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Adorno: Negation as Theory and Method
By Christian Garland (christiangarland@hotmail.com) “Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light” Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia) “Dialectical theory (…) cannot offer the remedy. It cannot be positive. To be sure, the dialectical concept, in comprehending the given facts, transcends the given facts. This is the very token of its truth. It defines the historical possibilities, even necessities; but their realization can only be in the practise which responds to the theory” Herbert Marcuse (One-Demensional Man) “Philosophers have only interpreted
the world in various ways, the point is to change it” Across the entire breadth of his work, Adorno does not at any point seek to reconcile philosophy with reality, or conversely, to explain reality by recourse to any form of ‘idealism’; instead, as arguably the most important ‘founder’ of Critical Theory, he attempts the reconstruction of Marx’s original project, which aimed at a dialectical supersession (aufheben) of these categories; minus it must be said, however Marx’s ‘positive’ belief that dialectical thought could comprise a system, in which truth was hypostatised into the supposedly provable ‘scientific’ theory of dialectical materialism. The aims of Adono’s Critical Theory as a method are closely tied to its broader political context, and the two cannot for obvious reasons, be readily separated. However, this essay should not be seen as an attempt at uncritically defending Adorno’s version of Critical Theory, since it goes without saying that any such effort is ultimately a misreading of the theoretical positions it would purportedly maintain, and a gift to those it would oppose. Neither is it our aim to present an overview of Adorno’s thought or that of Critical Theory-something that would require considerably larger scope than this essay; instead, we will aim to analyse Adorno’s negative dialectical method, as a basis for Critical Theory. ***
Just as the emergence of Critical
Theory paralleled the historical crisis of twentieth century ‘reason’,
Horkheimer and Adorno attempted to retrieve the essential elements of
truth contained in the Enlightenment project whilst subjecting them to
an interrogative critique. The ‘essence of the ‘Concept of
Enlightenment’ is contained in Horkheimer and Adorno’s statement
that “In the most general sense progressive thought (reason) has
always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty"
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979). It was the aim of Enlightenment thought
to remove the fetters on human reason for the purpose of removing them
from human existence, and it is this effort, which underpins much of the
foundational basis (substruktion) of the Frankfurt School project. Far
from merely preserving as ossified monuments, the faded concepts of the
past, the original project of Critical Theory was to update and refine
these theoretical motifs, allying them to an ongoing reflexive analysis.
The past century, it has been contended, would have apparently refuted the notion of Enlightenment reason as truth. However instead of merely connoting this with the inexplicable tragedy of being, by adopting a shallow pseudo-Nietzschean nihilism, Critical Theory by contrast, refuses any such abandonment of the world to itself. From this perspective it can be viewed dialectically: both as negation at the level of thought, of the existing social order, and as an historical resolve to maintain the affirmation of humanity against all odds. It is the ‘Great Refusal’ that Marcuse would in turn define by revolutionary praxis, and which finds in Adorno the same polarising radicality by which every substantive question is afforded political meaning. Such a perspective is aimed at analysing the oppressive features of the epoch by uncovering the human possibilities, actual and potential contained within it. Adorno’s philosophy however, unceasingly refuses the unifying Hegelian totality it criticises, whether as theoretical model or future society. If we accept in some sense Hegel’s definition of reason as ‘truth contemplating itself in thought’ it is apparent for Adorno that such truth can only emerge in the negation of its false reconciling unity, we are left otherwise, with a concept that all too easily may be invoked as the means of serving its opposite:
For Adorno, reason is not simply
the theoretical catchall, beyond which the scope of critical enquiry must
end but the self-defining standard by which it must itself be judged.
By refusing the imposed limits ‘the given’ as finality, dialectical
thought finds its application in Adorno as a critical method-and not as
a positive system. In any attempt to critically comprehend the world however,
the claims of theory to fully reveal itself as truth without the constant
awareness of its own limitations, are bound to fall back into the same
one-dimensionality, they would criticise. By taking “the whole as
the false” Adorno’s negative dialectical method aims to free
itself from any closed totality including its own containment as ideology:
the opposite from the most vulgarly mistaken charge against Critical Theory
that it is ‘totalitarian’ in its implications. Adorno defines philosophical idealism
as any “philosophy which tries to base such notions as reality or
truth on analysis of consciousness”, and which consequently would
assume a free-floating analytic detachment from their subject. Against
the metaphysical abstraction of traditional philosophical inquiry, is
posited the notion of ‘immanent critique’ aimed at incising
the protective defences such positions retreat behind. It should also
be clarified that a statement such as this explicitly reveals the ‘political
implications’ it holds: no less than the transformation of the world
toward something better, the defining feature of Adorno’s thought,
and indeed that of Critical Theory. It is the emancipatory quality of
the negative that continues the project of Marx, and which stands diametrically
opposed to the ‘Orthodox’ tradition that would claim to monopolise
that task as its own historical privilege. Adorno’s theory situates
itself as being at odds with reality, whilst openly acknowledging the
normative criterion on which such a position is based: that is the desire
to change the world as it is into what it might yet be: between ‘ought’
and ‘is’ thought must interpose itself as critique. The method of auto-critique used
by Adorno can be seen as the exact opposite of that unchanging dogma of
invulnerability, assuming a chiliastic faith that characterises the entire
current of thought known as ‘Orthodox Marxism’. This finds
its most forceful expression in Lenin’s unshakable belief that Marxism
and the materialist method comprised the pure science capable of uncovering
the truths of history, and to which all other critical accounts were inferior.
