Experience, Paranoia, and Speculation in
Theodor W. Adorno: Beyond the Dissolution of
the Subject
Jarmo Berkhout
“It does not matter what philosophical standpoint you might take these days: any way you look at it, the erroneousness of the world we think we live in is the most certain and solid fact that our eyes can still grab hold of.”
– Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Thesis Research Master Philosophy University of Amsterdam
Jarmo Berkhout; 10034781
Thesis Supervisor: Yolande Jansen Second Reader: Josef Früchtl
Date of Submission: February 2, 2019
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: Adorno’s Untimely Critical Meditations 1
PART 1: Culture Industry, Negative Dialectics, and the (Im)possibility of Experience 7
Section 1: Culture Industry and the Impossibility of Experience 8
Culture Industry and Subjectivity 9
Ideology and Difference 11
The Impossibility of Experience 14
Section 2: Negative Dialectics: Precarious Freedom and Changed Experience 18
The Non-Identical and the Preponderant Object 19
Subjectivity and Freedom 21
Towards a Changed Experience 25
PART 2: Paranoia, “Preterition”, and Speculation 29
Section 1: Paranoia and “Preterition” 30
Gravity’s Rainbow and Paranoia 30
Pathological Projection 32
Reality as Conspiracy 35
“Preterition” and Freedom 38
Section 2: Radical Change and Speculation 41
CONCLUSION 48
1
Introduction: Adorno’s Untimely Critical
Medita-tions
There is something untimely about Theodor W. Adorno’s position in the cultural and philo-sophical history of the West. While the Institut für Sozialforschung – the Frankfurt School – of which he was a leading theorist, was exiled during the thirties and forties, traveling from Ger-many to Geneva to New York City and then back to West-GerGer-many to re-establish itself in Frankfurt in 1951, Adorno’s contributions to philosophy and social criticism were almost en-tirely trumped by the overwhelming weight of the chaos and unprecedented horrors of the mid-dle of the twentieth century. Upon returning to Europe after the war, Max Horkheimer pre-vented the reprinting of their first collaborative masterpiece Dialectic of Enlightenment1, while post-war Germany sought to move on as quickly as decently possible from the atrocities for which it was responsible, neglecting the need for a philosophical “conscience”. During the six-ties, then, when students all over the world were looking for inspiration for their radical political projects, interest in Adorno’s work did surge, his trenchant critique of Western rationality and society at large becoming a major source of critical consciousness. However, as is well known, the elderly philosopher quickly fell out of grace when he obviously failed to connect to the students’ political practices and had the police put an end to the occupation of “his” institute. He died soon after and was replaced by Jürgen Habermas, who did not take long to do away with what he took to be the overly pessimistic philosophical position of his predecessor and reoriented the Frankfurt School theoretical preoccupations to elaborating the idea of communi-cative rationality. For a long time, then, Adorno’s work lost traction and scholarly interest, while the theoretical innovations of the French post-structuralists took over as the main para-digm for conducting social, aesthetic and philosophical criticism. To make matters ironic to an almost unbearable degree, his comeback in popular consciousness in recent years is almost entirely due to an especially conspiratorial current in modern conservatism that places him at the pinnacle of a great anti-Western plot called cultural Marxism. Enough legitimation for Stu-art Walton, all in all, to give his Adorno introduction the somewhat melodramatic title
Ne-glected or Misunderstood.2
1 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: see ‘editors’ afterword’ 2 Walton S, Neglected or Misunderstood: Introducing Adorno, Zero Books, 2017
2
Yet it is perhaps this untimeliness that makes for the possibility that Adorno still “speaks” to us in the present. As it occurs, it does indeed seem to be the case that there is an increase in scholarly activity that makes use of Adornian theory to make sense of the present, of present-day capitalism, of politics, of critical theory itself. John Abromeit3 and Peter Gordon4 for in-stance have both reached back to the Frankfurt School’s first generation’s theoretical tools to explain Trumpism and the return of authoritarianism in general. Scholars such as Amy Allen5 and Deborah Cook6 on the other hand have made important contributions to explicating the resemblances and links between Adorno and Michel Foucault, while also, like Asha Varadhara-jan7, exploring the possible value of his thought for post-colonial theory. Adorno, one might say, is not just a critical philosopher, but a philosopher of crisis, of critical times; given the disconcerting intransigence of our current crises, it is perhaps not so surprising for an untimely thinker to resurface, and given the wide range of academic explorations dedicated to his work, it is indeed opportune to ask, again, what Adorno said.
