Deborah Cook
Adorno's professional life was bound indissolubly to the Institute for Social Research, which opened on 22 June 1924 in Frankfurt-amMain, Germany. At its inception, Institute members engaged in interdisciplinary studies devoted to the theory and history of socialism and the labour movement. However, after the first director, Carl Grünberg, resigned, Max Horkheimer took his place in 1930, giving the Institute a new orientation. In his inaugural address, Horkheimer stated that the work undertaken by the Institute would examine “the connection between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the realm of culture in the narrower sense (to which belong not only the so-called intellectual elements, such as science, art, and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure activities, lifestyle, etc.)”.1 Using both empirical research and philosophy, the Institute would develop a theory of contemporary society by analysing its prevailing tendencies, with the ultimate goal of transforming society along more rational lines.2
However, with the victory of Hitler’s National Socialist Party in 1930, the Institute — nicknamed Café Marx3 — would not remain in Frankfurt much longer. It was closed and its property confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 on the grounds that it had communist leanings.4 Having taken the precaution of placing the Institute’s funds in Holland in 1931,5 Horkheimer had the resources needed to establish a branch of the Institute at Columbia University in New York in 1934, where he was soon joined by Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal. As they were settling in the United States, Adorno was studying at Oxford with the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who agreed to supervise a thesis he proposed to write on Husserl.6 Although he was associated officially with the Institute in 1935, it was not until 1938 that Adorno left for New York with his new wife Gretel.
Adorno, who studied composition with Alban Berg in Vienna in the 1920s, had already published a number of essays on music.7 Upon his arrival in New York, Horkheimer arranged for him to work with Paul Lazarsfeld in New Jersey as head of the music section of the Princeton Radio Research Project which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Until 1940, Adorno was responsible for conducting empirical research into the psychological value of radio music for listeners.8 But, by this time, it was glaringly apparent to the émigrés, some of whose family and friends were suffering horribly under Nazism, that anti-Semitism was rife in many other countries. In the early 1940s, then, Adorno began to study anti-Semitism, following the lead of Horkheimer in "The Jews and Europe”.9
In a letter to the secretary of the Institute’s Geneva office, Horkheimer declared in 1939 that all his earlier work was a prelude to a book he planned to write on dialectical logic.10 He confided to Pollock as early as 1935 that Adorno was the ideal collaborator for this project.11 By 1938 the project had become more concrete. Adorno reported to Walter Benjamin that Horkheimer was eager to “begin work on a book on the dialectic of the Enlightenment”.12 Yet this work really only began after the Institute moved most of its resources from New York to Los Angeles in 1941. Dedicated to Pollock, to mark his fiftieth birthday, the book was completed in the spring of 1944; it first appeared in 1947 in Holland under the title Dialektik der Aufklärung.
Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with a strident warning. If enlightenment was supposed to emancipate humanity, today the “fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (DE, C: 3; J: 1). The first chapter tries to show that, for all its attempts to supersede the mythic worldview, enlightenment is just an outgrowth of myth and ends by reverting to it. Compulsively forcing natural objects into explanatory schema in order to dominate them, enlightenment confuses “the animate with the inanimate, just as myth compounds the inanimate with the animate” (DE, C: 16; J: 11). Allowing nothing to escape its conceptual grasp, enlightened thought not only exhibits an overwhelming fear of nature, but it continues to be driven by nature. The modern employment of reason makes nature “audible in its estrangement” because its very attempt to master nature shows only that reason remains enslaved to it (DE, C: 39; J: 31).
This theme of our embeddedness in nature, which is central to the later work of Adorno as well, is elaborated throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment. In an excursus on the Odyssey, the emergence of reason is itself traced back to the dawn of history. Bound to the instinct for self-preservation, reason developed as a means to the end of thwarting the powers of nature. Endorsing Freud’s claim in Civilization and its Discontents that human history consists in the renunciation of instinct, Adorno and Horkheimer also observe that rational control over nature was achieved only by delaying the gratification of instincts, or by repressing them altogether. Mastery over nature
practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained because the substance which is mastered, suppressed, and disintegrated by self-preservation is nothing other than the living entity, of which the achievements of self-preservation can only be defined as functions — in other words, self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved.
