A plea for radical feminist social critique to leave behind the form-determinations of capitalist patriarchy.
In the 1990s, poststructuralist theories dominated academic feminism. In contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist approaches were absolutely marginalised. Instead of looking for a new understanding of totality that could explain more recent developments, such as the decline of really existing socialism, cultural explanations were employed along with an accompanying appreciation of the local, the regional, and the particular. Meanwhile, the situation has changed once more. It is not only since the crash of 2007/8 and the increasing prominence of social issues that interest has surged again in a critique of ‘political economy’. This has also been proclaimed in feminism since the mid 2000s: ‘Women, think economically!’ (Nancy Fraser). Since then, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School has also received more attention.
Adorno’s critical theory has had a certain tradition within German-speaking feminist theory since the late 1970s. However, it has been inadequately received by feminist theory, that is, inconsistently, unsystematically, discontinuously, disparately and eclectically. In contrast to this reception of Adorno’s thought, value dissociation theory developed in the 1990s during the high time of deconstructivism, partly in opposition to it. It involves a critical appropriation of Adorno’s critical theory, but in contrast to some other feminist theories that also refer to Adorno, value dissociation theory holds the form-determinacy of capitalist patriarchy as central. In this context, I criticise Adorno-inspired feminist accounts for not advancing a radical critique of the Enlightenment, i.e., one that questions both the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment as two sides of the same coin. These accounts are in fact sociologically stuck in positivist definitions of hierarchical gender relations. Enlightenment, rationality, a formal understanding of science, and even an empty, formulaic sociology are taken as adequate to critique the form of consciousness of capitalist patriarchy.
Value dissociation critique, however, not only refers to Adorno’s theory, but also to the value-critical developments of Marx’s own theory. As opposed to traditional Marxism, this approach does not begin with the subjective legal ‘appropriation’ of surplus value by the capitalist, but takes abstract labour, the commodity, and capital as automatic subject to be the real scandal of capitalist socialisation. This integration of value-critique with critical theory in Adorno’s sense transforms the critical theory of society beyond itself towards an account of social form.
After a rough sketch of value dissociation theory, which will also clarify the meaning of social form, the following text will discuss the history of the feminist reception of Adorno in the German-speaking world. Next I discuss the connection between value dissociation critique and relevant passages in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Finally, the third part argues for the necessity of a critique of Enlightenment in the context of value dissociation theory. This entails the categorical, fundamental critique of modern social forms affirmed by the Enlightenment. In order to prevent misunderstandings: this critique of Enlightenment comprehends itself beyond an irrational, vitalist recourse to life, community, and similar ideological abstractions, which are merely the flipside of the androcentric-universalist rationalism of the Enlightenment.
A critique ‘with Adorno beyond Adorno’ was actually already possible within critical-feminist theories from the second half of the 1980s onwards. But even when Adorno was invoked, this possibility was squandered in favour of an empty formulaic sociology so typical of a bourgeois-academic understanding of social theory, which is entirely devoid of the speculative moment of a fractured, negative dialectical thinking of totality (Adorno, 1973).
There is no systematic feminist orientation in the tradition of Adorno outside the German-speaking world. Theorists such as Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and Iris Marion Young in the Anglo-American world are not discussed here because they argue by and large in the tradition of Habermas, who gave up on a radical critique of capitalist (patriarchy) from the very start.
Value dissociation theory starts from the premise that it is not simply the case that capital, as the ‘automatic subject’ (Marx) of (surplus) value, constitutes a totality. Equally important is the ‘fact’ that reproductive activities arise in capitalism which are mainly carried out by women. Accordingly, value dissociation essentially means that reproductive activities determined as feminine, along with accompanying emotions, qualities, attitudes (emotionality, sensibility, care, etc.), are precisely dissociated from (surplus) value and abstract labour as well as a corresponding androcentric subjectivity. Female reproductive activities, ‘love’, nurture, care, and so on, have a different character than value-producing abstract labour; therefore, they cannot automatically be subsumed under the concept of labour. In other words, there is a side of capitalist society that cannot be grasped by Marxist conceptual instruments. This side is comprised by (surplus) value, necessarily belonging to it; but at the same time, it is outside of it and is therefore its presupposition. There is no hierarchy of derivation, both emerge from each other. Thus, the dissociation of value can also be interpreted as a superordinate logic, which overlaps with the internal economic categories.
To this extent, value dissociation also implies a specific socio-psychological relation: feminine connoted qualities, such as emotionality, sensibility, understanding, and weakness of character are projected onto women and dissociated from the male, value-determined subject, construed as rational, strong, assertive, and productive, and so on. Thus, in regards to the structure of the dissociated relationship, one must also take into account the socio-psychological and the cultural-symbolic dimension, whereby capitalist patriarchy is to be understood as a ‘civilisation model’ (Frigga Haug) and not merely as an economic system.
In this context, the dissociation of value also represents a meta-theory as it cannot be assumed that empirical male and female individuals correspond directly with it. Men and women neither appear immediately one-to-one in this structure, nor can they completely escape the corresponding attributions.