Nevertheless, Adorno’s philosophy and social criticism often seem close to steering into a dead-lock. It is not without reason that in some interpretations of his thought8 his theory is conceived to belong to a version of ideology critique according to which ideology is anchored in all levels and areas of totalised society, such that the social totality is permanently reproduced and there’s nothing that can be done about it. It is the case, in fact, that Adorno takes the subject of modern society to shrink, deflate, dissolve9, as that society, thoroughly rationalised and regimented, continues on its way to taking the shape of a really existing totality rather than the final state of reconciliation as the achievement of Absolute Spirit that Hegel predicted. Society, for Adorno, is the category for the mediation of everything by everything, from which not a single phenom-enon, no matter how seemingly innocent or personal, is exempt, and it is the subject – subjec-tivity itself – that arrives at being entirely devoid of autonomy, to be moulded all the better into
3Abromeit J., ‘Critical Theory and the Persistence of Right-Wing Populism, Logos: a Journal of Modern Society
& Culture
4 Gordon, Peter E. (2017). The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump.
Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, 44(2), 31-56.
5 Allen A, The End of Progress; Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Columbia
Univer-sity Press, 2016
6 Cook D., Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West, Verso Books, 2018
7 Varadharajan A., Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. University of Minnesota Press,
1995
8 Eagleton, Terry: Ideology and its Vicissitudes, in: Slavoj Žižek (ed.): Mapping Ideology, Verso Books (1994),
pp.179-226, 203
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the schema of mass production.10 This historical state of affairs he calls the dissolution of the subject. It is this, almost standard or prima facie understanding of the negativism inhering in his thought that makes its results seem very difficult to accept: culture is culture industry, the object is a commodity, the subject is nothing, and the right praxis is impossible. What, then, is to be done? Is there a way out? Adorno’s own remarks on, for instance, the student protests of which he felt himself a victim are not much of a basis for a positive answer. In his correspond-ence with Herbert Marcuse on the matter he displays an almost shocking lack of understanding of the students’ political purposes, although he does write that “I am the last to underestimate the merits of the student movement: it has interrupted the smooth transition to the totally ad-ministered world.”11 But in the essay he published about his position vis-à-vis the students, not
much remains of his understanding of the “merits” of the movement, as he declares theory – the right thinking – to be the right praxis, and the actual praxis to be a dangerous lack of the-ory.12 There is thus some ground for the accusation of political quietism. The “suspended life”
of which Fabian Freyenhagen speaks13, based on Minima Moralia, is an example of this: can it
be sufficient for a critical philosophy with political bearings to advise a conscious non-partici-pation in the affairs of the world? For Judith Butler – explaining this, ironically, in her ac-ceptance speech of the Adorno Prize – this is not the case. Discussing Adorno’s few remarks on moral problems she doubts that the recommendation to not “join in”, to understand resistance as not besmirching oneself by doing one’s part in an apprehensive social reality, could qualify as fruitful starting points.14 How much truth is there in such a reproach?