(DE, C: 55; J: 43)
Since survival instincts have propelled much of Western history, the official history of Europe conceals a subterranean history that “consists in the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization” (DE, C: 231; J: 192). Indeed, while greatly indebted to Marx, Adorno focused not just on economic conditions in the West, but on human psychology as well. As Martin Jay explains, “the unexpected rise of an irrationalist mass politics in fascism, which was unforeseen by orthodox Marxists”, justified the incorporation of psychology into a critical account of society. Yet, even after the defeat of National Socialism, “psychological impediments to emancipation” remained in “the manipulated society of mass consumption that followed in its wake”.13 Concern about these impediments is forcefully expressed in a chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment called “Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, where the psychology underlying fascist propaganda is compared to the psychotechnology of the Hollywood-based culture industry. Extensive use is also made of psychoanalysis in the following chapter on anti-Semitism.
Nevertheless, it was not just the attempt to understand fascism and the culture industry that made Freud indispensable. What particularly recommended Freud to Adorno was his endorsement of the idea that nature and history are dialectically entwined. Originally advancing this idea in a 1932 lecture called “The Idea of Natural History” (INH: 260), Adorno later supported it by citing The German Ideology, where Marx declared that nature and human history would always qualify one another (ND: 358). But Adorno points out that Freud too described history as natural. On the one hand, Freud derived “even complex mental behaviours from the drive for self-preservation and pleasure”. On the other hand, he never denied that “the concrete manifestation of instincts may undergo the most sweeping variations and modifications” throughout history.14 Consequently, Freud’s instinct theory not only helped Adorno to explain phenomena such as Nazi Germany and the culture industry, but also to elaborate in psychological terms on Marx’s dialectical view of the relationship between nature and history.
Admittedly, Adorno was neither an orthodox Marxist nor an orthodox Freudian, and he never fully addressed the problem of reconciling Marx and Freud. Yet he examined the impact of capitalism on the psychological development of individuals in most of his work. According to Adorno, the rise of capitalism had fostered widespread social and psychological pathologies such as authoritarianism, narcissism and paranoia. And, as early as 1927, Adorno argued that these pathologies can be overcome, not by psychoanalysis, but only by completely transforming capitalist society.15 Since psychopathologies have social roots, often connected to the predominance of exchange relations in human life, they can be dealt with effectively only by abolishing this predominance.
Yet Adorno distanced himself from both Marx and the orthodox Marxism of the former Soviet Union in his 1942 essay “Reflections on Class Theory”. Since Marx’s prediction about the concentration and centralization of capital was realized, capitalism had changed —particularly with respect to the composition of classes. Consisting of relatively independent entrepreneurs during the earlier phase of liberal capital, the bourgeoisie forfeited much of its economic power as monopoly conditions developed. The economically disenfranchised bourgeoisie and the proletariat now form a new mass class distinct from the class comprising the dwindling owners of the means of production (CLA: 99). In a Hegelian remark about the Aufhebung — the preservation and sublation — of classes under monopoly capital, Adorno states that Marx’s concept of class must be preserved because “the division of society into exploiters and exploited, not only continues to exist but gains in force and strength”. But the concept must be sublated “because the oppressed who today, as predicted by [Marxist] theory, constitute the overwhelming majority of humankind, are unable to experience themselves as a class” (CLA: 97, tr. mod.).
So, while class stratification persists, classes themselves have changed, and the subjective awareness of belonging to a class has evaporated. Marx’s theory is no longer straightforwardly applicable to conditions today precisely because he was right about the emergence of monopoly conditions. Adorno also takes issue with Marx’s theory of impoverishment, arguing that impoverishment can be understood only in a metaphorical sense because workers today have far more to lose than their chains. Compared to the situation of workers in nineteenth-century England, the standard of living of workers in the West has improved owing in part to the establishment of the welfare state. The work day is now shorter, and workers enjoy “better food, housing and clothing; protection for family members and for workers in their old age; and an increase in average life expectancy”. Hunger no longer compels workers “to join forces and make a revolution” (CLA: 103, tr. mod.).