Value dissociation as basic social relation is also subject to social change; it must be thought of as a historical process. It should be pointed out that modern gender conceptions and their corresponding forms of existence arose only in connection with the institutionalisation of ‘abstract labour’ for the market on the one hand and separate household activities on the other. The woman as housewife and the man as breadwinner did not exist in pre-modern times. Cultural conceptions of masculinity and femininity can vary, it must be stated, but this should not result in a culturally relativist failure to recognise that capitalist patriarchy shapes social reality worldwide.
In postmodernity, the structure of dissociation presents itself in a different form than in ‘classical’ modernity. The traditional nuclear family has now largely disappeared and with it the modern gender relation. At least in Western countries, women are now caught up with the men, for example, in terms of education. In contrast to the old housewife ideal, they are equally responsible for family and career. However, unlike men, they are still primarily responsible for the dissociated care activities, they still earn less than men, they have fewer opportunities for advancement, and so on. Moreover, in the era of globalisation, when the institutions of work and family are increasingly disintegrating in the crisis of capitalist patriarchy without new forms of reproduction to take their place, we are not dealing with the overcoming of patriarchy, but rather with its feralisation.
For a large part of the population, even in developed countries, this means that women are likely to live in conditions that are at least partly known from the slums of ‘Third World’ countries: women are equally responsible for money and survival. They are increasingly integrated into the world market, but without the opportunity to secure their own livelihood. They raise children with the help of female relatives and neighbours.
The ‘housewifised’ (Claudia von Werlhof) men come and go, moving from job to job and from woman to woman, who maybe even support them (in principle, it can be reversed, of course). Due to the precariousness of employment, combined with the erosion of traditional family relations, the man no longer possesses the role of breadwinner. At the same time, hierarchical gender relations have by no means disappeared. Male violence increases. This is true today on a global scale, despite all the differences in various parts of the world, which must be taken into account.1
Before discussing the link between value dissociation critique and the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the history of Adorno’s reception in the German-speaking feminist debate will be considered. It will be shown that, in contrast to value dissociation theory, over the decades this debate has become increasingly detached from the problem of social form.
It was only in the second half of the 1980s that German-speaking feminism appealed more to Adorno. Before that, the so-called ‘domestic labour debate’ took place within the narrower framework of traditionally Marxist-economic categories. The core question was whether domestic labour creates value, which ultimately had to be negated. Asymmetrical gender relations in capitalism could not be explained and criticised in the same way as value-producing labour-power. The turn to Adorno and Horkheimer, especially to Dialectic of Enlightenment, may be explained primarily by the rising awareness of environmental and ecological problems at the time.
With the so-called new social movements –ecology, women’s, alternative, peace and psychological movement – the problem of the domination of nature and alienation in the widest sense (the ‘colonisation of the life world’ according to Habermas) entered the focus of social critique, which thrived under conditions of the developed welfare state. However, in parts of the women’s movement, a simplistic critique of technology and society went hand in hand with the propagation of a new femininity. Women, like nature (often equated), should be emancipated in order to return to an allegedly original relationship with nature. A false immediacy reared its ugly head again. Especially after Chernobyl, a new maternal femininity was all the rage (Mothers against Nuclear Power, etc.).
Against this partly biological ideologisation, feminists aligned with critical theory began to form their own position and resist. At that time, many works and anthologies on rationality, the domination of nature, sensuality, and femininity appeared which sought to defy those crude tendencies of a new femininity in its false ‘naturalistic’ immediacy, and demonstratively turned against them. One could mention here, for example, Heidemarie Bennent’s (excellent) philosophical-historical investigation into the dissociation of the feminine in philosophy; in it, she refers to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, arguing with Horkheimer and Adorno that we are descendants of the Enlightenment in the good as well as the bad sense, and that a blanket rejection of it would lead to barbarism (Bennent, 1985).
Until well into the 1990s, books appeared with titles like Rationality and Sensuous Reason (Kulke, 1988), Twilight of Reason (Kulke and Scheich, 1992), Mediated Femininity (Scheich, 1996), The Problem of the Identity-Logic Constructions of ‘Nature’ and ‘Gender’ (Gransee, 1999). These references should be understood as examples, not a complete overview. In the 1970s, for example, Silvia Bovenschen emphasised the significance of witch-hunts using the Dialectic of Enlightenment in a feminist way that did not end up stuck in a false immediacy (Bovenschen, 1977). One should also absolutely mention her work on ‘imagined femininity’ in which, with the help of critical theory and before the poststructuralism fad, she uncovered the cultural patterns and fantasies of femininity while also rejecting the idea of ‘female culture’ within the women’s movement, which was entangled in such traditional phantasms themselves (Bovenschen, 1979).
