Pauline Johnson
The failure of socialist revolution in Western Europe is often viewed as the key to understanding Adorno’s diagnosis of modern society.1 The very first sentence in his main work, Negative Dialectics, reads: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (ND: 3). Socialist revolution, which might have overcome the irrationality of the existing bourgeois order and established a rational world, failed to materialize. This is why philosophy remains necessary as a vehicle of radical critique.
Horkheimer and Adorno witnessed the complete victory of fascism in Europe. The Institute for Social Reasearch’s empirical studies under Erich Fromm in the 1930s had already discovered the pervasive influence of the authoritarian personality among the German working class. This problem was compounded by the apparently successful reorganization and stabilization of monopoly capitalism under the New Deal in the United States.2 Its success ensured that a burgeoning consumerist culture was never problematized as a way of life but hailed as a truly democratic expression of the popular will. The multiple crises of the interwar period in Europe and the worldwide Depression appeared to have been overcome, but only at the cost of increased state intervention into the economy and the adoption of a greater planning and regulative role.3 The Bolshevik revolution in Russia had stagnated into a totalitarian form of state oppression. Rosa Luxemburg’s fears about the bureaucratization of the Communist Party seemed to be realized. The possibility of a socialist future seemed closed for the foreseeable future.
Horkheimer and Adorno summed up the historical configuration of the postwar world with the idea of the totally administered society. In their view, all contemporary economic systems — liberal democratic, fascist and socialist — manifested a frightening convergence in their basic logic and structure; they were characterized by the planning and manipulation of all spheres of life. Faced with a completely administered world, in which political regimes could be distinguished only by the means they used to produce totally compliant populations, Horkheimer and Adorno felt compelled to abandon their early allegiance to a Marxian vision of history as an emancipatory process towards humanity’s increasing self-conscious mastery of nature and its own fate. They looked upon the totally administered present as both an essentially irrational configuration and as a product of the triumph of the enlightenment reason that was assimilated by Marxism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, they insisted that the historical Enlightenment’s vision of a humanity able to steer its future by converting capricious nature and blind history into its own controlling purposes had turned hope for human freedom into the nightmare of an unleashed will that was bent only on domination.
Adorno’s mature social philosophy has routinely been described as adopting a melancholy, sometimes blackly pessimistic, posture on the present and future. We might wonder, though, what Adorno thinks we still have to lose. What emancipatory interests can survive his fulsome repudiation of an Enlightenment vision that equates freedom with the dominating aspirations of a self-asserting will? If all we have left is the lament of “reason’s other”, then how can Adorno’s own social philosophy offer itself as a critique of the irrational social order? To answer these questions, we need first to reconstruct what Adorno means by calling society irrational, and then explore his assessment of the human costs of this irrational social formation. Finally, we shall take up what Adorno says about our chances for a rational way of life.
Adorno never abandoned the critical purposes that charged the early days of the Institute for Social Research. He says to German students in the late 1960s that sociology “is insight into what is, but it is critical insight, in that it measures that which ‘is in case’ in society . . . by what society purports to be, in order to detect in this contradiction the potential, the possibilities for changing society’s whole constitution”. What can Adorno mean when he proposes that insights into the “essential” nature of society can be weighed as the frustrated potentials of a bad present even as he remains sceptical of the interest in “all general, comprehensive definitions” (IS: 15)? Not at all concerned to answer this riddle in terms that his audience can “write down and take home”, the single clue that Adorno offers is that only by “doing” the theory can the answer be understood. The theme of “learning by doing” was always dear to Adorno.
The essential nature of society has to be discovered by reconstructing the “social mediations” that emerge when we try to make sense of “elementary needs and problems” that seem to “have nothing directly to do with society” (IS: 16). The theory of society begins, then, with the attempt to understand the suffering of the concrete individual. Society, one might say, “becomes directly perceptible where it hurts”. For example:
one might find oneself in certain social situations, like that of someone who is looking for a job and “runs into a brick wall” has the feeling that all doors are shutting automatically in his face; or someone who has to borrow money in a situation in which he cannot produce guarantees that he can return it within a certain period, who meets with a “No” ten or twenty times in a definite, automated manner, and is told he is just an example of a widespread general law, and so on — all these, I would say, are direct indices of the phenomenon of society.
