Spiegel:‘Professor, two weeks ago the world seemed still to be ok…’
Adorno: ‘Not for me!’
The understanding of the socio-historical conditions of consciousness was at the core of early Critical Theory’s1 attempt to combine social-economic and epistemological critique. Since Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno primarily developed this approach, the chapter focuses on their accounts.
First, I look at their understanding of the socio-economic and epistemological critique of society. I then discuss how their notion of mediation – which materially socializes the German idealist notions of subject and object by drawing on the critique of political economy – is formulated in regard to this notion of critique. Finally, I take a closer look at the fundamental core of this critique: the social mediation that constitutes a specific capitalist objectivity, specific capitalist subjectivity and a correspondening non-identity.
Horkheimer’s programmatic 1937 essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ marks a turning away from not one but two traditions. It explicitly criticizes the understanding of critique, mediation and subject–object in philosophy and the sciences. But Horkheimer also strives to overcome the critique that this tradition had already been subjected to from a traditional Marxist perspective. Even though Horkheimer was still committed to emancipation from the standpoint of labour, the essay was an attempt to break with the positivism of both traditions,2 opening them up to a new critical theory in distinction to the positivist world-view Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals.3 This theoretical development came along with a critique of notions of historical progress – evolutionary in traditional bourgeois theory, revolutionary in the Marxist tradition – for the supposed forward march of history had not led to overcoming capitalist society. Instead the latter had become one-dimensional, wherein social reproduction in the form of economic compulsion produced the immanence of a false totality and thus a self-closure.
In Critical Theory, the critique of this closure avoids Hegel’s speculative dialectic which takes contradictions as proof of an ideally speculative solution. But it also avoids the traditional idea in Marxism according to which the antagonism between labour and capital contains its own progressive resolution. These insights led to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man4 and to the importance of ‘eros’ and ‘drive’ in Marcuse, to Adorno’s notions of a ‘universal context of delusion’5 (‘universaler Verblendungszusammenhang’), the ‘non-identical’ and the critical force of individual reflection, and to Horkheimer’s total domination of ‘instrumental reason’ as well as notions of subjective ‘non-compliance’. Indeed, it also led to Horkheimer’s later flirtations with messianic, utopian and religious notions.6
As a theory oriented on the Marxian insight (taken from Hegel) that ‘presentation is critique and vice versa’,7 Critical Theory’s approach to contradiction established the defining character of Critical Theory, which holds that the exposure of social content is critique. The former and the latter also expose contradictions in social and historical development: scientific and social progress, illumination and universalism, freedom and autonomy are not contradicted because they are simply hindered or held up by their opposite. Rather they create their opposites. This fateful immanent turn is key to the argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE) (Horkheimer/Adorno, 2002) and Negative Dialectics (ND) (Adorno, 1973). This understanding of immanence has important consequences for the field at stake here: the connection between the capitalist economy on the one hand and the forms of thought in capitalism on the other.
The aim of such a critique (which draws on Kant, Hegel and Marx’ notion of radical critique) is to find the conceptuality of object and subject in their socially specific capitalist conditions. Following Marx, Critical Theory holds that the categories of political economy ‘express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence’,8 constituting a social objectivity and a corresponding objective subjectivity. Thus, capitalist objectivity comprises a specific socio-natural objectivity and capitalist subjectivity likewise comprises a socially specific subjectivity that appears as timeless and quasi-natural. Yet, Critical Theory also inverted Marx’ approach to ask: why can thought – in everyday life or in philosophical thinking – not adequately grasp its own capitalistic social conditions? Why do the conditions and mediations of thinking remain opaque and lead to naturalized and ideological forms?9 Further, while capitalism leads to enormous increases in productivity, why is there no corresponding emancipatory consciousness?
Even though Adorno and Horkheimer rather modestly referred to themselves as sociologists, their main calling was philosophy.10 In combining both sociology and philosophy, they sought to unite empirical research with epistemological critique and social philosophy.11 Drawing upon Kant and Hegel’s notion of critique, Horkheimer and Adorno’s aim was to ‘socialize’ the philosophical concept of critique and its central notions (consciousness and self-consciousness, reason, identity, totality, subject-object, spirit, etc.) by grounding them in the Critique of Political Economy12 and Freudian psychoanalysis.13 Yet their goal was not to turn the Hegelian Spirit ‘on its feet’, reducing the idealist view of knowledge, rational self-understanding and reason to vulgar materialism (as Traditional Marxism had done with Marx and Hegel). Instead, Critical Theory endeavoured to use the categories of the critique of political economy to demonstrate the social character of philosophical categories. This implies philosophy, especially German Idealism and its understanding of philosophical problems, is a perverted form of thought in that it merely reflects one’s own society. However, since society and its social contradictions always already appear in philosophical terms as problems of reason and cognition, knowledge and thinking, the social nature of these contradictions and problems disappear in this form of appearance. Thus philosophy in general and German Idealism in particular already represent in its form of thought and its central categories the reified, alienated and inverted character of bourgeois society.