I will argue that it is in fact not necessary to understand Adorno in so quietist a manner, as I believe that his negativism represents a radicalism in not accepting the way of the world that I contend is still a major source for critique. In this thesis I will focus on the Adornian meaning and usage of the concepts of experience, paranoia, and speculation, and the role each plays in social criticism. Part 1 will be about the relation between experience, ideology and freedom, while Part 2 will be about paranoia as deficient experience, and speculation as the attempt to think beyond the limits that society forces upon the subject. The question that I will seek to answer is the following: how is it possible to theorise a consistent and meaningful way out of
10 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 96
11 Adorno, T., & Marcuse, H. (1999). Correspondence on the German student movement. New Left Review,
(233), 123-136, 134
12 Adorno, Critical Models, 292
13 Freyenhagen, F. (2013). Adorno's practical philosophy: Living less wrongly, Cambridge University Press,
2013
14 Butler, J. (2012). Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno Prize Lecture. Radical Philosophy, (176),
4
modern capitalist society if we follow Adorno’s construal of it as an inescapable totality? Adorno’s philosophy is firmly rooted in the attempt to work through the heteronomy of life under modern society in analysing how the objectification of the subject under capitalism ef-fectively breaks down the subject’s capacity to engage in a non-distorted way with reality and with itself, thus taking the insight in the mediated character of subjectivity to its limit. The uncompromising way in which he conducts criticism, without ever giving in to the temptation to paint a nicer picture of the world that what a stubborn materialism would allow us, is, I contend, not a symptom of detachment but the beginning of properly reimagining the world. To understand how this works, it is crucial to get a grasp of the role that the concept of experience plays in Adorno. In Minima Moralia he thematises this matter on an almost quotidian level: the very power of a car’s engine provokes the driver’s desire to test it out, to hit and crush the defenceless pedestrian, while in the jerky movements of machines in general one is able to detect the same harshness that characterises fascism, and any attempt to engage with the world in a manner that is careful rather than domineering is utterly neglected.15 The point he thereby
makes is the following: if our contact with things and with each other is reduced to the rule of their functionality, experience withers away and will gradually become impossible. This will be the central question to the first part of this thesis: what does Adorno mean by experience, in which way is its possibility blocked in capitalist society, and is it possible to conceive of a way to overcome this impossibility? It will appear that experience properly understood designates an interaction with reality that is not already (a priori) determined by socially mediated subjec-tive categories – i.e. one that manages to pierce through the boundaries beset upon the subject by ideology, for which, as will appear, a specific conception of speculation is necessary. In the second part of this thesis I will further develop the latter point. The question I will attempt to answer is: what kind of subject can be envisioned which offers a concrete site of resistance against the social totality the way Adorno construes it? Although it is true that the practical-philosophical aspects of his work are indeed very circumscribed, this is due to his attempt to offer an extremely qualified account of what a subject can still do or think under conditions of dissolution. To show this, I will first deepen the problems discussed in the first part – the impossibility of experience and the dissolution of the subject – by exploring Adorno’s understanding of paranoia as a form of derailed projection.16 I will argue that the deficient ex-perience which is left to the dissolved subject results in a kind of damaged subjectivity, a para-noid inability of telling truth from appearance. I use the novel Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas
15 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 40
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Pynchon, specifically the vicissitudes of its protagonist Tyrone Slothrop, to provide an example of the intricate connections that Adorno analyses between subject and totality, experience and paranoia, dissolution and freedom. It is this route that allows me to return to questions of a more practical philosophical nature, in conjunction with the more epistemological questions as dis-cussed in the first part. For Slothrop, the paranoid protagonist, isn’t just an exceptionally exotic figment of the imagination; Pynchon describes him as reaching a state of what in Calvinist doctrine is called “preterition” – a state of radical abandonment by God, by the System, by the powers that be. The novel, which is set during and immediately after WWII, exuberant and maximalist, makes use of this concept to describe the status of those who must fear being crushed by the ineffable powers of war and capital and look for a way of not being determined by the world-spanning, world-dominating plans of those who own the machines, the weapons, and scientific knowledge. Slothrop, who manages to slip beyond their reach, is thus called a “preterite” – one who is entirely overlooked, who dropped out of the conspiracy. In this thesis I understand this preterite figure as what results from the dissolution of the subject. If Adorno is right in his ruthless critique of society, philosophy and ideology – and it is my contention that we should at least take the radicalism of his critique very seriously, as hardly having been sur-passed yet – then the greatest difficulty in theorising “a way out” has perhaps to do with the question what kind of subject, after its purported dissolution, would be required. I contend that the subject of preterition offers a clue. On that basis I conclude the second part of this thesis with an exploration of some possible consequences of this view, thereby making use of James Finlayson’s and Elizabeth Pritchard’s reconstructions of Adorno’s ethical import, and referring back to the preliminary conclusions of the first part.
This thesis is divided in two parts which are each divided in two sections. In the first part – Culture Industry, Negative Dialectics, and the (Im)possibility of Experience – I will mainly make use of Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) two great works Dialectic of Enlightenment and
Negative Dialectics, as the former introduces the concept of culture industry – important for his
construal of social totality – and the latter, through an immanent critique of German Idealism, offers a clue as to the possibility of an experience that is qualitatively different from what cul-ture industry (society at large) enables (or disables). I start the second part – Paranoia, “Preter-ition”, and Speculation – with an analysis of the paranoia to which the protagonist of Gravity’s
Rainbow falls prey by basing myself on the chapter on Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlight-enment so as to illustrate the deterioration of experience as analysed in the first part. I analyse
6
on Pynchon’s main novel. In the final section, then, I explore some consequences of the disso-lution of the subject and its replacement by the figure of the preterite. Besides the aforemen-tioned works, in this part I make use of some less discussed texts by Adorno, such as his essays on literature, Hegel, Kafka, and the problem of progress respectively. I have not, however, at-tempted to cover all the ground opened up by Adorno, and although I have preferred to stay close to what he said, I am aware that some of my interpretations may be somewhat unorthodox, especially my attempt to think beyond the dissolved subject, which is a type of speculation that Adorno allows himself very rarely.17 I have also very sparingly juxtaposed him to his critics as it has not been my purpose to defend him, but rather to extend some of his lines of thought beyond the context of his own work. I hope to have thereby made a contribution to the benefit of what for Adorno as for Walter Benjamin remains the driving force of thinking: the wish for radical change.