(Ibid.: 36)
Adorno is interested in those “hurts” that seem to betray anticipations that our social interactions might be different, or that might facilitate individual wishes and purposes instead of crudely refusing, remodelling and homogenizing them. This suffering awareness that one is dependent on others, and that this dependence is not felt as simply an alien power, is not based on a plan for a better way of living together, just resentment at what is. The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment make the point: “Hope for better circumstances —if it is not a mere illusion — is not so much based on the assurance that these circumstances would be guaranteed, durable, and final, but on the lack of respect for all that is so firmly rooted in the general suffering” (DE, C: 225; J: 186).
Adorno thinks that the word “alienation” captures the general character of a mode of integration that provokes suffering as a way of life. For him, the term evokes the contradiction of living “within a totality which binds people together”, not on the basis of solidarity, but “only through the antagonistic interests of human beings” (IS: 43). The “profit comes first” logic of the market system ends in the “domination of the general over the particular, society over its captive membership” (S: 148). The pathology of capitalist society is not just that the principle of commodity exchange sweeps the individual into an alienated system of relations, but that its driving imperatives reproduce savage class inequalities.
Even towards the end of his life, Adorno was telling us: “Society remains class struggle today just as in the period when that concept originated” (S: 148). He is persuaded that capitalism is an irrational mode of integration because its arrangement of society runs counter to society’s purpose: “the preservation and the unfettering of the people of which it is composed” (ibid.: 133). This account of the purpose of society is not rooted in a background anthropology. It is, rather, a generalization that emerges from the sociologist’s efforts to reconstruct how people live and suffer in the modern world. “Alienation” expresses the general condition of a life damaged by social interactions that do not sustain and unbind the people who compose it but that stands over them with all the blind power of the world of nature.4
From this derivation of the “seemingly anachronistic irrationality of society”, Adorno supposes that a “proper sociology” needs to explore the irrational ends that are served by instrumentally rational institutions and practices in society because “the irrational conditions of society can only be maintained through the survival of these irrational functions” (IS: 133). His account of the institutions that serve the “stubborn irrationality of a society which is rational in its means but not in its ends” guides the investigation into the truly administered character of contemporary society (S: 149). The totally administered society appears as an instrumentally rational response to, and a manifestation of, the irrational and self-contradictory character of capitalism.
Even as it models the whole of modern life after the interests and norms of the market, capitalism fosters the ideal of the independence of each individual. However, the attempt to construct a principle of social interaction out of the expectations of competitive, isolated individuals ends up with a dislocated, impotent individuality confronting a hostile, anonymous power. “Within repressive society”, Adorno tells us, “the individual’s emancipation not only benefits but damages him. Freedom from society robs him of the strength for freedom” (MM: 150). This endemic irrationality is articulated and “managed” in different ways in the distinct epochs of capitalist development.
Nineteenth-century capitalism had “maintained a certain equilibrium between its social ideology and the actual conditions under which its consumers lived”.5 At least for the entrepreneurial capitalist, the liberal epoch of free enterprise had underpinned the construction of a “free” self-responsible individuality with some kind of, limited, practical conditions. The liberal expectation that the private will might be enough to direct the life and fortunes of the particular individual was experienced as suffering, but also as an ideology that made sense of a new general standard of rational action. Horkheimer puts it this way: “Liberalism at its dawn was characterized by the existence of a multitude of independent entrepreneurs, who took care of their own property and defended it against antagonistic social forces.” Though isolated “by moats of self-interest”, individuals “nevertheless tended to become more and more alike through the pursuit of this very self-interest”.6 The construction of society as a network of interactions between private, self-interested individuals produces a culture of conformist motivations, and with this, an effective management of the tensions between the individual and society.
However, in the epoch of monopoly capitalism, individuality loses its economic basis and this transforms the mode in which the relationship between the individual and society is regulated. In the age of big business, “[t]he future of the individual depends less and less upon his own prudence and more and more upon the national and international struggles among the colossi of power”.7 The great economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s fuelled the rise of corporate power and created the objective conditions for dependence which robbed individuals of their self-sufficiency and exposed them to unprecedented manipulation.
Friedrich Pollock provided the economic dimension of the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis of the totally administered character of late twentieth-century capitalist societies.8 The crux of his argument was that capitalism had entered a new phase in which competition had given way to government intervention and corporate planning. According to the totally administered society thesis, the liberal age of bourgeois society — with its competitive economic relations, democratic political institutions and contractually legal arrangements —masked the domination implicit in the capitalist system. But these liberal forms of freedom are now historical memories. They are increasingly replaced by an overtly authoritarian system. With the advent of modern totalitarian regimes, the typical liberal dualisms of individual and society, private and public spheres, the economy and politics are blurred — even liquidated — in the service of direct control and command.
