Theodor W. Adorno is highly renowned. But although he is well known, it is not clear that he is genuinely recognised for what is essential about him. A stubborn legend has it that his work is primarily that of a philosopher with a passion for aesthetics and literary criticism, who turned aside from Marxism after the Second World War by abandoning any prospect of social transformation. In reality, if Adorno did indeed break with the Marxisms that emerged after Marx, he did not renounce the idea of a society freed from exploitation and oppression. It might even be said that his whole œuvre, even in its most aesthetic manifestations, is centred on a search for adequate means of emancipation and liberation following the historical failures of the workers’ movement.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, these failures are set in the more general context of the development of the culture of the bourgeois era – the self-destruction of reason with its renunciation of the project of creating meaning between, and, for human beings. For Adorno, the workers’ movement and Marxists have themselves been trapped in this regressive spiral, this transformation of reason into mythology. Thus, the theory of emancipation itself needs to be resumed and rethought. In this radical reform, Marx himself must not be spared, for a ‘hidden positivism’ can be detected in him – positions on science and on the import of the critique of political economy that require clarification. Marx had indeed discerned a second nature in capitalist social relations, and especially in what he called ‘real abstractions’ (capital, value, the market). But he was unable to counter the influence of this second nature on thought processes and ways of perceiving social reality with sufficient vigilance. The critique of political economy – an enormous, unfinished labour – sometimes veers towards a positive science of the economy in search of laws of a very traditional sort.
However, these slips do not invalidate Marx’s enterprise. On the contrary, it needs to be continued and taken further, by working on it and from it. In fact, the reference to Marx remains constant in Adorno, even if it is not very frequent in a whole series of his writings. It is also implicit in the sociological work carried out from the 1940s onwards and conceived as an ambitious critique of the social sciences, using analytical tools forged by Marx : market abstraction, commodity fetishism, abstract labour, and so on. Over and above any notion of a critical sociology, Adorno undertakes to deconstruct sociological theories in their blind spots and, at the same time, to deconstruct the empirical world as a social world of necessary appearances. Adorno’s aim is to set fixed categories in motion, on the grounds that they fall foul of the illusion of their own immediacy, because they conceive themselves as mastering an unproblematic reality. He therefore wishes to introduce mediations where none are currently to be found, to demonstrate the distortions present in concepts, their inability to define the relations between the general and the particular ; and, more precisely, to demonstrate the domination of a particularistic generality over the particular (or the singular) under the appearances of simple transitions from one to the other. The subject of capitalist society is parasitised by an abstract sociality that permeates its consciousness and unconscious alike. Human beings are socialised not only in inter-individual relations, but also by their relations to social relations that are external to them – social relations between social things (relations between capitals, commodities, and the dynamics of valorisation) ; and they struggle in relations of competition, in processes of evaluation-assessment, that escape them. In fact, socialisation by abstract sociality overdetermines all social bonds and forms of sociability.
According to Adorno, this antagonistic socialisation inevitably creates relations of confrontation between individuals, a constant struggle to secure an advantageous position in the fields of valorisation and power relations. There is therefore a ubiquitous violence, open or masked, in social relations and a structured symbolic universe in which others represent a permanent threat. Tendencies to aggression and self-aggression continually traverse the unconscious of individuals and cloud consciousnesses, diverting them from an accurate perception of things and social relations and, as a result, of what is really at issue in society. Already permeated by economism and thereby rendered abstract, politics risks descending into irrational and murderous conflicts at any moment. Consequently, collective action, invariably dominated by organisational bureaucrats, tends to be transferred from the usual objectives to assaults on minority, powerless sections of society. Even limited democratic debate becomes impossible and politics destroys itself by taking the form of a life-and-death struggle against a mythical enemy. Cracks open in the fragile barriers of civilisation through which modern barbarism surges, with all its unsuspected potential. As Adorno says with reference to Auschwitz, the catastrophe has occurred and humanity has since lived in a kind of barbarous normality (or ordinary barbarism) made up of brutality and incivility. It is oblivious of the fact that behind this dubious normality an even greater barbarism is only waiting to be unleashed, because the whys and wherefores of Auschwitz have not been properly understood and assimilated.
