognitive emphasis of his theory ultimately remains inadequate to envisioning resistance to the forms of reification he identifies as central to capitalist domination. In this chapter I turn to the work of Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt school theorist who was perhaps most interested in elaborating a critique of reification, to push the critique of reification beyond Lukács’s cognitive critique.

Adorno borrows a great deal from Lukács’s work, in particular drawing on Lukács’s linkage of the antinomies of bourgeois thought with their basis in social life itself. Yet Adorno’s work on reification places radically into question fundamental aspects of Lukács’s theory, particularly Lukács’s emphasis on the standpoint of totality as the perspective from which dereifying practice operates, as well as his concern for reflexivity in practice, which Adorno finds to be mired in idealism. In this chapter I examine the new directions Adorno explores in his critique of reification, focusing in particular on the similarities and discrepancies between the different modalities of reification he illuminates, namely aesthetic, philosophical, and social reification. Unlike Lukács, Adorno is less concerned with the implications reification has for practical socioeconomic transformation than he is with the way in which reification results in the constraint of possibilities for subjective experience. Yet, perhaps despite himself, Adorno’s analysis of reification in the realm of art and aesthetics generates an approach to reified experience that has practical implications. In particular, his analysis of the work of art as what Lambert Zuidervaart has termed a “defetishizing fetish” is, I suggest, a particularly potent (though incomplete) strategy for resisting the reification of neoliberal subjectivity.1

Although the concept of reification is a central motif in Adorno’s work, Adorno never offers a systematic elucidation of the concept, preferring instead to elaborate the concept impressionistically. While, as Gillian Rose argues, reification serves as the “centrifuge of all his major works,” perhaps to the point of “obsession,” his usage of the term is eclectic and full of paradoxes.2 There is no single key analysis of reification in Adorno’s major works, and complicating the picture further is the way in which his usage of reification shifts and changes shape as it is applied to various areas of society and objects of analysis. Particularly revealing is the way in which Adorno’s analysis of reification actually shifts its valence as he moves from an analysis of reification in philosophy (“identity thinking”) to reification in the aesthetic sphere to reification in its sociopolitical modalities. While social reification is seen as negative, to the point of totalization, Adorno’s analyses of aesthetic and philosophical reification suggest that there are also emancipatory moments within reification: reification is potentially reversible. Rather than brush aside Adorno’s inconsistencies or discount the concept of reification on the basis of its lack of clarity, in this chapter I pursue a different interpretive strategy to make sense of Adorno’s concept of reification as a whole. I use Adorno’s more nuanced analysis of aesthetic and philosophical reification as a fulcrum for probing more deeply into the sociopolitical aspects of reification, which he tends to treat more superficially. The shifting valence of reification as Adorno moves from the philosophical to the sociopolitical register is significant for understanding the relevance of Adorno’s analysis to a political critique of reification. In this chapter I differentiate three modalities of reification in Adorno’s oeuvre: identity thinking or philosophical reification, drawn primarily from Negative Dialectic; aesthetic reification, outlined in Aesthetic Theory; and social reification, based on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as on Adorno’s writings on the culture industry. While I draw attention to the shortcomings of the social theory of reification, I will indicate how the more nuanced analysis of reification in the aesthetic and philosophical spheres can be brought to bear on a political theory of reification. Adorno’s theories of aesthetic and philosophical reification are posed in terms of an immanent critique that views reified forms as both ideological and emancipatory. In the spheres of aesthetics and philosophy Adorno’s theory provides the leverage for critique from within reified forms. By contrast, in the social-theoretic analysis of reification the reflexive standpoint of critique appears to be sacrificed to a thesis of total reification. I argue that Adorno’s deflection of the concept of social reification from the terrain of “praxis” (which was the basis of Lukács’s theory) to the terrain of “experience” motivates the totalization of social reification in his theory. While aesthetic and philosophical reification and dereification can be described and criticized within the framework of a critique of reified experience, I contend that social dereification, by contrast, necessarily invokes the field of political practice.