In this context, however, Horkheimer and Adorno have also been targets of critique since the 1980s. They were accused in Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as other works of remaining trapped within traditional gender stereotypes and corresponding dualisms. Consequently, it was necessary to look for ways to escape the trap of the ‘gender binary’. This already indicates a tendency which holds a flank open to deconstructivism. Horkheimer and Adorno were criticised for not seeing women as ‘resistant’. In general, there was much talk at this time of seeing women not just as victims, but as always resistant, as agents, witnesses of the era, ‘even-subjects’, who also demand recognition. Against the backdrop of critical theory, a new kind of feminist theory should be possible, one which dispenses with gender stereotypes and still holds social structures accountable for the gender malaise.
At the beginning of the more intensified Adorno reception in the 1980s, there was quite some reflection on the social form of modernity in terms of a critique of fetishism. In light of critical theory, Ursula Beer writes:
What … failed was the theoretical proof of the desire to conceive of domestic labour as ‘value-creating’. Domestic labour does not create value in the sense of money or exchange value as the object of value-form analysis … The question raised by Becker-Schmidt and her colleagues about the ‘form-determination’ of the family (also discussed in different terms in 1978 by Ilona Ostner) therefore seemed to open up new possibilities for me, but with a different aim: the significance of unpaid labour in society as a whole. In the Anglo-American discussion, which pushed the domestic labour debate most strongly, the question of the form-determination of the family was never raised. (Beer, 1987: 191)
Then, at the end of the 1980s, Beer suddenly turned from Adorno to Althusser as a reference, beginning with the critique of Adorno’s fixation on commodity exchange:
Adorno does not see the cohering principle of capitalist societies in material production, which is founded on the relationship between wage labour and capital, but in exchange, in the sphere of circulation. Specific logics of development, which are not based on commodity exchange, cannot be taken into account with this conception. This finding has great relevance for women’s studies because socio-economic inequality in gender relations is based on a tendential exclusion of women from commodity exchange in terms of the commodified valorisation of their labour power. Nor can (re)generative production be subsumed under the concept of exchange, which the feminist materialist postulate stresses against the material-productive character of women’s child-bearing activities. (Beer, 1990: 79)
From this critique follows the reference to Althusser:
It should be considered whether Althusser’s idea of positional and functional relationships can also be taken up in connection with the ‘mode of population’ and its interdependence with the ‘mode of economy’ … The thesis of determination in the last instance by the economy, which, according to Althusser’s reading of Marx, maintains the independence or relative autonomy of so-called superstructural phenomena, could perhaps be applied to the reformulated concept of the base: … in the sense that the ‘dominant structure’ of the mode of economy and population in its unity and differentiations exerts a profound influence on the organising framework of the entire society. (Beer, 1990: 102 et sq.)
Adorno’s pervasive exchange-reductionism is readily apparent. The capitalist fetish relation, the a priori connection between ‘abstract labour’ and ‘automatic subject’ of valorisation, is not adequately captured by Adorno’s cryptic and contradictory concept of exchange. But in contrast to traditional Marxism, and despite the reduction to exchange, his theory includes access to the critique of the value-form and its fetish character. For Beer, the critique of Adorno goes in a completely wrong direction. The ideological fixation on exchange is not critically resolved in line with a new determination of the relation between ‘abstract labour’ and gender relations, but is diverted entirely away from social form determinations. The traditional understanding of ‘wage labour and capital’ reformulated along Althusser’s structuralist theory fails to recognise the fact that the class relation is not immediately the ultimate ground of a ‘cohering principle’. On the contrary, it is ‘founded’ on the capital fetish across classes, the logic of valorisation and its gendered dissociation. A critique of social form in the sense of a critique of fetishism, which could have worked out the androcentric character of the fundamental categories of capitalism, was therefore impossible. In its stead, the feminist ‘materialist’ postulate, with its vulgar materialist or feminist understanding of production based on ‘child-bearing’ ability, left the door open once again for conceptions of society based on underlying biological and anthropological assumptions.
In the case of Beer, on the other hand, her Althusserian account (‘overdetermination’ of the ‘last instance’ by cultural ‘factors’, among others, of the capitalist economy traditionally understood by class sociology) proved to be a mere point of transition towards a cultural feminism, which was to become hegemonic in the form of deconstructivism during the 1990s. As a result, the capital relation as such with its basic categories largely disappeared from theoretical reflection, especially in deconstructivist feminism, which lost its critical sting. It is only recently, under the impact of crisis, that – problematic, short-sighted – efforts are being made to bring together the critique of capitalism with deconstruction in so-called queer-feminism, especially beyond any kind of thought about the basic character of capitalist relations in the sense discussed above.
The critical recourse to Dialectic of Enlightenment transitioned into a superficial gender-rationality in the 1990s at the latest. This also entailed a surrender of the problem of social form in terms of its categorical-content, which was initially conceived in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, gender was to be determined merely sociologically akin to class as a category of social structure, even though it was at first crucially linked to a concept of social form. What emerged in the early 1990s was an empty formulaic (feminist) sociology, already mentioned at the outset, whereby the transition to ‘relationality’ as an actual principle of knowledge, basically a formal logical point of view, played an important role.