Marx’s own comment that he was definitely “not a Marxist”
assumes here a prophetic sound. Since the original Frankfurt School project
aimed at avoiding the fate of theoretical caricature that would go under
the name of Marxism-Leninism-and by definition this means all variants
of Orthodox Marxism-it made a special effort to re-examine the ontological
depths of Marx’s thought. This may be understood as the attempt
at investigating that dimension of his work (most obviously, but not exclusively
the ‘early writings’), which has a recognisably philosophical
texture. In the 1844 Paris Manuscripts Marx gives his most important account
of alienation and subjectivity, whilst making it clear as in other ‘early
writings’ that such categories are not employed in their ‘idealist’
sense, but as theoretical means of ‘illuminating’ reality,
to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. If theory must endeavour to uncover truth, then it can only do so by resolution to ‘a ruthless critique of everything existing’, as long as this is deliberately ignored by means of a resort to repetition of the same presumptive tautology it can only continue to fail. In his ironic inversion of Hegel’s maxim ‘Das Wahre ist das Ganze’-‘the Whole is the True’, into its opposite, we are left with possibly Adorno’s most succinct expression of his philosophy: the whole comprehended as totality is false as long as it claims to be as such: since there can be no closed totality, this must be avoided in turn by the recurrence of dialectical negativity. In this sense we find a definition of ‘freedom’ as thought-if nothing else-estranged by its absence from the present. A further explanation is given by Lukacs, although it goes without saying that his ultimate theoretical conclusions were not shared by Adorno:
‘Time degraded to the dimension
of space’ is Lukacs’s evocation of life determined according
to the dead time of capital, but also serves as a striking description
of the theoretical problematic of both Hegelian and Materialist methods
in resisting a spurious mythology of immediacy, and which Adorno more
than anyone else was determined, above all else to resist. As would be
later noted: “If ontology exists it will define the ‘false
condition’ in which freedom has no place”: the continual difficulty
to articulate and re-define this relation must be recognised by any subsequent
attempt to continue such an undertaking. The reality of reification tends
toward defining even the attempt to overcome it, according to Adorno,
since consciousness is necessarily formed by the experience of such a
reality. Whilst refusing any over-simplified account of the relation between
thought and reality, Adorno gives an explanation of the ‘non-identical’
as being the method by which thought can truthfully comprehend itself.
Throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno set out to
undermine every form of reconciliation with the existing social order
by means of dialectical negativity; similarly, in his other writings,
Adorno defines Critical Theory’s refusal of any accommodation to
the present as both its own work and that of a recurrent moment interrupting
the continuum of history. Adorno rejects any first principle
that might assume the status of absolute certainty, including of course
the ‘unknowable’ realm inhabited by analytic philosophy. Just
as the false certainty of any theory is bound by a refusal to admit a
normative standpoint, theoretical efforts which situate themselves in
opposition, must avoid their own retrogression into ideology, by ascribing
a sense of infallibility to their concepts. ‘Marxism’ is itself
the most immediately appropriate example: conflating critical reason with
belief in its own scientific truth, the sum of which led toward its complete
reversal. The development of Marxism into a closed totality of thought-present
to some extent, it must be said in some of Marx’s own formulations-can
be seen as the prefiguration of the social order that under this title
assumed the same character whilst all the time claiming to be the embodiment
of something entirely different. Adorno’s Critical Theory
refuses to limit its scope to traditional positivistic empiricism with
the same determination it rejects the framework of traditional epistemology.