At the most general level, the theory of reification is embedded in a central motif of Adorno’s philosophy, the critique of what he calls identity thinking. In Negative Dialectic identity thinking appears foremost as undialectical thinking, thought that fails to be reflexive of the limitations of its concepts.3 Identity thinking fails to see the heterogeneity of objects in the world to the concepts that describe them. By contrast, dialectical thought is thought that recognizes the surplus of the object to the concept, laboring unceasingly in the interstitial space between the concept and the nonidentical. “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.”⁴

Beyond the epistemological problem posed by identity thinking, well explored by Lukács’s discourse on the “Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” in his essay on reification, there is a perhaps more pressing experiential problem indicated by the problem of identity that draws attention to its quotidian face, the way in which it presents itself in everyday life. Identity thinking in this sense refers to the manner in which human experience comes to be imprisoned by an unceasing cycle of sameness, a neurotic repetition perpetually confirmed in the subject’s immunity to the new. As the frame of amputated experience, the concept converts the qualitative into the quantitative, the somatic into the rational, the new into the same.

Such a description of the repetitive and neurotic character of experience framed by identity thinking perhaps already presupposes a normative understanding of how experience could or should otherwise be. This raises the question of how precisely Adorno criticizes identity thinking. On what grounds does he find identity thinking objectionable, problematic, or dominating? In his inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno indicates that a normative ideal of experience underlies his critique of identity thinking.5 Experience in its fullest possibility, he argues, is characterized by reciprocity and mutual transformation between subject and object, rather than a predominance of the subject (as in existentialism) or object (as in positivism). This is where epistemology gives way to an understanding of philosophy’s position within society. Reification at this level refers not only to the problem of identitarian thinking and experiencing, but more specifically it has to do with the naturalization of a particular kind of distorted experience that forecloses reciprocity between subject and object and therefore frames the new within the repetitious structure of the given. The naturalization of distorted experience, so Adorno indicates in Negative Dialectics, is intimately bound up with the structure of capitalist society. The reification of experience is therefore historical and socially conditioned rather than a timeless feature of rationality as such. In capitalist society, structured by the logic of value, experience itself is bifurcated. Like the commodity, Adorno’s analogy suggests, formed in its duality between its use value and exchange value, experience is reduced to its abstract form and the qualitative dimension is subsumed.

In general, it seems that Adorno adheres to the project of negative dialectics as an ultimately philosophical endeavor. However pressing the demand for the concept to surpass its own limits, to access the nonidentical by working through the limits of experience as laid out by identitarian thinking, Adorno is adamant that the limits of thought are to be discovered by means of the concept itself. This is the sense in which Adorno adheres to an immanent procedure of critique. Identity thinking, although fetishized, points toward its own limits.

The antithesis of thought to whatever is heterogeneous to thought is reproduced in thought itself, as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal criticism of the universal and of the particular; identifying acts of judgment whether the concept does justice to what it covers, and whether the particular fulfills its concept—these constitute the medium of thinking about the nonidentity of particular and concept. And not of thinking only. If mankind is to get rid of the coercion to which the form of identification really subjects it, it must attain identity with its concept at the same time. In this, all relevant categories play a part. The exchange principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average labor is originally related (urverwandt) to the principle of identification. Exchange is the social model of the principle, and without the principle there would be no exchange; it is through exchange that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical.⁶

The idea that identity thinking points toward its own limits is central to Adorno’s procedure of immanent critique and to his theory of how bourgeois thought is related to capitalist society. It also points to the critical space within which his critique of reification operates. On the one hand, Adorno writes about the way in which identity thinking is fundamentally related to the “exchange principle,” perhaps even its condition of possibility. Nevertheless, on the other hand, Adorno clings to the idea that the principle of exchange, for example, is to be opposed by way of the concept by revealing the inadequacy of the concept to its object. An abstract rejection of the principle of exchange, he argues, would only lead to a precapitalist pathos of difference, domination based on the inherent inequality of individuals and things. “If comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the exchange principle—as ideology, of course, but also as a promise, would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques.”7 One therefore cannot reject the criteria of equality tout court; rather, the emancipatory and ideological aspects of concepts must be taken as a complex that points beyond the opposition itself.