Thus, this kind of theoretical approach was to account for the objective structures and socio-theoretical perspectives that the prominent poststructuralist theories of feminism had most neglected (see e.g., Judith Butler). The poststructuralist approach overlapped to some degree with Adorno regarding the critique of identity. Beer’s theory was not much heard of in the 1990s, probably because of its (biologically vulgar) materialistic orientation (a recourse to ‘childbearing ability’ was quite rightly frowned upon in poststructuralist accounts). Similarly alongside Beer are Becker-Schmidt and Knapp, who still rely on Adorno today, and whose works are at least partly based on an implicit Althusserian foundation as regards the ‘relative autonomy of so-called superstructural phenomena’. Although the conception of (surplus) value as the form of capitalist reproduction has not completely vanished from theoretical focus, it is very much moved to the background.
It almost appears as if women in the ‘post-socialist’ 1990s groomed an academically and sociologically pristine and sterile Adorno in order to conjure away the problem of basic capitalist forms. When, for example, Becker-Schmidt and Knapp elucidate the meaning of the term ‘relational’, it becomes clear that they are indulging in a kind of Althusserian twisted understanding of Adorno:
First, relations specify the elements, the relata, which come into relation with each other as magnitudes in an equation. In our case, these are women and men considered as genus groups. Second are the contexts within which the genus groups, when not on equal footing, come into a reciprocal relationship of appreciation and depreciation. Interactions between the genus groups have a wide range of nodal points, for example, kinship bonds, sexual relations, and cooperative relationships, or economic, cultural and political conditions that decide the opportunities for appropriation and recognition of men and women. Such constellations are by no means based on the same organising principles in all societies. In cultural comparisons, we find relations of similarity and difference, symmetry and asymmetry, equality and hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion. Historical investigations – within a cultural tradition – can bring to light changes from epoch to epoch. This means that the configuration of relations between the sexes is dependent on history and society. (Becker-Schmidt and Knapp, 2000: 39 et sq.)
In contrast, Adorno already knew:
A notion of society … would be critical [if i]t would go far beyond the trivial idea that everything is interrelated. The emptiness and abstractness of this idea is not so much the sign of feeble thinking as of a shabby permanency in the constitution of society itself: that of exchange in modern-day society. (Adorno, 1969: 148)
Even though Adorno only conceptualises exchange here, and does not make the link with value dissociation, he addresses the formal principle of capitalist society located on the categorical level and not in the secondary structure of the surface (everything is somehow connected with everything else without determining an overarching concept of the whole). Precisely in this abbreviated manner, however, Becker-Schmidt and Knapp understand ‘form-determination’ as merely ‘the formation of a social structure that historically crystallised under certain conditions of production and reproduction’ (Becker-Schmidt and Knapp, 2000: 155).
These descendants of critical theory not only forego the categorical conception of social form, but also lack perception of Dialectic of Enlightenment even if only as a doubt of Enlightenment. Instead, an ambivalent critique of Enlightenment in the sense of a dialectic of Enlightenment, according to which the Enlightenment could have also led to piercing the ‘context of delusion’, was ultimately transformed into a positivist, formal-logical thinking, which was a thorn in the side for Adorno and Horkheimer. Rationality and irrationality are not seen as two sides of the same coin of an untrue whole but instead the resulting issues are one-sidedly resolved in a rational and formal-logical manner.
This manner of thinking also characterises, for example, Knapp’s considerations of intersectionality, i.e., the connection between ‘race’, class, and gender, which makes little recourse to the categorical level of capitalist social forms. It is precisely in this understanding that Frieder Otto Wolf writes:
No longer determined by the recently elapsed moment of postmodernism, the newer feminist, ecological and anti-racist critiques of the European scientific tradition no longer use ‘cultural critique’ in a romantic (or nihilistically theory-hostile) manner to critically overcome its ‘scientific character’, but rather aim anew at its ‘unscientific’, methodological distortions in the empirical-historical processing of reality. (Wolf, 2011: 362)
The critique of the bourgeois concept of science following Adorno, quite evident in feminism up to the 1980s, is declared over and rejected as ‘romantic’ or even ‘theory-hostile’. Instead it seeks out a scientific conception of theory that belongs to the positivist and formal-logic traditions of bourgeois thought. Wolf however welcomes Althusser’s reading warmly.
Althusser’s rejection of the humanist subject in favour of a structural analysis of the direct appearance of society went hand in hand with the adoption of a ‘class standpoint’ or analysis of a class structure, which served to determine everything else, despite all ‘overdetermination’, that is, the occurrence of other contradictions. As if by twist of fate, however, this kind of theorising allowed for the humanist subject to be reintroduced through the back door, as was already the case in Althusser’s self-criticism since the 1970s. This visible oscillation between (sociological, immanent-interests guided) ‘standpoint’ and ‘structure’ as basic model are traditionally always present within androcentric bourgeois science and scientific theory. Therefore, the ability for a feminist theory to distance itself from such a theoretical approach is necessary in order to advance towards a critique of basic social forms. Social form critique is the foundation of dissociation theory.