Borrowing a phrase from “The Communist Manifesto”, Adorno argues that, with the welfare state, the ruling class effectively secures “for ‘slaves their existence within slavery’” in order to ensure its own. Impoverishment now refers to the “political and social impotence” of individuals who have become pure objects of administration for monopolies and their political allies (CLA: 105). Survival depends on adaptation to a constantly changing and inherently unpredictable economic system. Adaptation is reinforced by the sophisticated psychotechnology of the culture industry and the prevailing positivist ideology which glorifies existing states of affairs. By these means, the needs of the new mass class are made to harmonize with commodified offers of satisfaction. Conformity to socially approved models of behaviour now appears more rational than solidarity (CLA: 97). This also helps to explain why prospects for revolutionary change have faded.
Some commentators claim that Adorno adopted Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, which argues that there has been a transition in Western countries “from a predominantly economic to an essentially political era”.16 Yet, while acknowledging that political power had increased in the West, Adorno agreed with Marx’s insistence on the primacy of the economy. At best, Pollock’s thesis signalled ominous trends in other Western countries. What really changes with monopoly capitalism is that the ruling class becomes anonymous: it disappears “behind the concentration of capital”. Capitalism now appears to be “an institution, the expression of society as a whole”. Pervading almost every aspect of human life, the fetish character of commodities, which transforms relations between people into relations between things, ends in the socially totalitarian aspect of capital (CLA: 99). As Stefan Müller-Doohm remarks, the pervasiveness of reification today provides an answer to a question posed in the preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely why humanity is sinking into a new kind of barbarism, rather than entering into a truly human state.17
The urgency of this question did not abate when Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949. Until his death, much of his work — including books and essays on music and literature — dealt with the problems of fascism and monopoly capitalism. What concerned Adorno above all is that conditions similar to those accompanying the rise of Nazism in Germany persist in the West. He believed that little had changed since the end of World War II: “The economic order, and to a great extent also the economic organization modeled upon it, now as then renders the majority of people dependent upon conditions beyond their control and thus maintains them in a state of political immaturity”. In the interest of survival, individuals must “negate precisely that autonomous subjectivity to which the idea of democracy appeals; they can preserve themselves only if they renounce their self” (CM: 98).
Upon his return to Germany, Adorno’s empirical study of personality traits in the United States — The Authoritarian Personality — was published, along with other volumes in a series entitled Studies in Prejudice. During the 1950s, Adorno also wrote articles dealing with research methodology in the social sciences.18 Indeed, while criticizing empirical social research on the grounds that social science must be guided by the normative idea “of a true society”,19 Adorno engaged in empirical studies throughout the 1950s. In 1952, for example, he drafted a qualitative analysis of astrology columns in the Los Angeles Times, as well as two studies of television.20 Back in Germany, he worked on a project examining the relationship between the manifest political opinions of Germans from different social strata and their latent attitudes.21 Part of the study focused on how German citizens attempted to deny their recent past. Here again psychoanalysis was used to explore both the guilt experienced by Germans and the defence mechanisms that helped them to assuage that guilt.22
By the end of the 1950s, however, Adorno devoted himself almost exclusively to the elaboration of his critical social theory. Among the more important of his essays is “Progress”, which he described as a “preliminary study” that “belongs within the complex” of his major work, Negative Dialectics (CM: 125). Here he develops an idea first advanced in Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely, that what counts as progress today is the domination of external and internal nature which, impelled by the instinct for self-preservation, threatens to destroy what it is meant to preserve. By contrast, genuine progress depends upon humanity becoming aware of its “own inbred nature” with the aim of halting “the domination that it exacts upon nature and through which domination by nature continues” (ibid.: 150). Catastrophe can be averted only if “a self-conscious global subject” develops and intervenes, using the “technical forces of production” to abolish all forms of material deprivation, and to establish “the whole society as humanity” (ibid.: 144).