Yet this does not invalidate philosophical thought, rather, this process of mystification is emblematic of nothing less than the hidden genesis of thinking and knowledge in general, for all thought is – and this is the main epistemological insight Horkheimer and Adorno took from Marx – socially constituted (which does not mean socially constructed), but trapped in false immediacy and immanence that cannot grasp its social origins. Moreover, this hidden genesis reaches the point of self-reflection in philosophy. Consequently, philosophy can be turned into a self-critique of thinking, especially when German Idealism is read in conjunction with Marx: the aim of Critical Theory is to uncover the social constitution of categories of thought and of being that present themselves as natural or ontological.
According to Adorno, the disappearance of the social first ‘appeared’ in the non-empirical, a priori status of Kant’s ‘transcendental subject’, and it reached its climax in Hegel’s overcoming of that transcendental subject in the supra-individual ‘Spirit’. Yet both find their truth-content in their inversion of the social and natural conditions of thinking into the supremacy objectifying reason holds over its objects. Moreover, in their philosophy the self-reflection of thinking must necessarily understand and at the same time misunderstand its social conditions and social genesis, and thus its own thinking.
Art, which plays a major role especially in Adorno’s writing,14 is used in the same way as philosophy: ‘The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relationship of art to society’.15
But while in philosophy, and especially in German Idealism, an unresolved reality finds closure in a systematic immanence, in art this unresolved reality is reformulated in the explicit non-systematic and configurational form of art itself. Therefore, while philosophy offers an adequate critique of systemic closure in thinking, art expresses the unresolved reality in a non-systematic way.
Thus, on the one hand, the ‘first’ truth of philosophy is to reflect on its own categories – being, form, consciousness, reason etc. – the disappearance of the social in thought, while on the other hand, philosophy is needed to draw attention to these social origins of thought, in order to change the former and the latter. ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed.16 That is why the duty of historical materialism is first of all, in Adorno’s words, the ‘anamnesis of the genesis’.17 This anamnesis, which Adorno conceives of as ‘dissolution of things understood as dogmatic’,18 does not in fact intend to reconstruct the social and historical genesis of thinking, at least not in a systematic or scientific sense. Instead, it traces the process of disappearance in thinking that becomes both practical reality and its blind spot, and it is because of this blind spot that he draws on both Marx’ critique of the political economy and Freud’s psychoanalysis and his notion of the unconscious.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s materialist theory of knowledge is distinct not only from Traditional Marxism’s quasi-official ‘reflection theory’,19 but also from Lukács20 and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s formulations of the former.21 The difference lies in the critical status of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Theory.22 Lukács’ attempt to formulate a materialist theory of knowledge privileged a non-contemplative, practical, epistemological standpoint: that of the proletariat as the ‘identical subject–object of history’.23 Sohn-Rethel claimed to reconstruct the social genesis of the conditions of the non-empirical forms of cognition akin to Kant’s ‘transcendental subject’.24 Adorno and Horkheimer, however, turned away from such emphatic – and, in the case of Lukács, even revolutionary – expectations of a materialist theory in general and of a materialist theory of epistemology in particular. Instead of constructing a coherent materialist theory of thought, they pointed out the shortcomings and aporias of such an attempt: such a theory points to the domination of subjectivity that must be the object of critique, or to be more precise, that must be the object of subjectivity’s self-critique. The aim therefore is not to replace the existing theories of knowledge with one of properly rational (self-)understanding, but rather to show the domination and harm caused by forms of thinking and subjectivity – not in the least against subjectivity itself.
This self-reflexive critical theory thus reveals the irrational and the ideological in the seemingly rational and objective on the side of the socio-economic constitution of social objectivity, and the corresponding subjectivity of individual experience, consciousness, thinking and science. This individual subjectivity, however, has to be derived from the supra-individual subjectivity of capitalist society’s objectivity since Critical Theory regards this capitalist society as an ‘autonomic subject’ (Marx). This is because social relations manifest themselves in the form of an incomprehensible movement of economic objects upon which society’s reproduction depends. The critique of society as an automatic subject thus shows the constitutive untruth of both society as object and society as subject while also revealing the conditions that constitute individual subjectivity and its corresponding socially necessary forms of thinking.