Once again, this should be clarified: it is not a straightforward ‘rejection’
as such of either method, but an attempt at offsetting the insufficiencies
inherent in both. The philosophical character of Adorno is counterposed
by his insistence that all ontology must exist in a social and historical
(and by qualification, political) context. Just as his social theory demands
that all ‘verifiable’ social facts cannot lose sight of the
implicit meta-critique their findings suggest. Adorno’s Critical
Theory gives way here, in a further sense, to the openly hostile relation
it has toward the traditional academic ‘division of knowledge’
bound as this is by accepted disciplinary conventions, not to mention
its highly dubious claims to ‘impartiality’. Analogous to
his critique of philosophy in its accepted form, as offering merely an
uncommitted description of the world, circumscribed by the language, truth
and logic of the present; Adorno is equally critical of the classical
sociological inheritance seeing in the continuing emphasis on quantifying
the social world by means of apparently ‘provable’ empirical
data, a refusal to critically engage at the level of theory; similar to
the claims of Marxism become ‘Diamat’ ideology, sociology
seems too often to share a belief in the purity of ‘value-free’
social science. Adorno, perhaps more than any other
‘founder’ of Critical Theory remains most closely associated
with the original aims of that project. At every turn he aims to uncover
the meanings lurking in the most apparently harmless sources, just as
he maintained that only a theory capable of recognising its own practical
shortcomings could retain any claim to truth. For Adorno, even among Critical
Theorists, there is more at stake in style than the mere nuance of an
author’s voice; ‘concepts’ as they exist-that is, without
critical engagement- serve to functionally mask reality, diffusing the
potential for its critical understanding. In attempting to communicate
the concept, the theorist must convey their ‘subjective’ perspective
in the quality of the text: there is not, Adorno maintains, the possibility
for honestly conveying it by other means. In bold contrast with both analytic
philosophy, and empirical sociology (as for political science), and the
impassive dead-end of Postmodernism, Adorno emphasises the importance
of a negative style, seeing in the inflections and contours of language
itself, the same struggle to articulate meaning and substance theoretical
concepts themselves must display. The stultifying onus on purely ‘scientific’
language employed so often within traditional disciplines can be seen
in their stylistic poverty, most obviously visible in the specialised
singularity of the concepts they use, overlaid by the repetition of formalised
procedural structures that otherwise require a minimum of original thought.
In contrast Postmodern theory claims an undue radicalism by dint of its
unending proclamation that there is nothing radical left to say. In keeping with the original interdisciplinary
formulations of Critical Theory, Adorno’s thought maintains an open-ended
dynamic -a position that is understandably greeted with some hostility
by critics. This is due in part to what is perceived as a weakness or
evasion by those who argue that by refusing accepted categories of academic
discourse, it cannot be judged by them, and would it seems, apparently
escape criticism altogether. Rather than uncovering the ‘ideological’
nature of Critical Theory, this accusation reveals its own complicity
towards the world as it exists. For Adorno, the criticism of philosophy
from the perspective of social theory is reversible, in that socio-political
assumptions must themselves be subjected to the meta-critique contained
in the philosophical moment: in this sense Adorno’s theory resists
spatial limitation by one or another disciplinary boundary. For Adorno, Hegel’s dialectic
represents above all, a method, a means toward understanding the dynamics
of the social world that is reflected back in thought. According to the
original Hegelian formulation, reason appears as the driving force of
human history, its appearance marking the shape of events, as it defines
their historical substance. It was Hegel’s belief that it is according
to ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ that the world was formed,
moving via historically reconciled synthesis to higher forms: the appearance
of reason is at the same time the evolution of consciousness toward self-knowledge.
The original project of Marx was of course, to reverse this perspective
into a ‘materialist’ theory in which the social world defines
and shapes the content of ‘the idea’. Critical Theory, and
Adorno’s version especially, further developed this project but
with the qualified objection that it could not be taken as a positive
system, and that the ‘puppet called historical materialism’,
as Benjamin put it, must be recognised and rejected for the impostor it
was. Adorno’s oft-quoted remark that his thought was schooled in
the Hegelian method but rejected its conclusions of the unifying whole,
applies equally well to the relation it holds to ‘Marxism’,
that is, it rejects every tendency this has towards a ‘positive’
unity, just as it resolutely refuses that version of materialism that
in its existence as a closed theoretical totality, itself reverts into
a kind of mythology. Against such tendencies, a key component of the original
Frankfurt School project, which finds a particular strength in Adorno,
is the recognition that in spite of the Enlightenment precept that recognised
the world as viewed from the standpoint of human consciousness; this perspective
had all but extinguished the last traces of itself. The recognition of
Hegel’s dialectical method along with the rejection of it as a system
was an essential aspect of Critical Theory in its original form and which
Adorno gave special precedence to. This is method in bold contrast to
positivism, which would lay claim to the objective ability of demonstrating
the truth claims of any theory by reference to ‘provable’
facts: Adorno’s ‘Negative Dialectics’ are in every sense
a refusal to accept such an apparently ‘scientific’ premise.