It seems that Adorno is saying that, in a sense, the capitalist social form is actually a species of identity thinking rather than the typical orthodox Marxist converse formulation, which would claim that identity thinking is an effect of capitalism. Yet this idiosyncratic approach to the relationship between capitalism and identity thinking raises the question of whether Adorno’s theory posits only an analogical relation between identity thinking and the real processes of commodity exchange. This is the question that will hover over Adorno’s grappling with the idea of reification and its relevance not only for understanding philosophical problems but also for understanding the relationship between philosophy and praxis.

One of the most important aspects of Adorno’s theory is his displacement of the critique of reification from the Lukácsian link between the social relations of capitalism and the experience of capitalist society expressed in philosophy to an immanent critique of philosophy. By insisting on an immanent critique of concepts within the frame of identity thinking, Adorno pushed back against the thesis of total reification (although he, at times, suggests this pessimistic thesis). He persisted in the belief that reification contains both ideological and emancipatory dimensions. Most important, the emancipatory aspect of reified thinking can only be accessed by way of the reified concepts themselves, neither through an abstract negation of them nor through a denial of conceptuality as such.

In Aesthetic Theory Adorno presents a complex theory of artwork and an extensive exploration of the social significance of art. Part of the complexity of this work lies in Adorno’s obtuse formulation of the situation of art in late capitalism. It is precisely the autonomy of artworks from society, Adorno argues, that provides the basis of their social significance and their potential to resist social reification. In his words, “Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.”8 The artistic realm is a nodal point within the totality of a society pervaded by capitalist exchange where resistance to social reification takes place. Nevertheless, Adorno harbors few illusions about the precariousness of aesthetic autonomy in a society spiraling toward total administration. Indeed, Adorno argues, the aesthetic realm too is pervaded by a specific modality of reification. Moreover, far from tangential to the social theoretic and political concerns of my study, it turns out that Adorno’s ideas on aesthetic reification contain the key to understanding the critical potential of his reification critique. That this critical potential is not ultimately a political potential, as I will argue, makes Adorno’s theory no less significant for a political economy of the senses.

The most striking aspect of Adorno’s usage of reification in Aesthetic Theory is its shocking reversal of the valence of reification. Those working within the Marxist tradition tend to agree upon the axiom that reification is a form of domination. Yet in Aesthetic Theory Adorno actually turns this premise inside out. Aesthetic reification paradoxically takes on a positive valence. To understand Adorno’s complex dialectic of reification, it is helpful to bear in mind Adorno’s skepticism toward those who would reify the concept of reification itself. His targets here seem to be both Lukács and Benjamin, representing the opposite poles of this tendency. In Negative Dialectics Adorno writes,

The critique of reification cannot revert to a “liquefaction” of things because reification as a process of abstraction concerns precisely the way in which the apparently thinglike objects that surround us, commodities, are in reality made of a spiritualized substance (exchange value) that is full of “metaphysical subtleties,” as Marx observed. The process of reification thus stands diametrically opposed to the material. In the name of the truth of reification critique, Adorno eschews immediacy as the antidote to reification and instead emphasizes the mediation of the artwork as the basis of its resistance to reification. Time and again, Adorno will return to the idea that reification is to be criticized in the name of materiality itself, not in opposition to it. Adorno argued that Lukács’s theory of reification succumbed to an idealistic tendency in its confusion of reification and objectivity itself. For Adorno, the truth of reification critique would emerge only through an encounter with the somatic, the thinglike, and the material.