Traditional capitalist entrepreneurs, who controlled their enterprises and lived off the profits, were reduced to mere rentiers and removed from a direct management function. Government intervened to control prices and wages, to encourage technological innovation, to enforce full employment and avoid over-accumulation through the expansion of military and defence requirements.9 This control, exercised by the state in league with the large monopolists, forestalled the worst excesses of periodic downturns in the economic cycle. Coupled with the direction of the new mass media, it opened up the possibility of a new system of ubiquitous control and manipulation (DE, C: 38; J: 30). Political cliques that controlled the state apparatus in the interests of the economically most powerful groups could now exercise naked power, backed by all the forces of modern administration and bureaucracy, and aided by the subtle yet insidious pressures of the mass media.
The authoritarian state becomes a vehicle of new modes of capitalist organization. No longer relying on competition and the market, the state’s steering functions are now transferred to the centralized administrative activity of the apparatus of domination — to government agencies, police, the army and the media. The result is a new synthesis of monopoly capitalism and state power that brings together the calculated interests of the major corporations and the planning capacity of the state organs in a technical rationality that dominates all aspects of society and quashes all opposition either by terror or by consumerist incorporation.
Developments in Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States all seemed to reveal the same tendencies. On Adorno’s view, modernity comes to represent a new system of total domination characterized by manifestations of alienation, administrative manipulation, and by uniform subordination and depersonalization. With its new power (increasing bureaucratic reach) and technological means (radio and television), the state is able to expand its influence. It now enters and administers every facet of life (DE, C: 133; J: 105—6; C: 137; J: 109). Everything that cannot be subordinated to the demands and logic of the system will be processed, re-educated, dispensed with. Uniformity inevitably replaces individuality. The notion of the “totally administered society” has its complement in “the end of the individual”.
With his Frankfurt School colleagues, Adorno drew upon a psychoanalytic interpretation of the family to explain how the administered society came to be lived, not as an imposition upon, but as formative of, the modern personality. Fromm had proposed that Freudian developmental psychology offered a diagnosis of socialization mechanisms in the nineteenth-century family which had produced the bourgeois individual as the bearer of a private will.10 Overcoming the fear of the Oedipus complex, the male child was supposed to emerge from his traumatic identification with the father to become the inner-directed ego of the classical liberal age. However, the family had eroded as a strong institution, and the position of the patriarch or entrepreneur in developed capitalism had faltered. As a result, individuals were compelled to seek beyond the family for the fulfilment of their unconscious identificatory needs; they looked to leaders and broader peer and social groups.
Adorno thinks that David Riesman captures well the displacement of the family as the primary site of socialization with his distinction between “inner”- and “other”-directed personalities. Internalizing the authority of their parents, earlier generations of Americans were inner-directed. By contrast, today’s “other-directed” American is “in a characterological sense more the product of his peers — that is, in sociological terms, his ‘peer groups’, the other kids at school or the kids in the block”.11 For his part, Adorno suggests that a “culture industry” has largely replaced the family as the primary site of socialization. The tempestuous drama of self-formation enacted in the old bourgeois family has changed into the easeful assimilation of cultural norms offered by a total system of consumption. Entertainment, distraction, conspicuous consumption all play a part in promoting a popular perception of contentment. Individuals enjoy leisure; felt needs are satisfied (DE, C: 139; J: 110—11).
The term “culture industry” was deliberately chosen to eliminate any positive overtones arising from alternative expressions such as “mass culture” or “popular culture”. Adorno and Horkheimer refute the idea that contemporary mass culture (film, radio, records, popular literature) was in any way a spontaneous, popular creation of the masses. It is not the organic product of a vibrant low culture that reflects the forms and activity of the masses, of their own cultural creativity. Contemporary mass culture is in no way spontaneous and has little to do with the genuine demands of the masses.12
The hegemony of mass culture today means that art and culture are no longer authorized to inhabit their own autonomous sphere from whence they might open up new possibilities and reveal critical insights into prevailing social arrangements. Culture now becomes an industry, subordinated like all others to the overriding imperative of economic profit and administrative need. As it becomes increasingly dependent on industrial and finance capital, culture must be primarily saleable and reassuring. For Adorno and Horkheimer, then, the term “culture industry” does not simply signify that cultural production has become industrial: a creature of big business. It also suggests that contemporary culture is increasingly standardized with only a “pseudo-individualization”, or marginal differentiation, of cultural products. “Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable” (DE, C: 125; J: 98). Despite the ideology of individualism that motivates much consumption in advertising and popular culture, the basic tendency of the culture industry is to eliminate all vestiges of individuality in favour of a predictable and calculable standardization and uniformity.