Just as the Frankfurt School tradition has sometimes-rightly or wrongly-been
referred to as ‘Marxist-Humanism’, this bears some similarity
with the description of the likes of The German Ideology or the 1844 Manuscripts
as being either overly ‘philosophical’ or simply ‘utopian’.
It is however the absolute refusal for reconciliation, for accommodation,
that Adorno’s theory consistently resists, just as it maintains
an unbroken hostility to the reality it attempts to criticise, situating
its commitment to analysing ‘that which is’ in the dialectical
moment of the negative. Like Marx before them, the Frankfurt School remained
‘enemies’ of utopia for the sake of its realisation. In his
refusal of any ‘given’ transcendental first principles, Adorno
described his thought using Benjamin’s concept of the ‘constellation’,
that is, mapping the moment of truth between different places in the ‘universe
of discourse’, to paraphrase Marcuse. It is Adorno’s contention
that thought cannot uncover the truth if it depends on straightforward
generative first principles, or privileges its own foundational premises
as being ‘beyond’ question. It is the recognition that the
cognitive and normative structure of any theory must continually engage
with itself as much as its subject for it to have any substantive meaning,
that Adorno repeatedly stresses. It is the imperfection of thought, that
is, the problematic of working outside a unifying objective whole that
defines ‘the negative’ in the moment of truth it uncovers:
“Posited positively, as given or as unavoidable amidst given things,
freedom turns directly into unfreedom” (Adorno, 1973). At the start of the twenty first
century, no less than when Adorno was still alive, we are confronted by
a world of seemingly inexplicable events beyond our reach, and in which
all foundational claims seem at the very least doubtful. This might of
course be termed Postmodernity, however recognition that we are in an
epoch (whatever one chooses to call it) beyond the assumed certainties
of the past, in no way means the affective impasse, that is accepted,
if not demanded as logically inevitable by so many of those who identify
their thought with, or in relation to, such a description of the present.
What are claimed as the limits of human possibility, that historically
frame such concepts as ‘reason’ or ‘knowledge’,
can be seen, when viewed from a critical perspective as being in fact
their further ideological appropriation. If for example ‘reason’
is now an obsolete concept according to capitalist Postmodernity, then
it is by its own historical standard: It is not in this sense the meaninglessness
of the concept measured by exposure to reality, but the meaninglessness
of reality exposed to the concept. Accordingly, the historical limits
of any social system do indeed exist, as Marx himself was adamant to point
out, although against the more predictive ‘positive’ claims
of his theory, a critical distance must be assumed. As Adorno and Horkheimer
as well as Marcuse pointed out, the ‘technological rationality’
of the system is the same ‘instrumentalization’ of reason
which reduces it at the level of theory, to the merely descriptive or
justificatory recognition of the present. Reason as the critical category
of thought by which truth recognises itself, can only re-emerge in the
moment of rupture, with the ‘given’ or to use Adorno’s
term for it, displacement. Conversely, in their persistent claims that
concepts such as this are mere Meta-narratives, Postmodern thought explicitly
reveals its own compromise with the world it claims to criticise. This
kind of thinking, displays what Marcuse would define as ‘One Dimensionality’,
by attempting to disarm all critiques of the social world as it exists,
it limits both thought and historical possibilities to within the orbit
of existing reality. The ‘instrumental rationality’ of advanced capitalism in which historical possibilities are arrested and turned into their opposite, remains a recurring theme in all of Adorno’s work. The limitation of such possibilities, contra Postmodernism is the result of a definite historical form of society that separates the accomplishments of technological and material progress from their human potential. As Adorno noted on more than one occasion, technological capabilities as they presently exist, within the ‘iron cage’ of instrumental reason, exhibit a reified social relation to human beings, apparently determining their own arbitrary trajectory quite independent of human intervention. As such, the progressive elimination of toil and in fact ‘labour’ through automation, as a basic condition for a qualitative transformation of the social world, moves further away from reality the more this becomes a concrete possibility. Douglas Kellner describes the material process of instrumentalization well:
***
It should also be noted that the political positions that can be drawn from the likes of Minima Moralia and Prisms are unequivocal, even if their exact political form is not. For Adorno, it remains the task of Critical Theory to accentuate the gap between the actual and the possible, to uncover the emancipatory moment in the non-identical; in his own words truth is glimpsed in the indeterminate negation of what is false. It is this point at which Adorno’s thought is situated: against the ‘given’, against the ‘unchangeable reality’ of the world as it is with the commitment to the possibility of what it might be, maintaining always a position of total critique, whilst “holding out all the time, for the possibility of something better” (Adorno, 1999). Bibliography Adorno, Theodor with Horkheimer, Max (1947) Dialectic
of Enlightenment (Herder and Herder 1972) Jameson, Frederic (1990) Adorno, or the Persistence
of the Dialectic (Verso)
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