This is why Adorno cannot share a certain optimism characteristic of Marx – especially the latter’s confidence in the positive import of manifestations of resistance to capitalism. At bottom, the basic antagonism between capital and labour is blind for Adorno ; and the class struggle rarely takes a direction conducive to social transformation. This implies posing the issue, not posed by Marx, of the struggle against capitalist society’s blinding connections or structures of blindness. It also means examining, over and above the particularistic domination of generality and real abstractions, the modalities of the intellectual division of labour, the formalism of scientific practices and, last but least, the culture industry. To link all this together, Adorno adopts an old theme of Horkheimer’s : knowledge is a social relation. In other words, the production of knowledge is not a simple activity derived from the intellectual capacities of individuals : it refers to a whole social organisation of intellectual exchange and cognitive processes. Thinking is always social, employing cognitive techniques and instruments that have been produced socially in response to social imperatives. This is what is masked by the various types of scientific formalisation when they reduce the problem of producing knowledge to logical constructions, decontexualising thought processes. In this way, crucial issues can be repressed : the issue of the genesis of cognitive processes ; of the social demand that lies behind the construction of objects of knowledge ; of the effects on social relations ; of the determination of intellectual activities (the intellectual division of labour, the divide between intellectuals and non- intellectuals, and so on). As a result, there is just as much production of ignorance as of knowledge. For Adorno, this no doubt explains many people’s ambivalent reactions towards science. On the one hand, it offers security because it brings technological progress that can be invested libidinally. On the other, it is a source of anxiety on account of the dangerous nature of its applications in a capitalist context, which refers to a basic feature which is unthought : its submission to the dynamic of valorisation.
Contrary to what many have claimed, and continue to claim, Adorno did not conclude that there is no way out and that the only thing to do is to await better days. On the contrary, he thought that there was an urgency to theoretical work, an imperative to intervene radically on cognitive processes and demonstrate their one-sided, utterly erratic operation. The urgency was all the greater in that knowledge production is increasingly important in social production and social existence and because theoretico-practical, as well as technological, development take pride of place. But one must be aware that mere denunciation of the mediatisation of thinking would be impotent. In reality, it is necessary to intervene on all fronts where modes of thought and ways of apprehending society crystallise. Critique must be rendered at once internal and external. It must be immanent – i.e. not deriving from without – and embrace what it wants to subvert, so as to reveal the flaws and deadlocks of that which believes itself to be rigorous. At the same time, it must be transcendent, demonstrating the untenable character of the status quo and of the reproduction of what currently exists. The starting point of such work is necessarily subjective. More precisely, it involves subjectivities working on themselves, in order to escape paralysing cognitive apparatuses, to cast off the yoke of ready-made thought and position themselves in an external relationship to it. However, such distantiation must necessarily be followed by the development of theoretical structures of observation and elaboration that are practically opposed to mediatised thinking. This assumes collective co-operation and collaboration over and above solitary reflection. Critical theory has to struggle against the compartmentalisation and fragmentation of thought into separate domains or disciplines.
Philosophical reflection is obviously central for Adorno and he defends it against all those who proclaim its replacement by some form of linguistic analysis or some way of disposing of problems. However, like Marx, he rejects the idea that it can be self-sufficient and capable of legislating on all types of knowledge. When it conceives itself as such, and believes that it is philosophia perennis or prima philosophia, philosophy in fact contributes to the reproduction the intellectual division of labour and thus to social reproduction as a whole. However, it must not succumb to the illusion that it can immediately convert itself into praxis. On the contrary, as theory it must confront other theoretical practices, in order to criticise them and to problematise itself. In particular, it must confront the social sciences, which are invariably enclosed in positivism, but rich in empirical material loftily ignored by philosophers. The empire of sociology is an unproblematised empirical world – that is to say, a world taken as a set of indisputable data. Yet it is not a heteroclite, arbitrary assemblage, constructed solely by the subjectivity of researchers. In its oscillation between holism and methodological individualism, objectivism and subjectivism, structuralism and constructivism, sociology indicates the difficulty of defining social relations and the modes of individuals’ incorporation into them. It does not succeed in striking a balance between the general and the particular, the static and the dynamic, the psychological and the social. In the form of unacknowledged symptoms, it reveals the disequilibria, the discontinuities that shape society, and the supremacy of uncontrolled processes that disorient individuals and social groups in their practices.