But Adorno continued to develop his ideas. Among the more important of these are his notions of identity and non-identity thinking. As J. M. Bernstein remarks, identity thinking was discussed as early as Dialectic of Enlightenment, even if it was not given that name. What is called the principle of immanence in Dialectic of Enlightenment was later called identity thinking. This principle entails that an object is known “only when it is classified in some way”, or “when it is shown, via subsumption, to share characteristics or features” with other objects. Similarly, “an event is explained if it can be shown to fall within the ambit of a known pattern of occurrence, if it falls within the ambit of a known rule or is deducible from (subsumable by) a known law”. In turn, concepts, rules and laws have a cognitive value only when they are “subsumed under or shown to be deducible from higher-level concepts, rules, or laws”.23 Bernstein resumes: “[c]ognition is subsumption, subsumption is necessarily reiterable, and reiteration occurs through cognitive ascent from concrete to abstract, from particular to universal, from what is relatively universal, and thereby still in some respect particular, contingent, and conditioned, to what is more universal”.24
By subsuming objects under concepts and laws, and concepts and laws under explanatory systems, we try to dominate nature in the interest of survival. In so doing, we wrongly substitute unity for diversity, simplicity for complexity, permanence for change, and identity for difference. Once particulars are effectively identified with universals, there is allegedly nothing more to be said about them. Identity thinking consists in the claim that diverse objects fall under concept “X”; it thereby obliterates the particularity of objects, their differences from one other, their individual development and histories, along with other unique traits. To counter identity thinking, Adorno proposed a new cognitive paradigm: non-identity thinking. He had already broached this idea in his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant implicitly endorses non-identity by insisting on “the obstacle, the block, encountered by the subject in its search for knowledge”. Non-identity appears in the idea that our “affections” not only “arise from things-in-themselves”, but that these things are irreducible to our concepts and categories of them (KCPR: 66–7).
Adorno devotes his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, to exploring this alternative cognitive paradigm. Claiming that identity thinking merely “says what something falls under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself”, Adorno contrasts it to non-identity thinking, which “seeks to say what something is”. By saying “it is”, non-identity thinking does identify; it even “identifies to a greater extent” than identity thinking. But nonidentity thinking identifies in “other ways” because it is not content merely to subsume objects under universal concepts with a view to manipulating and controlling them. Rather, non-identity thinking tries to make concepts consonant with non-conceptual particulars. In so doing, it reveals “elements of affinity” between the non-conceptual object and our concepts of it (ND: 149). This affinity exists because concepts are thoroughly entwined in non-conceptuality: they are “moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature” (ibid.: 11).
In non-identity thinking, then, the “direction of conceptuality” is turned back towards non-conceptuality because concepts are generated in our embodied contact with material things, and they continue to refer to things by virtue of their meaning in which their relation to the non-conceptual survives (ND: 12). Yet concepts have a dual relation to objects. On the one hand, they depend on the non-conceptual matter that provides their content and is the source of their power to name. To convey “full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection”, then, non-identity thinking must immerse itself in things (ibid.: 13). On the other hand, concepts transcend objects by heeding “a potential that waits in the object”, and intending in the object “even that of which the object was deprived by objectification” (ibid.: 19). In this case, non-identity thinking grasps objects by means of possibility to indicate what an object might become if the damaged conditions under which it developed were altered (ibid.: 52).
If concepts should be oriented towards the object’s material axis, the object in turn should approximate concepts. Non-identity thinking involves the “[r]eciprocal criticism of the universal and of the particular”. It must judge both “whether the concept does justice to what it covers” and “whether the particular fulfils its concept”. These two critical operations jointly “constitute the medium of thinking about the nonidentity of particular and concept” (ND: 146). To rest content with the judgement that the concept does (or does not do) justice to objects would amount to leaving “behind the medium of virtuality, of anticipation that cannot be wholly fulfilled by any piece of actuality” (MM: 127). Objects will satisfy concepts only by making good on their own immanent potential — a potential that some emphatic concepts evoke or intimate. Non-identity can be said to contain identity in the prospective longing of the concept to become identical with the thing (ND: 149).