The real object of critique is neither the supra-individual subjectivity of society’s objectivity nor the subjectivity of individuals, but their mutual social mediation, and that mediation is their social mode of existence. The duty of critique is thus to show the irrational, ideological and reified effects of this process of social mediation on subject and object. Rather than grounding a scientific theory or Hegelian speculative identity, the critique of social mediation reveals its subjective and objective untruth. Hence, the critique of social mediation points to that which the process of mediation compulsively subsumes but cannot totally sublate. If there is an idea of truth in Critical Theory, it is one that appears negatively:25 in the unresolved contradictions, promises and desires in society; in the forgotten moments and possibilities in history; in what remains powerless, overwhelmed and in misery; in what resists identification; and in that something simply is lacking. Even if, or precisely because, all this only appears negatively, critique is then ‘based’ on what breaks and thwarts the mediation between the supra-individual and objective subjectivity of the capitalist society and the subjectivity of individuals.
Moreover, critique also points to the dark, fatal side of social mediation: when illumination and universality, progress and freedom become their opposites. By showing their regressive development, Critical Theory uses the immanent turn of these ideas for an immanent critique that still tries to rescue them for emancipation, particularly in Horkheimer and Adorno’s main works Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics.
This (self-)critical, negative status of critique has led to charges that Critical Theory cannot explain or legitimize in any positive manner its own theory and its refusal to sanction the world.
Critical Theory was aware of this quandary. Instead of a systematic or scientific explanation, it saw the purpose of critique as pointing to the ‘damaged life’26 of unconscious ‘second nature’,27 thus indicating its ideological and traumatic effects but also what in history has been forgotten or lost, what remains unfulfilled or, not least, what resists as the hope, the promise and the desire for a better life that, after all, remains as unfulfilled as insatiable.
Totality is not an affirmative but rather a critical category.28
Since Critical Theory posits critique inside the perverted mediation of capitalist objectivity and subjectivity, then its ‘first’ critique is that there is mediation at all. This critique is directed against the type of understanding that takes different scientific objects and methodologies for granted without even asking how society presents itself, thus paving the way for a positivist thinking that takes the different objects of knowledge and its scientific spheres as immediately given.29
For Adorno, following Hegel, the immediate is always already mediated and this mediation, following Marx, is socially determined and historically specific. Consequently, positivist thinking can neither adequately pose the question of mediation, nor can it adequately challenge its own thinking. The former and the latter are the goal of critical theory’s specific notion of critique.
Since this form of critique aims to point to an individual subjectivity that, however false, irrational or unconscious it might be, still – or even especially then – corresponds to the constitution of social objectivity, this also means that Critical Theory holds onto the notion of totality. More specifically, it follows an idea of totality that derives from Hegel and Marx: that totality is mediation.30 Consequently, this idea of totality-as-mediation also means a dialectical conception of mediation, which does not exist outside, prior to or detached from the mediated, but rather comprises the interrelated constitution of objectivity and subjectivity. However, with the perverted character of this subject–object mediation and its immanent turn from progress into regression, Critical Theory modifies Marx’ critique of Hegelian totality: inverting Hegel’s speculative identity which turns the negativity of the mediation of subject–object into the positivity of their correspondence and mutual progress (which is Hegel’s supra-individual Spirit). It does so by refusing this affirmative turn by holding back the ‘closing’ and ‘positive turn’ brought by the second negation in Hegel’s ‘negation of negation’.31
However, in this refusal of the ‘second’ affirmative and closing negation there is also a positive determination. But now the determination lies in the independence and self-determinateness of what is not sublated in mediation by negativity and withdraws itself, giving it back its dignity by opening the way for emancipation in non-representative thinking.32 To avoid ‘Being’ disappearing into an identity with thinking, Adorno not only insisted on the ‘preponderance of the object’33 but on ‘Something’ (‘Etwas’),34 since to speak about ‘the’ object already makes it an undetermined material of thinking, while thinking itself becomes identical with its abstraction from its substrate. This, according to Adorno, is already the ‘first’ abstraction in Hegel’s concept of Being against which Adorno vehemently claims: ‘There is no Being without Entities’.35
But as much as Adorno refers to what is not sublated and resists its determination, he also shows the truth of Hegel’s speculative version of mediation and totality: they become true through ‘reconciliation under duress’.36 This leads to an immanence that is true through the very same extortion, but becomes untrue because what is not sublated is forced to appear as if it is identified.37 This true and false process of forced reconciliation culminates in the total immanence of what Hegel developed as the supra-individual Spirit [Geist].