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory turns to a peculiar kind of object, the artwork, which nevertheless falls prey to the same logic of exchange that other objects in capitalist society succumb to—however, with altogether different consequences. To be clear from the outset, Adorno is speaking not of those products of the culture industry that follow a rather straightforward logic of commodification but of their counterparts, “autonomous artworks.” In Adorno’s eyes the products of the culture industry are scarcely to be distinguished from other kinds of commodities. Adorno underscores the distinction between autonomous art and the culture industry in a well-known exchange with Benjamin, in which their fundamental theoretical differences regarding culture emerge. Benjamin contended that the “mechanical reproducibility” of photography and film has a potentially progressive effect, insofar as it tends to undermine the “auratic” dimension of art—its authentic quality and the authority it derives from tradition. The elimination of the auratic components of the artwork allow for a changed orientation toward cultural products. According to Benjamin, “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance.”10

Adorno, by contrast, emphasized the “fetish-character” of the products of mass culture and the way in which the culture industry and its products become integrated into the logic of capitalist exchange rather than serving as the basis of an emancipatory kind of spectatorship. Instead, the culture industry produces culture primarily as a commodity, for exchange, and thereby subordinates the use value component of cultural products in advance through the logic of exchange. This results in a “regression in listening,” for the products of the culture industry tend to render enjoyment of use value functional to exchange and thereby leave the needs and desires of the individual both manipulable and manipulated by the culture industry’s drive toward profit.¹¹ Adorno, in contrast to Benjamin, argues that it is not the products of the culture industry that contain the potential for a changed, potentially emancipatory experience of artworks, but rather the autonomized artworks characterized by artistic modernism, for only they issue a challenge to the all-pervasive social law of commodity exchange.

The concept of the autonomous artwork surely needs elaboration, since it is a paradoxical and highly mediated autonomy that Adorno describes. Adorno conveys this through a dynamic and restless dialectical mode of presentation. Art and society stand in chiasmatic relation to one another—art is both part of society as a totality as well as its negation. Artworks therefore occupy a precarious and contradictory position within society: they are defetishizing fetishes.¹²

The idea of the artwork as a defetishizing fetish begins to get at Adorno’s complex notion of aesthetic reification. To say that artworks are fetishes is to acknowledge that they are produced in a society in which commodity production and exchange is the dominant form of social mediation. Even supposedly autonomous artworks fall within the sphere of the social totality of commodity exchange. They are fetishes in the same sense that other kinds of commodities are fetishes: they obscure the labor that went into producing them and appear to be objects that satisfy a particular kind of need, exchanged in accordance with the abstract medium of exchange value. Moreover, the specific fetishism of the artwork as commodity is its appearance as a unique kind of cultural object that is autonomous from its economic and social conditions of production. Its very autonomy is a fetish. Further, the artwork is fetishized in its lack of functionality. It apparently serves no social use beyond its mere existence.

And yet the artwork nevertheless contains dereifying aspects, Adorno contends. In a society where the logic of exchange predominates, the artwork’s semblance of autonomy constitutes resistance to exchange. By appearing to exist for itself, as it were, the artwork combats the reduction of all objects in capitalism to their economic functionality. The semblance of autonomy from socioeconomic conditions allows the artwork to put forth alternatives that are not compromised by social reification. Finally, the very uselessness of the art object forges a short-circuit in the hegemony of instrumental rationality. Adorno refers to artworks as “absolute” commodities—pure exchange values that thereby explode the logic of exchange. “If artworks are in fact absolute commodities in that they are a social product that has rejected every semblance of existing for society, a semblance to which commodities otherwise urgently cling, the determining relation of production, the commodity form, enters the artwork equally with the social force of production and the antagonism between the two. The absolute commodity would be free of the ideology inherent in the commodity form, which pretends to exist for-another, whereas ironically it is something merely for-itself.”13

Adorno’s idea of artistic autonomy is intimately bound to his understanding of reification in the aesthetic sphere. While never systematically articulated, the category of reification frames Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Most readers of Adorno will agree that there is an unmistakable pathos in the version of reification critique offered in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which I will explore.14 There reification refers to the inertia of the subject-object dialectic, in which subjective involvement in the economic process is eliminated. “The technical process, to which the subject has been reified after the eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thought as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has becomes merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus.”¹⁵ By contrast, Aesthetic Theory almost reverses this formulation—the reification of the artwork is valorized by Adorno. Reification of the artwork somehow contains the potentiality for a radical subtraction from the social order.