Horkheimer and Adorno, especially in Dialectic of Enlightenment, offer possibilities of connecting with an enlightenment-sceptical theory of value dissociation, beyond affirmative structural logics and subject idolatries (cf. Scholz, 2004). A fundamental determination of Dialectic of Enlightenment is pointedly expressed in the following prominent quotation:
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 … Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable, and is unable to listen only if he is unable to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Workers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to one side. The urge towards distraction must be grimly sublimated in redoubled exertions. Thus the workers are made practical. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 26)
As is well known, Horkheimer and Adorno make recourse to antiquity with the Odyssey. Odysseus can be tied to the mast in order to resist the sound of the sirens. Dialectic of Enlightenment should not be read as an historical odyssey. Rather, it should be read as an account of the constitutive history of modern capitalist society, in which Marxist theory is implicitly connected with psychoanalysis. Andrea Maihofer, whose deliberations are interesting for value dissociation critique, correctly writes:
Otherwise independent phenomena such as capitalist commodity production, instrumental rationality, domination of nature, bourgeois-patriarchal rule, ‘male’ subjectivity, and so on, are seen in a strict constitutive context of emergence and reproduction. This is not meant, as is often the case, in the sense of a bad economic, monocausal derivation, according to which everything is connected with everything else, because ultimately everything is the (functional) form of appearance of the ‘one’ of the economy. (Maihofer, 1995: 111)
The male subject dissociates his drives and feelings; they must now be controlled and ruled. Consequently, there exists a dialectic between domination and submission or self-submission. The relation to value dissociation theory is evident. The dissociation of value is visible here at least in silhouette as the formal principle, which permeates society as a whole. At the same time, Horkheimer and Adorno do not simply reproduce gender stereotypes, as Maihofer also correctly observes, but reconstruct gender discourse and critically present its constitution. They thus also implicitly take into account the cultural-symbolic level and do not regard capitalist patriarchy merely as a ‘civilisational model’ reducible to the economy. Male and female subjectivity, however they may appear, are often presented as broken in themselves. Nonetheless, Horkheimer and Adorno do not yet arrive at the fundamental breakthrough of the critique of the constitutive core of the value dissociation relations. Their remarks on gender relations are primarily descriptive.
Generally problematic in this context, ceterum censo, is that Adorno regards the principle of exchange as the basic social fact of modernity, not value and abstract labour (let alone the dissociation of value as a social relation of reproduction). A critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment should have thus encompassed value and abstract labour along the trajectory taken by value dissociation critique. Instead it was taken in the direction of Althusserean structuralism, which led to claiming ‘material production’ in a feminist way without any further thought about value and its implications for totality. Indeed, in the case of Becker-Schmidt, who adopts an almost purely relationalist-sociological view of society, a fundamental critique of capitalism is an entirely alien undertaking.
In the face of National Socialism, Horkheimer and Adorno asked in the Dialectic of Enlightenment ‘why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: xiv). As children of their time, Horkheimer and Adorno obviously could not examine the new barbaric processes in light of today’s deterioration of capitalism. Beyond Adorno, we may diagnose a ‘feralisation of patriarchy’ in postmodernity. Institutionalised fixtures, such as gainful employment and family, are increasingly dissolving in the deteriorating context of capitalist patriarchy. Women are equally responsible for money and survival, production and reproduction, whereas men are being ‘housewifised’ at the same time, that is to say, their role as breadwinners becomes more and more precarious. Women now occupy a crucial place both in self-help initiatives of the Third World as well as in the corridors of declining state power. Horkheimer and Adorno already see the growing professional activity of women in their time with scepticism, and speak of a ‘dissociation of love’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 85). From the perspective of value dissociation critique, however, the dissociated sphere of the family is not a refuge, not a positive ‘other’, as it appears for Horkheimer and Adorno, but itself an immanent component of capitalist patriarchy.
Value dissociation theory has by no means become irrelevant with historical-postmodern changes, as might appear to the superficial view that associates it with traditional gender roles. Rather, it adopts Adorno’s insight, formulated in his Introduction to Sociology lectures:
[F]irstly, the essential concerns the laws of motion of society, especially the laws which express how the present situation has come into being and where it is tending to go; secondly, these laws are modified, and are valid only as far as they are really manifested; thirdly, the task of sociology is either to explain even the discrepancies between essence and appearance in terms of the essential […] or to have the courage to abandon concepts of essence or general laws which are simply incompatible with the phenomena and cannot be dialectically mediated. (Adorno, 2000: 25)
What does this mean from the standpoint of value dissociation critique, an approach that Adorno did not have in mind? From the perspective of value dissociation theory, it is crucial to insist on a dialectic of essence and appearance in Adorno’s sense, and not to get carried away by empirically ascertainable facts like the ‘double socialisation’ of women in postmodern individualisation (Becker-Schmidt), the diagnosis of the end of the patriarchy, or even the formal-logical determinations of the gender hierarchy. Rather, it is necessary to determine the constitutive reproduction of the overarching dissociation of value as the form determining principle of the social totality in its historical breakdown. This equally encompasses the material, social psychological and cultural-symbolic dimension in its postmodern developed form, and thus all areas and levels of society as well (see above; also Scholz, 2005, 2011). Accordingly, the more recent empirical changes in gender relations must be understood out of the mechanisms and structures of value dissociation itself.