This observation is crucial : the upshot is that there can be no unity of theory and practice. The practices stuck fast in conjunctures of subjection are not readily accessible to theory and theory cannot claim to find direct material in practice. In order to theorise wisely, it is necessary to be in a state of constant tension with practices, while not rejecting them disdainfully. In fact, one must enter into their blind, groping logic in order to disrupt and disturb them. The main objective of theory cannot be to guide action. It must above all seek to rouse people, to release them from the fascination exercised by the phantasmagorias of commodities – that is to say, by the market apparel of processes of submission bound up with valorisation. Critical theory must not be a theory of practice or practices – their mere reflexive extension. In its confrontation with the empirical world and fields of activity, it must make itself a secondary reflection – that is to say, come to terms with itself as a practice to be subjected to critique, as a theoretical practice of research employing intellectual instruments. But it must also express itself as a quest for change, as an intervention on behalf of different social relations. Construed thus, critical theory cannot be uninterested in the practical construction of intellectual institutions and groupings. It is not a solitary critique, but a constant confrontation with other theoretical practices.
On the basis of such considerations, the Institute of Social Research returned to Frankfurt. Neither Horkheimer nor Adorno wanted to fashion an academic œuvre, still less to settle down comfortably in the academy. Adorno, in particular, was anxious to test the techniques refined in the United States for investigating the ‘authoritarian personality’ on a new terrain : Germany after Hitler. The main goal of their enterprise was to assess the impact of Nazism and its collapse on Germans in the West, and at the same to test the prospects for democracy. At the outset, they were not very optimistic about the likely results. For them, society’s self-enclosure was virtually complete, sealed by the expansion of the culture industry, the decline in inter-capitalist competition, and the advance of state intervention. In this connection, Horkheimer tended to refer to an administered world where freedom of movement, characteristic of early capitalism (at least for certain social strata), was in the process of disappearing. He concluded that the room for manoeuvre was continuing to narrow and that it was therefore necessary to advance cautiously.
Horkheimer’s pessimism was contradicted, at least in part, by events. From the outset, the Institute met with manifest success as well as avowed hostility. It destabilised the sociological profession, which was already far from self-confident, because it offered both a sociology that was highly developed empirically as well as theoretically, and a critical re-examination of the past that countered tendencies to cover it in oblivion. It practised a sociology that was utterly untraditional and disrupted many routines – those of the Geisteswissenchaften and of an empiricism employing old-fashioned methods. According to some observers, it created an atmosphere of civil war in the social sciences. Even if the suggestion is somewhat exaggerated, it is true that the Institute exercised ever more influence during the 1950s and 1960s, to the great annoyance of its opponents. The research it organised was varied and creative and its sociology teaching at Frankfurt University enjoyed increasing success.
In the debates in the German Sociological Association, interventions by Horkheimer, but especially by Adorno, had very considerable resonance. They began to be perceived as a sort of unclassifiable current, strongly marked by German thought of the most classical variety, but tracing strong lines of demarcation vis-à-vis it, while seeking to open up new lines of theoretical work.
It would be paradoxical if Marx had been absent from these debates and this civil war. And in fact, he was very present – less as a supplier of positive theories than as a destabiliser of the theoretical field. Despite his errors – the penetration of elements of positivism or scientism into the critique of political economy, for example – he provided key weapons for penetrating the immediate appearances and false obviousness of capitalist society, notably thanks to his accounts of the commodity as a social relation, the abstraction of exchange (its domination by value or valorisation), and the transformation of what was most important about human activities into abstract labour. These theses became all the more significant in Adorno as he gradually abandoned the theses defended by Horkheimer in ‘The Authoritarian State’ in 1941. For him, the false totality represented by capitalist society is neither static, nor one-dimensional. It is shot through with unforeseeable, irregular dynamics that destructure and restructure social relations and individual situations.