It is clear that Adorno’s usage of reification in this work moves away from his more Lukáscian usage of the category in other works. Here, perhaps heeding his own warning that critique of reification can itself become reified when it becomes a critique of objectivity altogether (strains of Marx’s denunciation of Hegel’s conflation of alienation and objectification resound), Adorno problematizes the Ding (thing) in Verdinglichung, which, like the commodity, is full of metaphysical subtleties of its own. The classic formulation of the critique of commodity fetishism, stemming from Marx’s original formulation in the first volume of Capital, is that fetishism involves the mystification of relations between humans, which come to appear as an abstract, objective relation between things, commodities, and forms of capital.¹⁶ But, furthermore, commodity fetishism refers to an abstraction that takes place within material things themselves. What appear to be material objects, use values for the satisfaction of human needs, are abstractions, exchange values that recast the material itself in terms of its own investment in the ceaseless cycle of capital. Capital constantly alters its form, from money to commodities and back to money again in the pursuit of accumulation. What this means is that a critique of objectivity as such (which Adorno has accused Lukács of conducting) fails to get at the specific pathology of reification, since reification actually entails an abstraction of objects in the real itself. Reification, in this sense, concerns the production of objects—commodities—that somehow are not reducible to their material aspect yet present themselves as objective, thingly, and naturalized.

So when Adorno speaks of the reification of artworks as something constitutive of their potential for social resistance, it seems that he is attributing the powers of resistance at least in part to their “thingly” character. “Artworks are things that tend to slough off their reity. However, in artworks the aesthetic is not superimposed on the thing in such a fashion that, given a solid foundation, their spirit could emerge. Essential to artworks is that their thingly structure, by virtue of its constitution, makes them into what is not a thing; their reity is the medium of their own transcendence.”¹⁷

It is the thingly character of the artwork that somehow permits the work to transcend its social immanence. Furthermore, artworks “become spiritualized only through their reification, just as their spiritual element and their reity are melded together; their spirit, by which they transcend themselves, is at the same time their lethality.”18 The objectification of the artwork provides the work with its content. The artwork’s content is derived from a social world that is bracketed by the work’s formal structure. The specific quality of the reification of artworks concerns this quality of separation from social forces of domination immanent to capitalist society.

In contrast to his analysis of the culture industry, where Adorno tends to associate reification with the commodification of human sense and experiential capacities, aesthetic reification in the artistic realm denotes a willed abstraction from and suspension of social reification. In effect, Adorno effects a reversal in his way of understanding reification as he shifts from the social to the aesthetic. While social reification (“bad” reification) is seen as totalizing and effects a standstill in the dialectic between subject and society, the reification of the artwork involves, first, its separation from the social world through its objectification. In its objectification the artwork assumes a “monadic” form, which creates a kind of microtopia within the work, sealed off from the social totality. Second, reification of the artwork entails a mimicry of the commodity form itself—here we can understand why Adorno would refer to this aspect as reification at all. The artwork mimics the commodity form without becoming it. In a passage commenting upon the poetry of Baudelaire, Adorno discusses this capacity of artworks.