For all that, contemporary mass culture is not usually experienced as an authoritarian imposition of attitudes and worldviews. The great uncertainties of the twentieth century have engendered a widespread fear and anxiety about security and employment that generates ego weakness and neurosis. These conditions rob individuals of their independence and expose them to manipulation. Finding it difficult to cope, people take flight in entertainment: it offers fun, relaxation and relief from the boredom of work and from the fruitless, enervating efforts of the everyday. In this relaxed state, their irrational susceptibilities are open to manipulation by the mass media.
Adorno makes the point that these ideological effects do not rely on the self-conscious intentions of their producers. “The script does not try to ‘sell’ any idea.”13 The pursuit of popularity alone is sufficient to structure an ideologically potent fusion of messages in the products of the culture industry. On the one hand, the standardized character of popular culture reassures the dependent and insecure masses that everything is “somehow predestined” and that nothing will be asked of them except their “unreflecting obedience”.14 This authoritarian message is fused with, and cloaked by, an overt affirmation of the ideals of plurality and individual autonomy. “Pseudo-individuality is rife”: individuality is reduced to a mere option to choose between mass-produced “styles”. Individuals are “like Yale locks, whose only difference can be measured in fractions of millimeters” (DE, C: 154; J: 125).
Entertainment and the distractions of the culture industry serve to reconcile the masses to the drudgery and meaninglessness of everyday life in the totally administered society. As such, the reign of the culture industry is an index of the truth that people feel oppressed by the lack of control they have over their own lives. This is the basis of Adorno’s critique of the symptomatic character of the pursuit of pleasure. To be pleased means to be in agreement, not having to think about suffering. “Basically it is helplessness.” It is flight, not only as it asserts “flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance” (DE, C: 144; J: 115–16).
This brings us to the central dilemma thrown up by Adorno’s critical exploration of the administered character of contemporary society. Earlier we saw that Adorno thinks we can measure the irrationality and illegitimacy of this kind of society by the hurt and damage that it does to us. His comprehensive critique holds an authoritarian culture industry to account for a zero-sum game that trades the longing for liberty against the quest for contentment. Objective conditions of the twentieth century have conspired to sap the confidence and the spirit of individuals, thus denying to them all sense of the damage that is daily being done to them.
However, as Axel Honneth points out, Adorno was determined to “guard against the impression that the capitalistic organization of life could ever close itself off into a smoothly self-reproducing functional whole”.15 What, then, does he offer by way of hope?
In his search for a critical normativity, Adorno rules out two major candidates. In the Enlightenment affirmation of reason he espies only the repressive bid to impose instrumental purposes and interests as a normative grid upon all human variety. The identity thinking upheld by the ideal of a civilizatory reason is the last place Adorno is going to look to articulate his critique of the distortions of social life. At the same time, his sociological account of the triumph of a reconciled, “happy” consciousness appears to block any chance that a critique of administered life might be grounded in a dynamics that is immanent in everyday life. J. M. Bernstein describes the apparent impasse as follows: “Adorno’s philosophy is routinely interpreted as directly embodying the pessimism implied by the intersection of the sociological picture of a rationalized society and the philosophical dilemma of being left without a useable conception of reason.”16
Adorno’s last work, unfinished at his death, addressed the question of the cultural remainders that might allow us to cling to critical awareness. Aesthetic Theory set out to defend the resistive power of modernist art as the last refuge for an unreconciled subjectivity. Art that refuses the beautiful image of an integrated, reconciled world and opts for the atonal can mimetically capture the experience of unreconciled, discordant, subjectivity. The atonal, the ugly, which form the “organizing and unity constitutive moment”17 of the modernist work, is the porthole through which the suffering angst of displaced subjectivity can make itself known.
Adorno is not claiming that autonomous art offers some pure Archimedean point from which the irrational distortions of an administered social life can be gleaned. Alienation from the “logic of domination” is expressed as suffering anxiety through the compositional forms of the modernist work, and this signifies its deep social mediations. However, the point has frequently been made that the critical negativity that Adorno finds stored up in modernist art remains trapped there, devoid of social consequence. He offers no hope that the work of art might set up a receptive relationship with an empirical consciousness that could turn its anxieties into a defiant vision of alternative ways of living. If aesthetic autonomy gives sanctuary to images of unreconciled subjectivity, it also seals them into a “speechless accusation” that provides nothing by way of a utopian vision with practical significance.