At the same time, the development of the productive forces and market dynamics, which themselves are based on the basic principle of value dissociation, undermine their own presuppositions by forcing women out from their traditional role and instead making them aware of the always already existing ‘double socialisation’ (Becker-Schmidt) in the course of the process of individualisation. For example, since the 1950s in West Germany, more and more women from the middle classes have joined the labour market, due to processes of rationalisation in the household, among other things; women have long caught up with men in education; mothers are increasingly employed; family planning has become possible due to contraceptive means, and so on (Beck, 1992). In short, there has been a long-standing tendency for more women to be integrated into the official (traditionally male connoted) society. However, even in changed postmodern circumstances, women are still responsible for care and household activities in contrast to men, earning on average less than men, and so on. What transpires is a mere modification of the structure of value dissociation: ‘double socialisation’ gains a new quality. Women are no longer just objectively ‘doubly socialised’ as before, but now under conditions of feralised, crisis-ridden patriarchy; even according to this model, they are still determined by the roles of housewife and mother. Even on the globalised macro-scale, women are mainly crisis-managers, whether increasingly in ‘power positions’ of business and politics or on the poverty level of self-help groups, often borne by women in the slums. Women function once again as ‘detergents and disinfectants’, as already found in a patriarchal tradition (women are the better humans), although in a modified postmodern form in the sense of a now so-called work–life balance, which can be studied hands on with the help of social science (Thürmer-Rohr, 1987). All the while, male violence increases if nothing else because of the inconsistency of status.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, a critique of the logic of identity entails a critique of the logic of gender. Thus, they write:
Man as ruler refuses to do woman the honour of individualising her. Socially, the individual woman is an example of the species, a representative of her sex, and thus, wholly encompassed by male logic, she stands for nature, the substrate of never-ending subsumption on the plane of ideas and of never-ending subjection on that of reality. Woman as an allegedly natural being is a product of history, which denatures her. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 87)
Instrumental reason and the logic of identity, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, culminated in the liquidation of the ‘other’ in National Socialism. In so doing, they connect the predominant logic of identity categorically with the domination of nature and, in this context, with the exchange principle. Value dissociation critique, on the basis of Adorno’s thought, utilises the critique of identity logic for itself, thus adopting the critique of a deductive thinking that wants to create order from above and subject the particular, contingent, different, ambiguous to one logic. The thought form of identity logic however does not correspond simply with exchange or, more correctly, with (surplus) value. For it is not important whether the common third thing – disregarding qualities – is average social labour time or abstract labour, which stands behind the form of equivalence, but that it again must exclude and look down upon whatever is connoted as feminine, namely, domestic work, the sensuous, the emotional, the analytically incomprehensible, the different, and the contradictory.
However, the dissociation of the feminine is by no means congruent with the non-identical in Adorno; instead, it represents the flip side of value. Dissociation in general is a precondition for neglecting the actual forms of life, the scientifically incomprehensible, the contingent, and so on, and for remaining largely dim in the masculine areas of science, economics and politics of the modern age. Leading the charge is a classificatory thinking that cannot take into account the particular quality, ‘the thing itself’, and thus must omit any differences, breaks, contradictions, and so on.
Thus, a corresponding theory of value dissociation should reveal its own limits; this is a core requirement of the approach. In this context, for example, it is important to point out following Adorno that empirical individuals are never wholly absorbed in gender-typical attributions, even if they cannot escape them. Thus, as a critical social theory, value dissociation must protect itself against acquiring a transcultural character. Even though dissociation of the feminine entails a global dynamic, it has different faces in historically different phases of value dissociating socialisation. In postmodernity, as already mentioned above, it is undergoing a change of form as traditional gender relations erode, as the institutions of the family and labour market protection corrode, and as patriarchy undergoes feralisation in the course of globalisation.
The abstract recourse to the non-identical, to contradictions, to the ambivalent, to difference, and so on, has long since become affirmative. This is true in postmodern and poststructuralist theories insofar as they are free-floating, without reference to a concept of society, without reference to a universal, to a (negative) social essence (to be overcome), as was the case with Adorno.
Contrary to the anti-philosophical, postmodern, and poststructuralist tendencies, today’s global social reality can only be tackled by an admittedly contemporary, speculative-philosophical thinking in terms of a radical critique of value dissociation relations that constitute the basic social structure. The central importance of value dissociation as the principle of social form, including the corresponding gender relations, does not mean that value dissociation presents the so-called main contradiction of society. Following Adorno, and according to the remarks above, the theory of value dissociation cannot correspond to a logic of the One. Rather, it remains true to itself in its critique of the logic of identity; it can only exist by relativising itself, even denying itself where it is necessary. And this also means that value dissociation critique, if it is to keep an eye on the relevant thing in itself, must concede equal theoretical place for various forms of social discrimination (Scholz, 2005).