Baudelaire neither railed against nor portrayed reification; he protested against it in the experience of its archetypes, and the medium of this experience is the poetic form. … The power of his work is that it syncopates the overwhelming objectivity of the commodity character—which wipes out any human trace—with the objectivity of the work in itself, anterior to the living subject: The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity. The modern pays tribute to this in the vestige of the abstract in its concept. If in monopoly capitalism it is primarily exchange value, not use value, that is consumed, in the modern artwork it is its abstractness … that becomes a cipher of what the work is.¹⁹

But while Lukács sees the unengaged stance of reified consciousness as primarily a problem of practice—of human beings’ misrecognition of the conditions and effects of their own practice—it is clear Adorno and Horkheimer see the problem of reification differently. For them, particularly for Adorno, reification concerns the loss of the experiential capacity for reciprocity between subject and object rather than a practical misrecognition. The emphasis for Adorno and Horkheimer is on the way in which reified social reality is homogenized, quantified, and formalized, and how experience of the social world, thoroughly structured by the logic of equivalence, comes to be naturalized. Their rejection of Lukács’s ontology of practice, while historically grounded in the decline of the proletariat as agent and signifier of revolutionary struggle, also has a theoretical basis, indicated in Adorno’s later philosophical works.

Therefore, whereas Lukács takes Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as the basis for a theory of the practical coming to consciousness of reification in capitalism, Adorno argues that this approach overlooks the problem of experience. Yet if reification consists of the naturalization of a kind of experience that is abstract, formalist, and homogenizing of its objects, this raises the question of how reification can be reflected in human experience. Explicitly criticizing Lukács along these lines, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectic,

Dialectic of Enlightenment seeks to navigate this set of problems: first by problematizing the perspective from which the critique of reification is enunciated, second by introducing a level of mediation into the theory of reification. It can hardly be overlooked that nowhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment does Adorno systematically state his theory of reification in plain terms. I suggest that this could be seen as an attempt to avoid Lukács’s hypostatization of a subject that overcomes reification simply by a coming to consciousness of his role as subject-object in the processes of capitalism. For what Lukács’s approach overlooks, so Adorno suggests, is the possibility that experience itself would qualitatively change in a situation where the reified capitalist form of subjectivity were not naturalized. Lukács has, in a sense, philosophically predetermined the outcome of the revolutionary dialectic by assuming a standpoint of totality, but, for all that, he fails to address the specific problem of reification.

Dialectic of Enlightenment stages this problem, but does not solve it. The first essay of the book, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” plays out the disenchanted world of equivalence imposed upon a society marching toward progress. Because history, identified with the progressive force of Enlightenment, is bound to the increase in the social complex of reification, Adorno seems to commit the very error he criticizes. The essay depicts a world that is leveled, homogenized, quantified, and abstracted, a victim to the concept, which seems to stand in for the Marxian category of exchange value, imposing its form upon more and more spheres of human life. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion.”21

Compounding the problem is the fact that it is not only bourgeois society that is ruled by equivalence—we soon discover that equivalence is projected into prehistory, and the instrumentalizing impulse of capitalist subjectivity is found to be present in civilization from its inception. For Marx and Lukács, critique of reification was grounded in its historical specificity. In capitalism reification is socially anchored in the system of commodity exchange. But Adorno and Horkheimer remove this fundament of reification critique and instead find reification at the dawn of history. Have they not thereby rendered reification timeless, ahistorical, and immune to human practices of resistance?

In fact, there is a strong historical dimension to Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly present in its essay on “the culture industry.” Here Adorno and Horkheimer are far more attentive to the connection between reification and capitalism, and they provide an account of how, under capitalism, ever greater spheres of social life are rendered functional to commodification. Moreover, the commodification of “culture” reveals another aspect of reification, what one might refer to as a kind of inward commodification where human desires, faculties, and senses are rendered functional to capital. Along with the spectatorial consciousness that Lukács theorized, the culture industry serves as its objective counterpart, an apparatus of social reification.

These points notwithstanding, the fundamental problem met by Dialectic of Enlightenment is the fact that reification is presented as one-dimensional. Unlike in the spheres of aesthetic reification and identity thinking, Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis here does not suggest the potential reversibility of reification. Social reification appears monolithic, and the possibility of a significant challenge to it falls out of view. In direct contrast to Lukács’s theory, the use value dimension of the commodity form appears not emancipatory but irrational and inherently functional to the capitalist mode of production. The essays on anti-Semitism and the culture industry reveal the way in which the revolt of use value against exchange value, content against form, “nature” against Enlightenment, do not constitute dereification in any sense, but only represent the irrational return of the repressed that is channeled into further domination.