Non-identity thinking therefore “contains identity” in a peculiar fashion. Since particular objects do not currently realize their potential, no particular is “as its particularity requires” (ND: 152, tr. mod.). For Adorno, the ``substance of the contradiction between universal and particular” is that the non-conceptual particular “is not yet — and that, therefore, it is bad wherever established”. Holding fast to what concepts rob from particulars, non-identity thinking also retains “the ‘more’ of the concept” as compared to these particulars (ibid.: 151). To make good on “the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism” between the object and the thought of it (ibid.: 149), non-identity thinking prospectively identifies the object with the concept. In such thinking, emphatic concepts suggest changed conditions — like the condition of a free society where human beings might develop unfettered. Evoking conditions that do not yet exist, these concepts “overshoot” what exists in order better to grasp it (MM: 126).
Concepts can evoke something more than what exists owing to their determinate negation of existing conditions. The resistance of thought to “mere things in being” (ND: 19) is all the more powerful when concepts are forged in the negation of the negative conditions that damage human life. Adorno illustrates these ideas in his discussion of the concept of freedom: the shape of freedom “can only be grasped in determinate negation in accordance with the concrete form of a specific unfreedom” (ibid.: 231, tr. mod.). Ideas of freedom are derived from a negation of those aspects of reality that perpetuate unfreedom. Freedom is therefore “a polemical counter-image to the suffering brought on by social coercion; unfreedom as that coercion’s image” (ibid.: 223). Here Adorno invites us to think of emancipatory movements such as abolitionism and women’s liberation in which the unfree conditions that cause suffering point to their possible reversal by giving rise to the idea of a condition in which oppression would end. Ideas such as that of freedom arise within oppressive situations “as resistance to repression” (ibid.: 265); freedom arises historically in experiences of combating unfreedom.
Although he claims that determinate negation is “the only form in which metaphysical experience survives today” (ME: 144), Adorno rejects Hegel’s view that it necessarily yields something positive. Since our conceptions of freedom are rooted in the very negativity they strive to overcome, they are also contaminated by that negativity. If critique indicates what is right and better, it does so only obliquely. The negation of negative conditions “remains negative” because positivity is only indirectly outlined by critique (ND: 158–9). A resolutely critical negation of existing states of affairs, determinate negation discloses something equally negative: what exists is not yet what it ought to be and what ought to be does not yet exist. In other words, a double negation yields only more negativity.
Emphatic concepts must be employed with other concepts in what Adorno describes as a constellation. As opposed to identity thinking, which abstracts from objects when it subsumes them under concepts, a constellation of concepts will illuminate “the specific side of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden”. In this context, Adorno praises Max Weber’s employment of ideal types, or of concepts “‘gradually composed’ from ‘individual parts ... taken from historic reality’” (ND: 164). To illustrate this procedure, Adorno turns to Weber’s discussion of capitalism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where Weber gathers diverse concepts — such as acquisitiveness, the profit motive, calculation, organization — in order to express what capitalism “aims at, not to circumscribe it to operational ends” (ibid.: 166). Conceding that constellations are subjective constructs, Adorno nonetheless argues that this “subjectively created context” is “readable as a sign of objectivity”, or of the “spiritual substance” of phenomena (ibid.: 165).
Adorno defines truth as “a constellation of subject and object in which both penetrate each other” (ibid.: 127). Even in this form, however, truth is not something static. Instead, thought must constantly renew itself “in the experience of the subject matter”, and that matter, for its part, is first determined by subjective concepts. Enunciated in “a constantly evolving constellation” (CM: 131), truth manifests itself only in a progressive approximation of objects by concepts, and of concepts by objects. Thus objects are “infinitely given as a task” (ibid.: 253). Moreover, Adorno continues to stress the fallibility of emphatic ideas when he writes that “the truth of ideas is bound up with the possibility of their being wrong, the possibility of their failure”. That the truth derived from determinate negation can always be revised, overthrown, even lost, further demonstrates that the negation of the negation fails to yield something positive (ME: 144).