Thus to a much greater extent than other theoretical feminisms, value dissociation critique follows Adorno’s negative dialectic as a critique of social form, which argues in and through the thing itself, the particular object of the gender relation, and aims at the content.
How, are we to situate the sociologically narrow developments in feminism after critical theory, gender theory, and the corresponding reference to rationality and enlightenment in light of the critique of the determinate dissociation of value as the principle of social form? Knowledge of the ambivalence of Enlightenment, appearing in feminist titles such as Rationality and Sensuous Reason, Twilight of Reason, and so on, should have led to a theory of value dissociation instead of seeking ‘refuge’ in structuralist paradigms. A feminist insistence on structure is tellingly resolved in a purely sociological manner, without recognising it as a narrow-minded, genuinely bourgeois standpoint. The merely descriptive presentation of the problem of gender in Dialectic of Enlightenment should have instead been transferred to a categorical level. Such a critique leads through the Dialectic of Enlightenment to a fundamental critique of Enlightenment, rather than its affirmation. It goes without saying that such an approach has nothing in common with any recourse to a ‘false immediacy’ (Adorno), even with claims of a somatic moment in general. Such conceptions of a ‘new femininity’ are highly distorted and basically reactionary, but in opposing mere gender-positions, they must be asserted in a completely different way. A critique of value dissociation thus requires a critical distance and capacity for abstraction far greater than any ‘normal’ and recognised sociological form of theory. It thus refers back, nolens volens, to the Enlightenment, which must not only be enlightened about itself; it must also be overcome to prevent the Enlightenment from falling into reaction. What is required here is the ability to withdraw from the given – even the Enlightenment itself – and actually venture into a no man’s land, a procedure which has nothing in common with an apotheosis of the Enlightenment. There is no escape from this tension. The gender problematic and its entire history are always in danger of being concretely and immediately misunderstood.
Negative dialectics has its roots initially in the Enlightenment, but at the same time, it demands going beyond itself, to examine its own limitations and thus to think against itself, with and against Adorno. This kind of dialectical thinking may be indispensable, but it cannot be perpetuated for all time or immortalised as a fundamental affirmation of enlightenment. The necessary recourse to negative dialectics as a radical critique of the given conditions is ultimately there to be overcome. We simply do not know how modes of thinking might look in a non-capitalist, non-patriarchal society. To this extent, value dissociation is the basic social principle of contemporary society. In this sense, negative dialectics is thus ‘true’ with regard to the critique of the present condition. With Guy Debord, however, it must be stressed that ‘in a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false’ (Debord, 1995: §9). What is at issue here is a critique of an all-encompassing value dissociating practice of socialisation. Practice does not simply mean political practice, but social practice in a comprehensive sense, which transcends a false immediacy of everyday life and its reservoir of alleged femininity. It also has nothing in common with a structuralist reading of theoretical practice à la Althusser, which from the outset shies away from any dialectical reference. By negating the fundamental social principle of (surplus) value as the constituent principle of capitalist society, the theory of value dissociation does not simply say something about the critique of gender relations. It rather offers a critique of gender relations through the critique of global social relations as a whole.
The point is not to constantly conjure up and praise social contradictions, as if they hold some potential for resistance and somehow push beyond themselves, rather the point is to overcome and critique them. The antithesis to this approach would be, for example, Hardt and Negri’s operaist philosophy of ‘praxis’, which must always accommodate ‘happiness’ within the walls of its practice. The earlier analyses of feminine dissociation as well as analyses concerning racist traditions are not only narrow – they usually get stuck in a structural and politicised class context – but they also show that a simple recourse to the Enlightenment is ultimately uncritical in its conception of society.
Value dissociation critique has to be asserted and thought through in an uncompromising manner. It should not be treated as a moral ‘ingredient’, but as a critique of an essential structure-forming context that understands the necessary mediation of subject and object. It does not allow itself to be reduced to a theory of action in order to achieve status as a legitimised approach in the social sciences. Likewise any one-sided hypostatisation of the object has to be avoided. Diethard Behrens’ accusations against some Marxist positions are thus most relevant to a theory of value dissociation: ‘An action-theoretic restricted dialectics must fail in its approach because it is always on the search for the dialectical operator […] The sought-after mediation of immanent critique thus reverts back to external mediation, i.e., to the mechanics of individual and society’ (Behrens, 2010: 114). A Marxist understanding of science that, in competition with the bourgeois understanding of science, endeavours to surpass it becomes in fact equal to it. Instead, bourgeois science and philosophy itself should be conceptualised as fetish-constituted.