Perhaps, though, we can look to other dimensions of Adorno’s social philosophy to find an escape route from its “praxial paralysis”.18 In what follows I shall look at what Adorno has to say of the critical needs that cling to the lived tensions of contemporary intimacy.
We have already seen that, for Adorno, the contemporary family has been rationalized to conform to the logics and comply with the purposes of the completely administered society. What partly attracts him to psychoanalytic theory is its insight into the traumas of the bourgeois family that formerly produced inner-directed personalities who were able to sustain an ethically distinct private life. Today the family has become nothing more than a conduit for the demands of the totally administered society. Subjectivity loses its normative ground and is determined only by the need to cope.
Sometimes Adorno appears quite nostalgic:
With the family there passes away, while the system lasts, not only the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie, but also the resistance which, though repressing the individual, also strengthened, perhaps even produced him. The end of the family paralyses the forces of opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery of a classless one: together with the bourgeois it liquidates the Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love.
(MM: 23)
The strong self-directed personality forged through the Oedipal drama had looked to the loving family as an ethical haven from the heartless world of commercial life. It might appear, then, that Adorno’s critical diagnosis of life in the administered society draws its normative charge from the image of the ethical personality constructed in the bourgeois household.
Martin Jay thinks that the evidence points this way.19 However, it seems to me that Rahel Jaeggi is on stronger grounds when she draws attention to Adorno’s problematization of the ideal of an ethical, “right”, life in a “wrong” society.20 If we are to chart our way out of crippling alienation we need first to understand what a good way of being with others looks like. Adorno offers some grounds for hope that critical, ethical motivations might be located in the dialectics of intimacy.
Along with other commentators on the “disorganisation of transition” that was affecting postwar private life,21 Adorno seemed to be alert, not just to the crushing new burdens placed on the weakened family, but to the prospect that the normative contents locked in its institutional conventions might be opened up to a new self-reflexiveness and renegotiation. He is by no means investing romantically in the idea of the natural power of love to break through an alienating sociality. Actually, he is highly sceptical of the ideological functions of romantic images of the individual as a merely feeling self.
Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter (MM: 172).
Posing as a sanctuary for particular natural subjectivity, the idealization of passionate, involuntary love offers society “an alibi for the domination of interests and bears witness to a humanity that does not exist”. Since it falls for conventional attractions, romantic love “runs away” when the going gets tough and the needy particularity of the other starts to be felt. So love, it seems, can survive only if it becomes a chosen fidelity to the object of involuntary passion. While love’s own chances depend on forging a unity of involuntary passion and elected loyalty, its dialectical unities can also help us to begin to think in a non-ideological way about the meaning of autonomy (MM: 172).
Adorno wants to learn from the insights of a complex ethical, not just natural, love. If love is to represent a better society,
it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity, it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counterpressure.
(MM: 172)
But love alone cannot provide sanctuary to the hope for a decent life. There is: “No emancipation without that of society”. The “peaceful enclave” is not immune to the divisions, inequalities and insecurities of an alienated sociality and, indeed, it can be the site of a special, perceptive cruelty: “false nearness incites malice” (MM: 173). However, Adorno makes the point that the dialectics of intimate life can at least offer an image of non-instrumentalizing interactions between particular individuals. A natural romantic passion turns out to carry various cultural conventions and expectations that are not reflected upon. Yet the longing it expresses that particular unrepeatable subjectivity might achieve non-alienated recognition can provide the hook on to which an ethical, chosen, love can attach itself. The negotiation between reason and passion forged in an ethical intimacy is an index to the hope that a Romantic love for the particular might not always be at the mercy of a subduing enlightenment reason.
Bernstein insists that “Adorno is not providing a sociology of marriage or love but taking the pulse of the moral possibilities and hence the rationality potential latent in them”.22 However, Adorno’s insight into the normative ambiguities of intimate life is not meant as a positive orientation to how we might live reasonably and decently with each other. “Wrong life”, he tells us, “cannot be lived rightly” (MM: 39). He grimly supposes that the totally administered society finally invades and overwhelms the potentials for a rational mode of interaction that peeps through the dialectics of love. “Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better” (ibid.: 34). The ethical power of intimacy rests on the capacity to negotiate and live with its normative ambiguities. But ambiguity is anathema to the management imperatives of the totally administered society. And, corrupted by the distorted motivations of a wrong life, love can turn into exquisite cruelty.