Total immanence is fatal even as it remains contradictory. For, in contrast to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, the hidden burrow of the good ‘old mole’ – as Marx borrowed from Shakespeare38 – and to Traditional Marxism’s notion of class antagonism, there is no emancipatory urge in the contradictions of the capitalist society. Rather, social contradictions are the antagonism, maybe even the agony of the false world.39 The fatality of the immanence of totality is not only that enlightenment, democracy, liberalism and progress turn into their own opposite, but that also the possibility of their overcoming and the attempt to form alternatives culminated in the authoritarian and repressive forms of real socialism and Stalinism. That is why Critical Theory positions its critique not only after the failures of the Enlightenment, but also after the failures of the attempts to practically overcome these.
Thus confronted with such a false totality, Critical Theory’s negativity should not to be conflated with resignation,40 but immanent critique is ‘the only’ way out so far.
Critical Theory’s first move against Hegel’s emphatic-affirmative version of the dialectical mediation of subject–object precedes Marx’ materialism. It is a constant reference to Kant. Critical Theory draws upon the critical distinction Kant makes between the ‘transcendental subject’ and the ‘thing in itself’ [‘Ding an sich’]. The gap between the former and the latter limits knowledge to individual experience. This leads Adorno to use the thing in itself against Hegel’s attempt to overcome the limits of the Kantian notion of reason.
The thing in itself stands for three critical ‘materialist interventions’ that run through Adorno’s entire work: (1) the ‘preponderance of the object’, (2) the ‘non-identical’ and (3) the way that both work together to open up philosophy which in its systematicity reflects the forced closure and false immanence of social mediation.
What first concerns the ‘preponderance of the object’41 is that it marks the turn into an explicit materialist dialectic: ‘It is by passing to the object’s preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic’.42 But the materialism of this preponderance is nevertheless still governed by the more fundamental rule of dialectical mediation as such: that the immediate is always already mediated.43
The object, too, is mediated; but according to its own concept, it is not so thoroughly dependent on the subject as the subject is on objectivity. Idealism has ignored such differences and has thus coarsened a spiritualization that serves abstraction as a disguise.44
For Hegel there exists nothing un-mediated by the supra-individual Spirit which is the reality of the mediation of subject–object and all subjective knowledge is as much mediated as its objects and content. For Adorno, on the other hand, Spirit cannot abstract from the finite. Or rather: Spirit itself is this abstraction. Only by paying the price of hypocrisy can Spirit deny its own genesis: that its origin is an abstraction from its finite conditions.
The materialism of the preponderance of the object lies neither directly on the side of the object nor on the side of its social or subjective mediation. It lies in what – and that is the second reference to the thing in itself – mediation does not sublate and what withstands identification. This grounds a materialist critique that speaks in the names of what resists: including use-value,45 nature,46 the body47 and its agony, the misery of the mind and suffering in general, but also the autonomy of subjectivity and, not least, the hope of the utopian ‘total otherness’,48 or simply what provides comfort and shelter. It is a criticism that neither points to empirical facts or evidence nor makes scientific claims. The aim is to speak in a non-representational manner in the name of what is forced into objectivation and generalization, culminating in Adorno’s concept of, or better reference to, the ‘non-identical’, elaborated in particular in Negative Dialectics.
Although ‘preponderance of the object’ means the inevitability of both nature and society, the subject has an autonomy and independence that is neither derivable from nor reducible to its natural or social conditions – the subject arises from a process of (self)objectification. Acknowledging the preponderance of the object thus provides no insight into the conditions of thinking, knowledge and subjectivity. For, since as subjectivity’s ‘first’, self-constitutive condition is to objectivity itself, the first condition of its emancipation would be to return to the object in order to acknowledge its preponderance, but also the preponderance of the social mode of (self)objectification.
There is thus a positive determination and even an emphatic expectation in Adorno’s negative dialectic, namely ensuring the impossibility of the absolute detachment or total independence of subjectivity and of the Hegelian Spirit from material conditions. For the more the subject tries to itself from its conditions of possibility and denies them, the more it grounds its existence in repression and domination that will, like in a ‘return of the repressed’, turn against the subject itself – and here, Adorno’s emphatic taking the side of the object brings to the fore negative dialectics for the subject. The critique of this social process of self-objectification is the third materialist intervention.