17 Namely in Negative Dialectics, in his discussion of schizophrenia; I will come back to this in the second part
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PART 1: Culture Industry, Negative Dialectics, and
the (Im)possibility of Experience
8
Section 1: Culture Industry and the Impossibility of Experience
If there is one idea of Adorno’s that has become especially discredited, even though it remains his perhaps most well-known development of cultural criticism, it is the “culture industry the-sis”. It is probably mainly owing to this infamous chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment that the qualification of being “mandarin”, elitist and overly pessimistic got stuck to first generation Frankfurt School thinking.18 However, it must be said that although descriptions of Adorno’s
criticism are usually adorned with such adjectives as “scathing”, “ruthless” or “uncompromis-ing”, whether approvingly or not, it seems that a major source of confusion resides exactly in what such adjectives are supposed to designate: his philosophical radicalism. The culture in-dustry thesis sits so uncomfortably because it denounces any and all inherited norms in which social or cultural analysis is rendered, for the simple reason that the critique of capitalist society cannot ignore the fact that those norms are produced by the society it wants to criticise. This awareness constitutes the movement of the entire Dialectic of Enlightenment; in the chapter on the culture industry it is specifically directed at the question what the dominance of the com-modity form does to the development of cultural products. In what follows I will delineate the basic argument underlying it so as to lay bare the radical position assumed by Adorno and the type of critique of which it is the foundation. I will then be in a position to inquire further into the question what role the possibility of experience plays in such critique. The overarching argument concerns what Adorno in Minima Moralia calls the dissolution of the subject (Auflösung des Subjekts), by which he means the historically specific causes for the becoming redundant of the traditional subject of epistemology as of society generally.19 Reading the
Di-alectic of Enlightenment from that vantage enables a better understanding of the nature and
focus of Adorno’s critical project, namely an understanding that involves an analysis of the subject’s capacity of experience, cognition and finally freedom. The treatment of these ques-tions as undertaken in Negative Dialectics and its results will be discussed in the next section. I start by looking at culture industry because it captures the underlying idea of subjective dis-solution and ideology by directly applying it to the critique of modern society; one thus also gets an idea of how Adorno understands the mechanisms of modern society under late capital-ism.
18 Adorno’s almost incomprehensibly dismissive work on jazz may have deepened and consolidated the
manda-rin-reproach.