What can we do? Adorno always invests in understanding. He believes that “only by making this situation a matter of consciousness — rather than covering it over with sticking plaster — will it be possible to create the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we should lead our lives today”. The most we may be able to say “is that the good life today would consist in resistance to the forms of wrong life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds” (PMP: 167–8).23
However, it seems that all that critical theory has to offer is an impotent clairvoyance. It can help us thematize how we might use our diverse cultural resources to imagine a non-repressive mode of interacting with others. It can analytically demonstrate why there can be “no emancipation without society”. Finally, it can critically dissect the mechanisms employed by the totally administered society to distort and confuse emancipatory motivations. Yet Adorno seems to be prepared to sacrifice an engaged role for critical theory to preserve the philosophical radicalism of his critique of a totally alienated present.
Adorno never had much interest or confidence in the feminist politics he saw taking shape in his last years.24 However, there seem to be missed opportunities here for a mutually enlightening dialogue. In the first instance, it would seem that the feminist movement stands awkwardly in front of the totally administered society thesis as testament to a complex set of pathways, running in both directions, between critical motivations that germinate in contemporary intimate life and the expectations of civic and legal freedoms.
With the later Habermas, we can suggest that the social and political reform agendas of contemporary feminism have disclosed and exploited aspects of a latent critical normativity in liberal democratic institutions that were obscured in Adorno’s despairing diagnosis of the totally administered society.25 It might also be said that a modern feminist movement demonstrates that emancipatory needs nursed in an ethically complex private life can achieve public significance and help shape civic and political reform agendas. The strong thesis of the “unholy alliance” between administrative state power and monopoly capital that dominates Adorno’s description of contemporary alienation tells an important story about contemporary social life, but it is not the only one worth telling.
This is a two-way street. Adorno also has something useful to say to the fraught, internally divided, character of feminism’s reflections on the sources of its critical and utopian energies. This social movement has sometimes interpreted its hopes for an autonomous life within a romantic framework, as the aspiration of a, supposedly irreducible, natural feminine difference. Here Adorno’s commentary on the conventional cultural descriptions that can overtake Romantic thinking might be allowed as a useful note of reservation. More than this, perhaps his outline of an ethics that draws upon diverse cultural legacies can offer a useful corrective to the stalled debate within contemporary feminism over the ideational sources of the emancipatory hopes that have fuelled it.
As we have seen, Adorno is persuaded that we have to utilize a range of emancipatory interests, both Romantic and reflective Enlightenment, if we are to have any hope of breaking the hold of contemporary alienation. While the unilateralism of the totally administered society thesis leaves us in the dark on the how, Adorno never has any doubt about the why. A humanistic conviction that people, “who are even now better than their culture” (MM: 46), deserve something much better than a totally administered society never leaves him.
1. J. E. Grumley, History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault (1989), 169.
2. Ibid., 170.
3. Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State”, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1978), 95–118.
4. Axel Honneth, “A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life: A Sketch of Adorno’s Social Theory”, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 12(1) (March 2005), 51.
5. Adorno, “Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture”, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957), 477.
6. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1974), 139.
7. Ibid., 141.
8. Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations”, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1978), 71–95.
9. Ibid., 80–81.
10. Erich Fromm, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology”, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1978), 477–97.
11. David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denney & Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950). Cited by Adorno in “Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture”, 477.
12. See Robert W. Witkin’s chapter on the philosophy of culture in this volume (Chapter 10) for further discussion of Adorno’s views about the culture industry.
13. Adorno, “Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture”, 480.
14. Ibid., 477.
15. Honneth, “A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life”, 60.
16. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001), 20.
17. Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ ”, New German Critique 26 (1982), 21.
18. Bernstein, Adorno, 58.
19. Martin Jay, Adorno (1984), 92.
20. Rahel Jaeggi, “ ‘No Individual Can Resist’: Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life”, Constellations 12(1) (2005), 69. For further discussion of Adorno’s views about living right life in a wrong society, see Fabian Freyenhagen’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 6).
21. See, for example, Talcott Parsons & Robert F. Bales, with the collaboration of James Olds, Phillip Slater & Morris Zelditch, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (1955).
22. Bernstein, Adorno, 58.
23. Cited by Jaeggi, “ ‘No Individual Can Resist’ ”, 70.
24. Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (2005), 475–6. Müller-Doohm describes the brutality of some of Adorno’s women students in April 1969; they were seemingly motivated by a crass “sexual liberation” agenda.
25. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996), 244–5.