‘Identity is the primal form of ideology’.49
Critical Theory uses Marx to criticize the mediation of subject–object in a two-fold way. First, the mediation is socially and historically specific50. Second, in capitalism, the social and historically specific character of mediation is a synthesis of the individual mind with the unconscious but practical social activity that constitutes a capitalist social objectivity with the character of a second nature. Yet, the actual object of critique lies in the calamitous entanglement that results from this mediation: the very same subjectivity that unconsciously but practically constitutes social objectivity, thinks of it as an immediate given,51 quasi-ontological objectivity.52 Since this objectivity becomes supra-individual domination behind the backs of all individuals and individuality as such, this social objectivity is regarded as mere material for a subject that imagines itself as dominant.53 The subject belongs therefore to the inverted and mystified social objectivity over which it deems itself to be in charge; in this entanglement Adorno radicalizes Marx’s notion of the subject as a personification of economic categories and a ‘character mask’. This domination of the subject over its own other – over its outer and inner objectified nature – in an immanent process, renders this dialectic negative: while on the one hand social and historical disasters have the character of an inevitable natural necessity or destiny, on the other hand, even what in nature strikes back is due to the control and domination over the inner nature of the individual’s body and mind and of its outer nature.
Adorno’s critique holds that this objective entanglement of the subject to its own perverted world appears as process of identification. Hegel conceptualized this logic of identification as concept-thinking in his Science of Logic and phenomenologically in his Phenomenology as the supra-individual Spirit.54 Adorno develops an immanent critique of this Hegelian notion of identification with reference to Marx’ critique of economic exchange and equivalence. According to Adorno, the ‘principle of exchange’ is the ‘identifying principle of thought’.55 Hence concept thinking and the idea of a supra-individual Spirit are entangled with ‘exchange’, although their internally related social genesis is obscured.
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. […] The exchange principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin 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 nonidentical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total.56
To trace the logic of identification back to the social form of capitalist mediation marks a decisive shift from Traditional Marxism, which argued that labour was the social mediation of subject–object and the essence of the historical process, and aimed at the liberation of labour from capitalist domination. Critical Theory, in contrast, searches for the mediation between object–subject and their reciprocal constitution in the commodity-form and sphere of circulation. In this effort at establishing the social nature of the capitalist social relations it followed Lukács, Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel, Korsch, Bloch and others.57 The critique of the commodity-form exposes not only its functions in modern society, but also how it unconsciously becomes the dominating form of second nature.
The critique of social synthesis via the commodity was undoubtedly central to early Critical Theory,58 especially Adorno.59 His first remarks about the commodity-form can be found in his habilitation60 as well as in his inaugural lecture of 1931.61 Further remarks appear in his studies about the sociology of music undertaken between 1932 and 193562 and later in his main works, notably Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics. His last remarks are in his final major and unfinished work, the Aesthetic Theory.63 As a whole, Adorno’s critique was influenced by Marx’ critique of the commodity-form as a perverted form of social mediation, and by Lukács’ and Sohn-Rethel’s philosophical and epistemological reformulation of the latter.64 In addition – like Lukács and Sohn-Rethel – Adorno was also influenced by Weber’s notion of modern rationalization.65
However, while these remarks appear throughout Adorno’s works, they ultimately remain systematically unelaborated, much like his interpretation of the critique of political economy.66 Consequently, his critique must be reconstructed through fragments and intuitive leaps. That being said, one can still identify the continuity of the idea that the hidden connection between the economy and thinking somehow lies within the homologous logic of identification of the concept and exchange. For, even if Adorno refrains from historically reconstructing or logically constructing the genesis of this connection67 – it is less than a strict causality but more than a mere analogy or isomorphy68 – the idea that both identifications are mechanisms of abstraction69 and assertions of power appears throughout his work. Moreover, he also repeatedly points out that such abstraction is the hidden connection between Spirit, commodity exchange and their associated properties: the concept, concept-thinking, rationality and scientific objectivity for the former; exchange-value, the automatization of exchange-value in capital, economic rationality and objectivity, reification and alienation for the latter.