Devoting much of his later work to devising an alternative cognitive paradigm to overcome identity thinking, Adorno was also drawn to aesthetics. Philosophy resembles art because, at their best, both aim to open up “a perspective on reconciliation” with nature (AT: 276). Yet, because it determines its object “as indeterminable”, art “requires philosophy, which interprets [art] in order to say what it is unable to say” (ibid.: 72). If philosophy refuses to abandon “the yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art”, Adorno warns that a “philosophy that tried to imitate art, that would turn itself into a work of art, would be expunging itself” (ND: 15). He claims that “philosophy cannot survive without the linguistic effort” because the “organon of thought” is language. Consequently, one of philosophy’s tasks is to reflect critically upon language in such a way that its use of language finally permits “a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference [between them] fades”. In this, philosophy reveals the utopian bent that it shares with art because to want “substance in cognition is to want a utopia” (ibid.: 56).
While developing these ideas about non-identity thinking, and drafting his treatise in aesthetics, Adorno remained a staunch critic of oppressive socio-economic conditions. On his view, individuals now stand in relation to society in much the same way that material particulars stand to universal concepts. Indeed, he even refers to society as the “universal”. While identity thinking falsely maintains the primacy of concepts over objects, society reifies individuals by subsuming them under abstract exchange relations. In this respect, identity thinking and exchange are isomorphic. Just as identity thinking expunges particulars by identifying them with universal concepts, exchange relations make “nonidentical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical”. In both its conceptual and social forms, then, the principle of identification now “imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total” (ND: 146 passim).
Adopting Marx’s view that exchange relations have a life of their own to which human life is now forfeit, Adorno claims that bourgeois individualism, which celebrates the individual as the substance of society, masks an entirely different reality: the predominance of exchange relations and their homogenizing and levelling effects on needs, behaviour, thought and interpersonal relations. Although individuals have always been obliged to submit to economic conditions that determine whether they work, when, where, and how they work, today even their needs and instincts are manipulated to correspond to available offers of commodified satisfaction, and their behaviour is moulded to fit socially approved models. In fact, exchange relations now encroach upon areas of life that were formerly unaffected by them. Forced to adapt to a world “whose law is universal individual profit”, we submit to forms of integration so complete and far-reaching that Adorno even compares them to genocide (ND: 362).
Individuals measure their own self-worth and the worth of others in terms of the value of the goods they possess and the places they occupy within the economic system; their possessions and occupations serve as social markers that position them within groups and distinguish them from other individuals and groups. In other words, individuals relate to one another as mere “agents and bearers of exchange value” (S: 148–9). At the same time, they are isolated and alienated from one another precisely because their interpersonal relations are often cemented by nothing more substantive than exchange. Indeed, Adorno is especially worried about prospects for social solidarity today. As the exchange principle degrades relations between people to relations between things, the solidarity needed to surmount these relations has evaporated. In other words, exchange relations undermine the very solidarity that is needed to overcome them.
Economic conditions also severely impair the autonomy of the family and the public sphere. Since individuals are completely dependent for their survival on the often fickle largesse of the state and the economy, it is far easier for public and private institutions to usurp the role the family once played as the primary agent of socialization. As the media and other institutions replace authority structures within the family, ego development suffers because individuals no longer measure their strength against their parents through rebellion and resistance. Now weakened, the ego’s defences against the instinctual energy of the id and the superego are also weak. This ego weakness contributes to the marked increase in narcissistic pathologies, which Adorno was among the first to diagnose. Owing to the psychic economy of the reified and narcissistic personality, society “extends repressively into all psychology in the form of censorship and the superego”.25 Regressive forms of solidarity have emerged in movements (such as Nazism) where leaders attract followers by reanimating narcissistic superego introjects.