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Culture Industry and Subjectivity
To begin with, the culture industry thesis does not refer to a kind of lamentable deterioration of “pure” or “high” culture into purely commercialised forms of entertainment. The whole
Dia-lectic of Enlightenment, for that matter, is not a Spenglerian story of decline and fall. Rather
than simplistically playing out the difference between real art and simple entertainment, Adorno and Horkheimer inquire what happens to the cultural sphere when it is integrated in the oligar-chically organised economic structures characteristic of late capitalism, and how the transfor-mation of culture into culture industry affects the subject. The point is not so much that art becomes entertainment, but that neither art nor actual entertainment remain possible when the (artificial) boundary that separated them is artificially dissolved with the purpose of aligning both spheres more efficiently to the directives of mass production.20 This is an often overlooked
result: not only art, but entertainment too suffers from the fusion that does not absolve their contradiction but instead transforms both in an altogether different sort of spectacle. Both need to be different from what there is: art in order to be subversive, if at least, as Adorno implies, it has to deviate from the normal social order to be able to express its truth. Entertainment, on the other hand, to mock the dictates of an economically productive society. In the era of culture industry however, neither subversion nor distraction is allowed, as cultural production serves to integrate its audiences in the general pace of industrial production.21 This is the culture in-dustry thesis. What the general thesis of the culture inin-dustry refers to should therefore not be seen as a simple and wholesale denouncement of any and all facets of contemporary culture; rather, it tries to make sense of the functions of culture under circumstances that negate its possibility of expressing autonomous value. Needless to say, the authors find little reason for optimism – it is only through resisting the commodity form itself that any product would be capable of questioning the status quo, but as a result of market expansion in all domains of the economy this opportunity will gradually diminish. In that sense, rather than being a cautionary tale or a sort of j’accuse directed at American mass culture – which, of course, in some sense it is also – the chapter on culture industry attempts to capture, in its historical specificity, the secular transformation of a nominally liberal market economy of free exchange into a rational-ised society which, in order to reproduce itself, seeks to integrate all products and subjects into one system that allows for no alternative.22 Hence the subtitle of the chapter: Enlightenment as
20 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107 21 Ibid., 110
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Mass Deception (Massenbetrug). The most salient result of the blending of art and entertain-ment into culture industry is that while it requires, obviously, subjects as audiences, it simulta-neously robs them of their subjective contribution to what is being shown.23 Culture industry, paradoxically, does away with the need for a subject, i.e., does away with whatever it does not need in the subject. This is one, preliminary way in which we can understand what Adorno and Horkheimer mean by integration. What does this redundancy of the subject mean?
Culture industry is therefore not so much an attack on culture as an attack on the possibility of autonomous subjectivity, through the gradual subsumption of all spheres of life – from “high” art to entertainment – under the commodity form so as to enable its mass production and consequently the eternal reproduction of the capitalist economy itself. This has nothing to do with questions of taste; “whenever Adorno spoke of a descent into barbarism he was referring to something different from, and very much more dangerous than, a decline in taste.”24 As a
matter of fact, taste, in times of culture industry, is an old-fashioned and outdated concept which only applies in a situation where the object is supposed to be detached and semi-independent from its context so that a disinterested subject can pass judgment on it according to certain rational principles that are taken to be independent from the object as it is. This Humean-Kant-ian approach fails to appreciate how under industrialisation the relation between subject and object is mediated by society from the start. To apply the category of taste to a system that forecloses the possibility and the need for a subject to arrive at its own understanding of what it experiences is part of the same ideology that pervades mass production itself.25 That is to say, in culture industry “taste” serves as the remembrance of a time in which the active participation of the subject was required for the spectacle to succeed and the illusion that this is still the case. Insisting on the importance of taste, or the general level of quality of cultural goods, would mean succumbing to the temptation of reintroducing a bourgeois subject that has in fact become redundant, and thus missing the point of the major transformation of which the culture industry is the embodiment. It is in this respect that Adorno and Horkheimer cannot be conflated with the conservative criticism of modern culture, as represented, for instance, by Oswald Spengler (to whose Decline of the West an essay in Prisms is dedicated). The conservative cultural critic bases his position on the idealisation of a pre-capitalist organic society whose model is the idea of natural harmony.26 In such a society modernity has supposedly not yet wreaked havoc on the
23 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 96 24 Witkin, 55
25 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 106 26 Adorno, Prims, 69
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stability of social relations, as a result of which culture can thrive in a healthy and reconciliatory manner. Innovations of any kind, whether they are modernist and avant-garde or popular and “base”, are regarded with the utmost suspicion and contempt, for they are taken to be symptoms of a decline of culture itself. The masses, so it seems, do not have the capacity of upholding the good taste that is a prerequisite for maintaining the cultural heights of the Western tradition. As a result, the conservative critic, discontented with popular mass culture, and hypostasising the tradition of which he is a zealous admirer, seeks for those developments on which he can put the blame for the perceived cultural degeneration.27 Among the main consequences of this view are the reification of “high” culture itself – as if it were an unchanging reservoir of artistic achievement – and a certain blindness for the actual motive powers of societal change, such as economic factors. The culture industry thesis tries to establish the exact opposite. By investi-gating how modern capitalism affects the production of cultural goods it becomes possible to assess the impact that the major transformation mentioned above – the integration of all spheres of life into a system of pure commodity production – has on subjectivity.