The act of exchange implies the reduction of the products to be exchanged to their equivalents, to something abstract, but by no means – as traditional discussion would maintain – to something material. […] Exchange value, merely a mental configuration when compared with use value, dominates human needs and replaces them; illusion dominates reality. To this extent, society is myth and its elucidation is still as necessary as ever. At the same time, however, this illusion is what is most real, it is the formula used to bewitch the world.70
The abstraction made by conceptual thinking and exchange-value constitutes nothing less than the difference between the subject and the object. Abstraction constitutes objectivity for a subject, which responds by objectifying its own subjectivity. Abstraction thus becomes double-faceted instrumental domination; both concept and exchange-value make their object commensurable through generalization, reduction and hence the subsumption of the specific, particular and singular under the generality of the concept and of the exchange-value. The mediated is thus made commensurable by an act of identification that hides its domination in this very same process: while concept-thinking grasps the object as a pure object of identification and aims for the correspondence of thinking and being,71 exchange-value becomes identical with the use-value it ‘grasps’. The dominance of exchange-value over use-value corresponds not only to the dominance of concept-thinking over the identified to the point that ‘all qualitative moments whose totality might be something like a structure are flattened in the universal exchange relationship’:72 What is thereby unconsciously executed by individuals is their own praxis that manifests itself behind their backs and becomes a second nature which gains independence from the acting individuals. The capitalist valorization and accumulation of exchange-value becomes a power of its own and manifests itself as – just like Hegel’s Spirit – the ‘real total movement of society’.73 ‘In the form of the exchange principle, the bourgeois ratio really approximated to the systems whatever it would make commensurable with itself, would identify with itself – and it did so with increasing, if potentially homicidal, success. Less and less was left outside’.74
The epistemological and social-economic critique of early Critical Theory, and Adorno’s in particular, is characterized by brilliant insights rather than a systematic exposition of how the economic object presents itself in capitalist society. Their most important insight was that epistemological and social-economic critique starts from the false semblance of the sphere of commodity-exchange and -circulation rather than from labour, production and the social metabolism with nature. On this basis, early critical theorists concerned themselves with the critique of the social constitution of a socially objective social rationality and its corresponding socially necessary epistemology as realized in both scientific rational thinking and ideological phenomena such as nationalism and antisemitism. Hence the real object of critique is the unconscious, inaccessible process of social constitution, which in the form of the mediation by concept-thinking and exchange-value constitutes both subject and object. Unlike Hegel’s dialectical logic of identification and correspondence, this process leads to reification and alienation, personified ‘character masks’ (Marx) and socially necessary ideology. Hence the identification of concept and exchange-value is real – as objective illusion. This is why Adorno’s inversion of Hegel’s notion that ‘the true is the whole’ says that ‘the whole is untrue’ – the false process of identification is the truth of capitalist society. Immanent critique, in turn, endeavours to unveil and overcome this social untruth by critiquing this subjective–objective process of identification. For the exchange principle this immanent critique means that ‘when we criticize the exchange principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just exchange. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend exchange’. Concerning his critique of the concept, immanent critique means that Adorno wants to ‘overcome the coercive nature of the concept by means of the concept’.75 This is the ‘systematicity’ of immanent critique. However, ‘the limit of immanent critique is that the law of the immanent context is ultimately one with the delusion that has to be overcome’.76
1. Critical Theory with upper case letters refers to the early Frankfurt School or its so-called ‘first generation’.
2. Horkheimer, 2002b: 213, 217; Postone, 1993: 107ff.; Honneth, 1993: 187–214.
3. To be precise it was already a return to Marx, as according to Horkheimer’s essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Critical Theory was founded by Marx, cf. Horkheimer, 1980: 626.
4. Marcuse, 1964.
5. Adorno, 1997: 168.
6. For an overview cf. Breuer, 1977.
7. Marx, 1987.
8. Marx, 1973: 107.
9. For critical theory, ideology comprises the necessary illusion of capitalist society. If in the classical Marxist context the question after World War I was ‘only’ why the proletariat was not gaining revolutionary consciousness, this question took a dramatic turn with the rise of fascism and was reformulated as follows: why do the masses not only have no emancipatory or even revolutionary consciousness, but voluntarily choose to support a type of domination that is actually against their interests – not only as a member of a class, but even as self-responsible individuals? The techniques and mechanisms of forming mass-consciousness were perhaps the most important new phenomena in the time of early Critical Theory. The Institute researched the former with a very serious but contested use of psychoanalysis. Many of the controversies among Critical Theorists concerned not only classical Marxist issues but how to adequately use the psychoanalytical terms and arguments, especially those related to the theories of Erich Fromm and Siegfried Kracauer, who provided the best research in these areas.
10. McCarthy, 1993.
11. This connection was often criticized for the lack of grounding in empirical analysis and operating with a philosophical concept of history, cf. Honneth,1993.
12. Important for the authors of Critical Theory first of all was Capital Vol. I, but also Marx’ Economic and Philosophical Manuscript from 1844, especially for the concept of reification and alienation.
13. Programmatic already at the beginning of ND: 10, and then ongoing.
14. It’s important to keep in mind that in the case of Adorno, half of these writings concern culture, aesthetics, music and literature.
15. Adorno, 1997: 6.
16. This is the famous first sentence in the introduction to ND: 3.
17. Sohn-Rethel, 1978a: 139.
18. Adorno, ND: 196.
19. Refering to Engels’ Dialectics of Nature. Lenin developed reflection theory in the course of his polemics with empirio-critics, cf. Lenin, 1970.