Ironically, the poststructuralist approach, which set out to deconstruct Western Christianity, modern rationality, the Enlightenment and the humanist subject in general, ended up in familiar rationalist waters. This certainly shows that many poststructuralist concepts have more to do with the Enlightenment and corresponding forms of rationality than would like to be thought. This is also unabashedly expressed by Althusser, who shaped Marxist (post)structuralism by hypostatising structure on the one hand, but (or precisely because of this) on the other hand questioned the humanist subject. As he writes in his autobiography:
Those against me included not only the band of philosophers who wrote books ‘for man’ against Foucault and me (…) but also all the ideologues of the Party as well who made no secret of their disapproval and who supported me only because they could not have me expelled (given my notoriety). (Althusser, 1993: 186)
As already mentioned, Althusser is stuck with the old class-subject, that is, the structure ‘articulates’ itself in ritual, action, and practices from the outset. In this manner, the subject–object dialectic found a ‘smooth’ positivist solution, which has been ‘hegemonic’ in capitalist society ever since its beginnings. Indeed, it rejects any fundamental critique of social form, even if its ‘normative’ critique and corresponding manifestations of commitment stagnates in boredom.
Without a doubt, postmodern discourse and poststructuralist theories fulfilled the ‘civilising mission of capital’ at a time of its decay; ironically, one could say. A worn-out gender discourse primarily concerned with the ‘production’ of gender and the relation of whatever empty relata to itself, eloquently bears witness to this. Even the psychoanalytic dimension is incorporated in a purely mechanical way. Such a discourse continues with Hardt and Negri, who assume an emancipatory-irrational moment based on a diverse, managerial multitude.
Operating within this prevailing left-wing discourse of identity, feminism has finally come to agree with patriarchal ideology, which regards women as empirically oriented, practical and down to earth. A gender oriented feminism is fundamentally compliant with this demand and content with a purely structuralist reading of social relations. Rather than insisting on the dissociation of value in all its complexity, which does not expire in the gender struggle, it bespeaks contemporary relations by describing them abstractly.
Still, one must go beyond a (negative) dialectical view of value dissociation critique in order to transcend methodologically as well as content-wise the determinations of male–female, heterosexual–homosexual, as well as the intersectional relations of various social disparities. This should not be carried out with affirmative intent, but rather as the negation of the corresponding conditions on a purely conceptual level. Only on this basis could a somatic and actual critique of concrete oppressions (an apt concept that has not fallen out of fashion for nothing) be taken into account once more. Otherwise, what comes to pass is a secondary recourse to traditional identities as indices of serious emancipation (see e.g., the headscarf cult of Islamic women, interpreted as emancipatory in Western feminism, primarily as resistance to the West, but which is also an approval of a traditionally Western image of women as seen by growing currents of the new right, which could connect women and feminists frustrated by postmodern developments by means of cross-front strategies). On this basis, a culture–nature, sex–gender dialectic would also need to be reflected, which by no means should lead to the assumption of a natural heterosexuality, a dialectic disregarded in contemporary discourses of ecology and nature. The latter are caught up in instrumental reflections, as if there had never been any previous, serious critiques interested in a mediated approach, however deficient they may have been.
Adorno does not promote a labour-based and derivative Marxist methodology, but rather thinks social form (though caught up in ‘exchange’) in an overarching sense. He grasps totality in its non-identity, and his reflections are thus something quite different in content from the many exegeses of the so-called ‘new Marx reading’, in which social content is fundamentally subordinated to purely methodological aspects, reducing dialectics to a method, whether within or outside of labour movement Marxism, and so on.
The real (un)truth of the social whole, however, reveals itself first with regard to a complex critique of value dissociation, which is not established simply by epistemology, but can find its end only in an actual overcoming of androcentric, racist, and nature-hostile practice. This lies beyond the stressful romantic everyday life of the forced ‘housewifised’ man who makes a virtue of necessity, secretly looking for something else. Increasing male violence showed itself for example in the 2016 New Year’s events of Cologne. This must be interpreted against the backdrop of the deinstitutionalisation and feralisation of capitalist patriarchy, and cannot be projected ethnically/racially on allegedly North African men. On the contrary, such tendencies must be interpreted against the backdrop of a worldwide, universal patriarchy in its form of disintegration, which does not stop at the doors of the West, but has its roots even within fortress Europe. The role that the Enlightenment plays in all this, and the fact that there can be no naive appeal to it against the rising barbarism, should have become clear in the course of my argument. It is necessary to go beyond both Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.
When Gudrun-Axeli Knapp recently bemoaned a mere juxtaposition of feminist positions, she stated a dry conciliation and tolerance in feminist discourse. She critiques feminism as a worldview – which is also always in danger of failing into a Heideggerian ontology – and wishes for an increased debate, but without even considering value dissociation (Knapp, 2013). A debate about the Enlightenment in the context of the fundamental critique of value dissociation socialisation is long overdue.
1. On this and for a detailed presentation of value-dissociation theory, see Scholz (2011) (The Gender of Capitalism).
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