In a 1962 seminar, Adorno was quite explicit on his relationship to Marx : he identified him as the first great theoretician of critical theory and stressed the importance of the theory of fetishism for understanding valorisation as an abstract conceptualisation of social relations. He brought out some of Marx’s uncertainties, particularly in relation to Hegel, but credited him with not falling into a problematic of the revolutionary subject and class consciousness (characteristic of Western Marxism). In conclusion, he noted that Marx had left unresolved many problems, which had not been taken up by those who claimed to be his successors. He thus implicitly accepted that the task of contemporary critical theory was to continue Marx differently, by tackling these unresolved problems. But none of this could be done from the outside. What was required was an immanent critique – that is to say, one that started out from the difficulties and impasses of Marx’s theory, while trying to understand them better than Marx himself had been able to. For example, it was not possible to remain at the level of phenomena of alienation : it was necessary to penetrate the effects of the commodification of social or inter-individual relations, as well as of objectivity, much more deeply. For a left Hegelianism or a variant of ethical humanism was insufficient. As for problems of power, they must not be abstracted from the reproduction of existence, of what happens by way of bodies, in everyday relations, in relationship to objects, to time and space. The abstract conceptualisation of social relations did not only take the form of cognitive processes that escape human beings, it was also inscribed in the process of abstraction of corporeality and materiality, in their conditioning in the service of the conditioning of labour-power.
Marx’s œuvre must therefore not be reduced to a narrow conception of the critique of political economy. It must be expanded, surmounting disciplinary compartmentalisation and cognitive barriers in order to undermine the dictatorship of real abstractions. However, to attain this objective, critical theory cannot think the negative totality directly – that is to say, think it abstractly. It must multiply partial illuminations, establish itself in the most varied domains, dismantling borders. As Adorno put it, to exhibit the truth, it must think in constellations, organise a convergence of different intellectual endeavours on developing the mediations that lead to the abstract totality. It follows that the genuinely critical thinker, while not claiming to be universal, cannot simply be a specific intellectual (in Foucault’s terminology) : he must explore a great deal in order to discover new paths. When Adorno engages in literary criticism, this is not the activity of an aesthete, but the meticulous, professional, strenuous labour of someone who wants to identify the impossibility of being human in an inhuman world as accurately as possible (see, for example, his commentaries on Beckett’s Endgame). The same spirit inspires his many writings on music. Their technical difficulty can frequently prove off-putting, but it would be wrong to perceive them as the expression of a sort of élitist avant-gardism. In reality, the writings on music are an exploration of the possibilities that art contains for resisting the exhaustion of the avant-gardes and finding, even in debased forms, ways of reacting against commodification by transgressing the boundaries between genres. The fraying of forms, their contamination by forms borrowed from distant genres, furnish new means for making ways of living in society seen or heard differently ; and for transcending, by way of the unexpected, the fixed intentions of those who fashion works of art.
Basically, the dispersion of Adorno’s works is only apparent, for his many initiatives are coherent and complementary. Without a doubt, many of those who came into contact with him in one way or another did not always grasp the significance of his work in its full range. But many understood, at least partially, that they were in the presence of a revolutionary, utterly unconventional intellectual endeavour. The impact of this theoretical practice without any real precedent was, of necessity, ambiguous. There were misunderstandings, occasionally rash interpretations, and some uninformed enthusiasm. Nevertheless, a terrain, albeit certainly a limited one, was worked in depth ; intellectual processes were set in motion, which themselves had political consequences. This is particularly clear in the student world, where a not insignificant minority recognised itself both in critical theory and in an organisation, the association of socialist students (SDS). Adorno himself was perfectly aware of this and he also knew that he was in the process of preparing a new reception of Marx’s œuvre – one far removed from the old orthodoxies (Communist and social-democratic). The SDS’s publications did indeed propagate a critical reception of Marx’s work by acknowledging its unfinished character and ambiguities and by developing new examinations of it. Moreover, it was under the influence of Adorno (more indirect than direct) that the Frankfurt SDS group opposed the activism of other SDS groups (some of them influenced by orthodox Communism), while participating in campaigns against the presence of former Nazis in the state apparatus or against atomic weapons, and doing educational work in the trade unions.