20. Lukács, 1971; Lukács’ Theory of the Novel was also influential on Critical Theory. Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, published at a time when Marxism was still dominated by the traditional Marxism of the Second International, was likewise important for Critical Theory.
21. See the chapter on Sohn-Rethel in Volume 1 of this Handbook.
22. For the critical status cf. Jameson 1971, 1990; Rose 1978; Jay 1984; Jarvis, 1998.
23. For Adorno’s critique on Lukács, cf. Adorno, 1977.
24. Sohn-Rethel, 1978.
25. ‘The idealistic magic circle can be transcended only in thoughts still circumscribed by its figure […]. Pure identity is that which the subject posits and thus brings up from outside. Therefore, paradoxically enough, to criticize it immanently means to criticize it from outside as well’ (ND: 145); for the importance of negativity cf. Buck-Morss, 1977.
26. Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Reflections of a damaged life, together with DoE and ND, is Adorno’s third programmatic title. With its reference to Aristotle’s Magna Moralia it is close to ethics and also attempts to open up a minimum gap for individual self-reflection in the hermetically sealed world of capitalist identity, see Adorno, 1974.
27. ND: 38, 67ff., 295, 356ff. The notion first came from Hegel. But when Adorno refers to Marx’ Capital when stating that ‘the law of capitalist accumulation … has been mystified into a law of nature’, then he refers not, like Hegel, to a second nature in which the spirit recognizes itself. Instead Adorno refers to the materialist turn of second nature via economic commodification, quantification and valorization not only of nature and use value, but of social relations in general; this was overlooked in Cook, 2011: 8.
28. Adorno et al, 1976: 12.; similar Adorno, 1976b: 107.
29. This understanding began with the aim of disciplinary research inside the Institute for Critical Research and was later fought out in the so-called positivist dispute in German sociology, cf. Adorno et al, 1976); for the beginnings see Bonß, 1993.
30. ‘Totality is a category of mediation’ (Adorno et al, 1976: 107).
31. Cf. ND: 158ff.
32. Long before post-structuralism, Critical Theory’s critique of generality and identity tried to speak in the name of what isn’t sublated in a non-representative way – the non-systematic constellations in Adorno and his focus on aesthetics, Benjamin’s notion of pictures, Marcuse’s non-conformism and subjectivity of desire, drive and eros, and Horkheimer’s messianic – but without rendering its ‘positive’ consequences into a politics of recognition, speaking in the name of a minority or alterity or in deconstructing the correspondence between text (text in the largest sense) and meaning. Critical Theory remained loyal to the universalism of Enlightenment; it would be problematic to take it without further ado as a post-structuralism avant la lettre.
33. ND: 192.
34. ND: 22, 27, 29, 34 and ongoing, in particular 135ff.
35. ND: 134.
36. Even if this sentence entitles a text on Lukács (Adorno, 1977), it can be taken as the overarching formula to combine the his conception of negative dialectics with that of the dialectics of enlightenment.
37. ND: 10f.
38. Marx, 1951.
39. ‘There is no right life in the wrong one’ (Adorno, 1974: 39).
40. This ‘pessimistic turn’ in the history of Marxist-oriented critique of capitalist society has been often discussed. For Critical Theory in general cf. Postone/Brick, 1982; for Horkheimer’s ‘pessimistic turn’ cf. Postone, 1993. To align this pessimism in the broad history of social critique cf. Agger, 1992: 57ff. Conveniently in his last text, written in 1969, in the period of the German student revolt, Adorno responded to this accusation of resignation, cf. Adorno, 1998.
41. The translations of the central works of Critical Theory, especially Adorno’s, are sometimes problematic when it comes to decisive passages. This also affects the secondary literature. In particular the general concepts like Bewusstsein, Selbstbewusstsein, Verstand, Vernunft and Geist must be treated very carefully because of their differences. Also ‘preponderance’ (of the object, ND: 192) is not the same as ‘primacy’. Adorno’s critique of the fallacy of the – here explicitly – primacy of the subject is keen to avoid a vulgar materialist turn like he found in Traditional Marxism.
42. ND: 192; for the object’s preponderance see the whole chapter in ND: 183ff. For the three stages in Adorno’s concept of materialism in his late work cf. Schmidt, 1983, 2002.
43. Largely elaborated in Adorno, 1982.
44. Adorno, 2014: 155.
45. Pohrt, 1976.
46. Cf. Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx (Schmidt, 1973), encouraged by Adorno and directed against ‘productivism’ in both western capitalist and eastern socialist states; cf. also Vogel, 1996.