Of course, Adorno borrows from Freud in his analysis of phenomena such as Nazism. As Freud explained in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”, once individuals identify with a leader and become members of a group, they behave instinctually rather than according to their egocentric interests.26 In his 1951 essay, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, Adorno also adopted Freud’s view that groups often act as a “negatively integrating force”. Negative emotions towards out-groups (Jews, blacks, communists etc.) offer a narcissistic gain for followers because they believe that “simply through belonging to the in-group” they are “better, higher, and purer than those who are excluded”.27 Collective narcissism compensates for social powerlessness by allowing people to turn themselves “either in fact or imagination into members of something higher and more encompassing to which they attribute qualities which they themselves lack and from which they profit by vicarious participation” (TPC: 32–3).
While the family no longer serves as the primary agent for socialization, the public sphere fails to fulfil its role as “the most important medium of all politically effective criticism” because it has become so commodified that it currently “works against the critical principle in order to market itself” (CM: 283). Public opinion is imposed from above by “the overall structure of society and hence by relations of domination” (ibid.: 121). Opinions disseminated by the culture industry merely reflect those of the prevailing economic and political powers. Public opinion today is “indissolubly entangled” with private interests in profit and power that only masquerade as universal (ibid.: 117). Truth is replaced by statistically generated opinions, and the public has lost the capacity for the sustained reflection “required by a concept of truth” (ibid.: 114).
The loss of individuality, autonomy and freedom, which Adorno charts throughout his work, can be traced to the surrender of the task of self-preservation to the welfare state and the capitalist economy. Admitting that this surrender was necessary to enable individuals to survive “in more highly developed social conditions”, Adorno nonetheless observes that, to survive under capitalism, individuals are compelled to become the involuntary executors of the law of exchange (ND: 312). For their part, however, Western societies neglect their living human substratum in their relentless pursuit of profit. As Simon Jarvis puts it:
The more obvious it becomes that the economic basis of any individual’s life is liable to annihilation, and the more real economic initiative is concentrated with the concentration of capital, the more the individual seeks to identify with and adapt to capital . . . For capital, however, the individual’s self-preservation is not in itself a matter of any importance.28
Adorno complains that even reflective people, capable of taking a critical perspective on society, have little choice but “to make an alien cause their own” (ND: 311). But most individuals remain the unconscious and largely impotent pawns of an economic system that uses and abuses them with the sole aim of promoting its particular interests in profit and power. Once the “self-preserving function” of their egos was “split off from that of consciousness” and subordinated to economic and political agents and institutions, their attempts to preserve themselves effectively “surrendered to irrationality”.29 Since individuals are wholly dependent on society for their survival, capitalism can dispense with “the mediating agencies of ego and individuality” it had fostered under the earlier stage of liberal capitalism. It now arrests “all differentiation”, while exploiting “the primitive core of the unconscious”.30 Substantially weakened, few individuals can resist the manipulation and exploitation of their instincts.
Openly admitting that he was exaggerating the “somber side” of our current predicament (CM: 99), Adorno tried to describe objective tendencies in the West where “the immense concentration of economical and administrative power leaves the individual no more room to maneuver”, that is, where “society tends toward totalitarian forms of domination” (ibid.: 298). Still, individuals are not doomed to remain oblivious to the ways in which they perpetuate their own powerlessness. Although survival instincts have led us to do destructive things both to ourselves and to the nature on which our survival depends, things might have gone, and may yet go, differently. It may yet be possible to direct self-preservation consciously to the goal that it implicitly contains: the preservation of the species as a whole. In fact, Adorno argues that reason “should not be anything less than self-preservation, namely that of the species, upon which the survival of each individual literally depends” (ibid.: 273). Reason can never be “split off from self-preservation”, not only because it owes its own development to this drive, but because the “preservation of humanity is inexorably inscribed within the meaning of rationality”. Self-preservation “has its end in a reasonable organization of society” (ibid.: 272), or in a society that preserves its subjects “according to their unfettered potentialities” (ibid.: 272–3).