The ambition of the leadership group in the SDS was limited at the outset [1] to strengthen democracy and counter the authoritarian tendencies present in some social strata. But it was quickly outstripped by the organisation’s success. For many, the SDS gradually came to embody radical opposition to the forces of the Federal Republic. Various anti-conformist currents formed around it, which were heterogeneous in their outlook and conduct. In addition, it collided head-on with the student radicalisation that followed the mass expansion of German universities. The rapid growth in members in fact destabilised the whole organisation, which was drawn into increasingly bruising confrontations with the ruling powers over anti-imperialist activities (against the American intervention in Vietnam) and action against the ways in which universities were governed. The anti-authoritarian current around Rudi Dutschke, which advocated direct action (non-terrorist, illegal action), assumed greater importance and disrupted the leadership’s orientation and structure. The divergences over the analysis of the situation were not insignificant. Hans-Jürgen Krahl, a student of Adorno’s but close to the anti-authoritarians, believed that the authorities were adopting a harder reactionary line which would threaten democracy in the short term. Accordingly, he thought that the student movement must do everything to counter the reactionary offensive and supplant a failing, even complicit, social democracy.
Adorno’s attitude during this period is often presented as fundamentally hostile to the student movement [2]. Did he not have the students who were occupying the Institute expelled by the police ? In reality, his reactions were ambivalent, at once favourable to the student movement and critical of it. Adorno could not but appreciate the democratic thrust of the movement, its refusal to throw a veil over the Nazi past, its way of shaking the conventions and hypocrisy of the reigning morality. On the other hand, he was very sceptical about the movement’s ability to overcome its infantile disorders, its impatience, its underestimation of the obstacles it faced, its tendency to mythologise violence, its temptation to wish to change the world without really interpreting it, and its fetishisation of subjectivity at the expense of objectivity. He glimpsed the dangers of activism – that is to say, of an atheoretical practice that was consequently blind to the pathologies of action in contemporary society. According to Adorno, part of the student movement was prey to collective hallucinations. As can be seen from his correspondence with Herbert Marcuse on the issue, for him there could be no question of subscribing to student initiatives and actions whose orientation he did not share [3]. A concern for personal comfort was certainly not absent from this remote attitude. But it would do Adorno an injustice if we forgot the fundamental, predominant reasons.
Nevertheless, Adorno’s abstention was not innocent and was even paradoxical. At the very moment when critical theory was hailed as a movement which, even if minoritarian, was nevertheless a mass movement with original features, it could find nothing better to do than withdraw to quarters. In a word, it did not seek to theorise the effects of its theoretical practice in the academy and the intellectual world – and this in a social context where the production of knowledge was assuming increasing importance. Adorno criticised the students’ collective actions, but he did not take the trouble to attempt a determinate negation of them, by indicating the paths to be pursued. If the students’ collective actions were one-sided, it was necessary to try to explain on what conditions they could become multilateral or rather multi-dimensional – that is to say, directed not only towards multiple objectives, but also towards the positioning of groups and individuals within action and towards its transcendence by employing new social logics and new social links. If the student actions were marked by many political deficiencies in their strategic and tactical approaches, it needed to be shown that different orientations were possible. Yet politics is virtually absent from Adorno’s reflections. We find it, obviously, in the critique of Nazism and in texts that broach the weaknesses of democracy. But all that is far from constituting a developed theory of politics in collective action and of collective action in politics. Following in the tracks of Marx, Adorno had a firm grasp of the dependency of politics on economics and economism, but he placed it under the aegis of a sociology of domination largely adopted from Weber.
By proceeding in this fashion, he did not tackle the utterly decisive question of the articulation of politics with the organisation and circulation of power in social relations and society. Politics is not reducible to exchanges between the state and social groups, and still less to a bureaucratic administration of relations of domination and citizenship. It has something to do with what Foucault calls the micro-physics of power – that is to say, mechanisms of discipline and surveillance and the resistance they provoke. This theme of resistance (and its many forms) is obviously crucial for understanding how politics might be unlocked, how people might see through state performances and the biased representations that social groups and individuals give of themselves in political sparring. In fact, resistance to oppression and exploitation invests numerous domains – cognitive relations, relations in firms, relations between the sexes, expressive relations. On condition that they are polyphonically linked in constellations, forms of resistance are potentially levers for undermining individual and collective action, for overcoming feelings of powerlessness in face of the machine-like organisation of capital, for desiring lives different from those that are currently lived. Politics must cease to be a defence of interests (which can only operate in favour of the dominant interests of capital) and become the unveiling of abstract social relations and a struggle for their reconstruction.