I want to suggest that the problems confronted by Adorno and Horkheimer are not primarily due to their neglect of the economic dimensions of reification and the structure of the capitalist economy, although this is a familiar line of attack favored by critics of Dialectic of Enlightenment. To the contrary, I believe that Adorno’s theory of reification is illuminating and insightful in its decisive refusal of the base/superstructure problematic. Adorno indicates that supposedly superstructural forms themselves comprise an essential aspect of the capitalist “mode of production.” They can be understood and described as part of the capitalist social form without underscoring their determination in the last instance, so to speak, by the economic.

My line of critique follows another path: I suggest that the stumbling block of Adorno’s theory is the opposition that Adorno creates between reified practice and reified experience. Adorno discusses aesthetic and philosophical reification and dereification within the framework of a critique of reified experience. Yet I would suggest that dereified social life is not comprehensible solely by means of the concept of dereified experience. Adorno’s polarization of dereified experience and praxis discounts the capacity of human beings for collective action within a world shared in common. For Adorno the critique of reification is a possibility disclosing activity. By engaging in the practice of negative dialectics or in contemplating the autonomous work of art, new experiential possibilities that are not predetermined by the limits of extant experience come into view. This is the utopian aspect of his thinking. Adorno writes in Negative Dialectic, “To want substance in cognition is to want a utopia. It is this consciousness of possibility that sticks to the concrete, the undisfigured. Utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality; this is why it seems abstract in the midst of extant things. The inextinguishable color comes from nonbeing. Thought is its servant, a piece of existence extending—however negatively—to that which is not.”23

Adorno critiques reified experience in the name of the utopia of the not yet existent. But by neglecting the praxeological dimension of reification, Adorno aestheticizes his critique. This leaves his theory segmented, with no sense of mediation between the philosophical, aesthetic, and social modalities of reification. There is no potential backfire from aesthetic dereification to social dereification. Relatedly, Adorno seems to ignore the challenge of thinking about the material (and by this I do not mean only the “economic”) preconditions of dereified experience. Perhaps dereified experience requires a space, a stage upon which such experience can happen. But because Adorno focuses almost exclusively on the critical, “negative” function of reification critique in his theory of reification, he dismisses the problem of dereifying praxis as bound to instrumental rationality, thus contributing to further reification. Reification and dereification take place upon a metapolitical plane—never to intervene in the sphere of praxis.

The picture I have painted here, which highlights the imbalance in Adorno’s figuration of sociopolitical reification, aesthetic reification, and philosophical reification, confirms the well-known verdict that Adorno’s theory has very little to say about political possibilities or about the structure of dereification in the sociopolitical sphere. For the sovereignty of art and its dialectic of reification and dereification ultimately presupposes the persistence of reification in the social sphere, against which stands the autonomy of the aesthetic. The power of the autonomous artwork is a purely negative power, one that, by definition, allows no real intervention into the existing state of society.24 It thus makes perfect sense that Adorno preserves a dialectic of reification and dereification in the aesthetic realm, but only insofar as it works in a parallel sphere as a form of highly mediated resistance to the frozen social dialectic. But this reading of Adorno does little to rescue the validity of reification critique in general from charges of political irrelevance or aestheticism, since the category of praxis, which was central to Lukács’s understanding of the possibility of dereification, remains almost invisible in Adorno’s major theoretical works. A more promising strategy would be to reckon more deeply with Adorno’s emphasis on the reification of the art object as a means of provoking dereified forms of subjective experience. As George Henderson suggests in a provocative reading of Marx’s occasional and tantalizing engagement with artworks, such an emphasis could motivate a “revalorization of reification” allowing one “to experiment with the production of communist objects” and “to ask how to pay respect to this idea of being ruled by things rather than considering this rule outmoded.”²⁵