The goal of establishing a rational society that preserves and enhances the lives of each one of its members without exception was championed by all first-generation critical theorists. For his part, Adorno reiterates a point made by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man when he declares that “the technical forces of production are at a stage that makes it possible to foresee the global dispensation from material labour, its reduction to a limiting value” (CM: 267). If it was once necessary to “struggle against the pleasure principle for the sake of one’s own self-preservation”, labour can now be reduced to a minimum and need no longer be tied to self-denial (ibid.: 262). A similar remark appears in Negative Dialectics: the state of productive forces is currently such that much of our labour is superfluous. Impelled by survival imperatives that continue to demand the sacrifice of instincts and the domination of external nature even after technology has made self-preservation “easy”, the logic of history is logical no longer (ND: 262).
To be sure, capitalism appears to be second nature; it seems to have evolved naturally, and therefore to be unchangeable. But this appearance is illusory because “[t]he rigidified institutions, the relations of production are not Being as such, but even in their omnipotence they are man-made and revocable” (CM: 156). Although he has been criticized for failing to provide a blueprint for radical social change, Adorno recognized that radical change was needed to foster the reconciliation of the individual and society that would enable us to develop freely outside of constraints that are as unnecessary as they are irrational. He was also convinced that sustained critical reflection on our current predicament is the first step towards emancipation. According to Adorno, we “may not know what people are and what the correct arrangement of human affairs should be, but we do know what people should not be and what arrangement of human affairs is false”. Only in this critical understanding of the negative aspects of the human predicament is “the other, positive, one open to us”.31 To acquire a sense of what a more rational society might look like, then, we first need to achieve a thorough understanding of the irrational conditions that continue to fetter us.
1. Max Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research”, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (1993), 11.
2. I am paraphrasing the Institute’s description of its own history in an in-house publication. See Forschungsarbeiten, vol. 10 (September 1999), 7. Two excellent histories of the Institute are available in English: Martin Jay’s Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923–1950 (1973), and Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (1994). A good biography of Adorno available in English is Stefan Müller-Doohm’s Adorno: A Biography (2005).
3. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 177.
4. Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, 128.
5. Ibid., 110.
6. Adorno revised this undefended thesis on Husserl and published it in 1956. The book was later translated into English as Against Epistemology (AE).
7. See, for example, Adorno’s controversial essay “On Jazz”, and “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” in EM.
8. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 239.
9. Horkheimer, “Die Juden und Europa”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8 (1–2) (1939), 115–37. In 1941, the Institute published a series of articles on National Socialism in the successor to the Zeitschrift, called Studies in Philosophy and Social Science.
10. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 177.
11. Ibid., 160.
12. Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 254.
13. Jay, Adorno, 85.
14. Adorno, “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse”, tr. Rainer Koehne, Gesammelte Schriften 8 (1972), 22. This essay was originally given as a lecture to the Psychoanalytic Society in San Francisco in 1946; it was first published in Psyche VI(1), 1952.
15. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 105.
16. Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations”, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1978), 78. See also Pauline Johnson’s reading of Pollock’s thesis in this volume (Chapter 7).
17. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 267. See Horkheimer and Adorno, DE, C: xi; J: xiv.
18. See, for example, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (1976), which contains presentations that Adorno and Karl Popper gave at a workshop in Tübingen in 1961.
19. Adorno, et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 27.
20. See Adorno, “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column”, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture (1994), 34–127. See also “Prologue to Television”, and “Television as Ideology”, CM: 49–57; 59–70.
21. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 380. See Friedrich Pollock (ed.), Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht (1955).
22. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 381–2.
23. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001), 87.
24. Ibid., 88.
25. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology”, New Left Review 47 (1968), 79.
26. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12: Civilization, Society and Religion (1985), 100.
27. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1978), 130.
28. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998), 83.
29. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology”, 88, tr. mod.
30. Ibid., 95.
31. Adorno, “Individuum und Organisation”, Gesammelte Schriften 8 (1972), 456.