However, the revival of politics and collective action will not occur from scratch. It involves a critical re-examination of the past of the workers’ movement, a sort of duty to take stock, which, over and above the denunciation of crimes and errors, will endeavour to analyse the processes that led to catastrophes and to the expanded reproduction of capital. In the first instance, it is necessary to criticise the fact that the workers’ movement, in its overwhelming majority, has not proved capable of breaking with the narrow and subordinate forms of politics peculiar to capitalist society. Certainly, large-scale battles have not been wanting, any more than crises with revolutionary consequences. But the political expressions given to them have remained largely prisoners of tutelary and paternalistic organisational forms. The masses have invariably been asked to rally in semi-passive fashion to orientations and apparatuses that were autonomous from them. Parties and unions were constructed in the chinks and interstices of the institutionalised world of politics. They have adopted many of its practices and failings : hierarchical systems of material and symbolic rewards and a ritualisation of collective action. To this must be added the fact that representations of the process of social emancipation have scarcely gone beyond the stage of more or less mythologised narratives – that is to say, they have not been able to trigger new cognitive processes and help create new social bonds. The degree of innovation in the politics of the workers’ movement was not completely insignicant. But it was insufficient to enable it to practise politics differently, so as radically to recast it.
Adorno never tackled this complex of problems, prisoner as he was of an unduly general conception of domination. He was easily satisfied with a fluid, unexplained concept of totalitarianism to characterise the Soviet Union. This lack of analysis of the social, cognitive and symbolic processes that led to the construction of pseudo-‘real socialism’, and then to the submission of a large part of the workers’ movement to a veritable process of social counter-emancipation, subtracted a whole dimension of social and political reality from examination. It makes it possible to understand Adorno’s silence on the future to be constructed : he saw the horizon darkened by a fragile Western democracy, a possible resurgence of Nazism, and the threat of Communist totalitarianism. He did not perceive what was going on under the surface of Soviet monolithism and he therefore did not see all the indications or counter-indications that could be drawn from more developed analyses – particularly for a new conception of politics. Basically, for him, there were far too many tendencies towards a standardisation of the world and a progressive clouding of social relations. Here we find some of the ambiguities and hesitations already visible in the analysis of capitalism. Adorno knew that oppression and exploitation come from afar. But he wondered whether the catastrophic continuity of history (Benjamin) was modulated in major discontinuities. One sometimes has the impression that he construes capitalism as an essential break with many pasts and a reorganisation of part of these pasts by selection and assimilation to the present and the temporality of capital in incessant, endlessly new syntheses. The absorption of the past thus renders its reconstruction uncertain. It can now hardly be grasped other than via traces and ultimately pertains more to an archaeological endeavour than to vast historical syntheses contributing to a universal history. This is how we might interpret certain critical remarks on the philosophy of history. But, at other times, discontinuity is denied, in favour of a continuity of domination (domination over nature and humanity).
These ambiguities and oscillations obviously represent serious obstacles to any determinate negation of capitalist relations at a theoretical level. Critical theory à la Adorno did not link up adequately with the critique of political economy ; and the abstraction of exchange [Tauschabstraktion] was insufficiently conjugated with the movement of abstract labour and many capitals – that is to say, with the metamorphoses of the value-form. As a result, it was not able fully to explain the mode of existence and functioning of this upside down world, which is forever prostrating itself before the new idols engendered by real abstractions. In many respects, Adorno went further than Marx and detected the economism that persisted in Marx’s critique of economism. But he was unable to avoid several dead ends. He went beyond Marx, but at the same time he fell short of the founder of the critique of political economy. This is the paradox that requires reflection in order to restore vigour to critical theory.