47. ND: 203. In particular Feminist and Disability Studies have pointed out the importance of the body in Adorno, cf. Heberle, 2006; Lee, 2005.
48. Both Horkheimer and Adorno in their late period referred to the utopian: Horkheimer more to preserve the hope inherent in utopian and religious thinking, Adorno more to have a placeholder for a different society and because of the vacancy of any revolutionary force. Quite telling is Horkheimer’s Spiegel-Interview from 1970, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45226214.html
49. ND: 148.
50. Alfred Schmidt pointed out the importance of history in two writings on structuralism’s ‘attack against history’. For the English version see Schmidt, 1981.
51. ‘The totality of the process of mediation, which amounts in reality to principle of exchange, has produced a second, deceptive immediacy’ (Adorno, 2001: 124).
52. This ontologization of the social, Adorno most explicitly critiqued, contra Heidegger, in The Jargon of Authenticity, cf. Adorno, 1973b.
53. ND: 19 and then throughout.
54. ND: 11 and then throughout.
55. ND: 190, 146–7. In some translations ‘commodity exchange’ is translated as ‘barter’. Even if this translation is problematic, it still gives a hint of Adorno’s understanding of an exchange that historically goes beyond capitalist commodity production and his derivation of the exchange principle from the tradition of gift and sacrifice. This was often discussed, cf. Koltan, 1999; Müller, 1988: 177; Habermas, 1991a: 428 ff.
56. ND: 146, similar 47. Translation amended from the German original.
57. In these period-identical formulations about the whole world becoming a commodity, compare Lukács, 1971: 86: ‘The commodity can be understood in its undistorted essence only when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole’; Bloch, 1991: 107: ‘this process of the whole world becoming a commodity’ (similarly in Bloch, 1970).
58. ‘This is elaborated in Marx’ chapter on fetishism, truly a piece from the heritages of classic German philosophy’ (ND: 189f.).
59. Horkheimer in his early writings referred more than Adorno to Marxist terms like labour, production and class. Later, in contrast to Adorno, he mostly avoids Marxist terminology. Despite all later restraint, Horkheimer always agreed with the centrality of the category of commodity and of Marx in general.
60. Adorno, 1989.
61. Adorno, 1973a.
62. Cf. Adorno, 2002, here focusing on the commodity character of art; likewise in the culture industries chapter of DoE. It is important to notice that this critique is also thoroughgoing in his works on culture.
63. Adorno, 1997.
64. About the hidden influence of Lukács, see Claussen, 2008: 82ff. For the connection of epistemological and social critique based on the commodity-form in Lukács, Sohn-Rethel and Adorno, see Engster, 2016.
65. The critique of rationality from Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and others led even to the term ‘Weberian-Marxism’. However, for Adorno and Horkheimer, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ by rationalization was a turn back into mythology, cf. DoE: ff. and then especially ‘Excursus I’: 35–62.
66. Hans-Georg Backhaus claimed that ‘Adorno and Horkheimer […] totally ignored the value-form analyses’ (1997: 76). Habermas, 1987: 178 and Jay 1996: 146f. make similar claims, while Braun stein: 2011 is less strong in this regard. Adorno’s own most precise elaboration is to be found in his work on philosophical terminology, cf. Adorno, 1973c.
67. Jameson, 1990.
68. Much criticized is Adorno’s extension of his critique of the commodity-form and fetishism to mass-culture, and his theory of the culture industry as a form of industrial mass-production and monopoly capitalism; see, for example, Miklitsch, 1998.
69. In ND it is already explicit on p. 8 and then throughout.
70. Adorno, 1976a: 80; ND: 178.
71. Rose, 1978: 35ff.
72. ND: 88; similar sentences appear throughout: ‘imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total’ (ND: 146. Translation amended in line with German original).
73. Quote ND: 304, cf. also 244. Adorno’s idea that exchange-value makes everything identical with itself leads to the thesis that use-value in late capitalism becomes the empty bearer of the exchange-value, stripped of all content and faking it. Wolfgang Pohrt and others have radicalized this idea, cf. Pohrt, 1976. For a general critique of this ‘use-value fetishism’, cf. Hafner, 1993. For money as the blind spot in the whole critique of social mediation by commodity-form, see Engster, 2014.
74. ND: 23. Translation amended in line with German original.
75. Mullen, 2016: 94. In particular, the last chapter of ND is dedicated to this. It was radicalized, as often was noticed, in Derrida’s deconstruction, cf. Wellmer, 1998: 183.
76. ND: 182.
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