To conclude, culture industry means integration of subjects into an order, dubbed the “ad-ministered world”28, that disables their capacity to experience and therefore think in a way that
is not entirely pre-determined by that order, which in fact bars their capacity of becoming sub-ject in the full sense. It is important to note that to (Horkheimer and) Adorno this is not the entire problem, or even the most important aspect of it. The dialectical point is rather that the order of which culture industry is the embodiment fixates, petrifies the subject as an empty mould, which is necessary for the reproduction of that order but detrimental to those who are obliged to resemble the mould. This coercion of actually existing subjects is therefore ideolog-ical: instead of moving towards a situation where the necessity of being the subject of the wrong order is overcome, it aims simply at reproducing this situation, this society, which devalues precisely the individual subject inasmuch as it could be something that differs from the deter-minations of the existing order. This then contributes to the dissolution of the subject.
Ideology and Difference
It may be maintained however that the culture industry thesis expounds a reductionist view on the reception of cultural goods by the public, as has indeed been argued by the proponents of cultural studies. If, that is, commodity fetishism is considered omnipresent and inescapable,
27 Adorno, Prisms, 26
12
then, in Stuart Halls’ words, “both capitalists and the masses look like judgemental dopes”29,
unable to tell true from false, always entirely determined by the ideological machinations of the culture industry. If culture is reduced to economy, especially when done in the most orthodox Marxist way, it doesn’t make much sense to be bothered with cultural products at all or with their reception by audiences as it is clear from the outset that they are simply fulfilling their ideological function. “Instead, cultural studies continues to insist that culture be treated as a fundamentally distinct sphere of human activity with its own rules and processes”30, so as to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism and to be able to actually analyse how people relate to mass culture. This approach cannot, of course, but make the culture industry thesis seem outdated and useless. It relies on the idea that culture is a relatively autonomous sphere constituted as a discrete semiotic environment. Products of mass culture are produced and proliferated with a certain purpose on the basis of certain economic relations of production, but this does not de-termine the meaning that they have for the audiences that receive them; the fact that culture is an “ensemble”31 of signs allows for a subjective “decoding” at will, which helps the audience
to create its own interpretation and thereby retain its autonomy. As neither capitalists nor the masses may be considered “judgemental dopes”, the idea of the cultural sphere as consisting of discrete semiotic structures that are never fully determined is attractive for it establishes the subject as an individual at a certain distance from the goods that it receives, and that it can then go on the decode at its discretion. And this approach does indeed undeniably offer a much more specific framework in which to analyse the production of cultural goods than does the culture industry thesis. In fact Adorno admits in the introduction of his later work Negative Dialectics that his dialectical method must accept as a sacrifice a lesser specificity in describing individual experience when compared to for example phenomenology.32 But if the culture industry thesis is then considered to be a total indictment of contemporary mass culture because of its embed-dedness in the capitalist system, it must of course fail to account for the actual diversity per-ceivable in such a culture. The idea of audiences decoding and thereby subverting whatever they are offered by the big studios of cinema, music and television on the other hand is a lot more appealing.
However, to be wooed by the world of difference that is on offer every day and to legitimise the subject as a free floating decoder of signs would be to ignore the world as created by a
29 Hall, 31
30 Gunster S., A World of Difference: Adorno and Cultural Studies, in Burke et. al., 299 31 Hall, 36
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capitalist system of economic reproduction in which the event of culture takes place. This is not to argue that “cultural studies” (a vague signifier anyway) unwittingly accepts that this is the case, but it is a possible result of analysing cultural phenomena as detached from the economic circumstances in which they are produced. To put it bluntly: to buy an iPhone or clothes from a big fashion franchise is to be an accomplice in mass exploitation of Third World labourers, while subverting the reception of such articles makes no difference whatsoever in the way they are produced. Of course, it is not the case that Horkheimer and Adorno do immediately connect culture to exploitation, but in analysing cultural products as symptomatic of the greater material tendencies of modern society, they are able to show that both subjects and objects are captured by a process of integration that inhibits from the start a free or autonomous relation between an the individual and a cultural product. To neglect this, for them, would mean to falsely reassert the integrity of a subject which can no longer be presupposed. When they argue that the culture industry reproduces itself in an essentially repetitive manner – creating the self-same time and again – this does not just refer to the fact that differences between cultural goods are neglectable and serve only as a diversionary tactic of the industries that distribute them. The point is rather that even if the difference is as big as that between an opera and a Schlager, as long as the sole legitimation for their existence is the fact that they appear as commodity-form, they cannot really be experienced as antithetical to the general economic production process.33 Instead, in conjunction with mass media – and more contemporarily, social media – cultural products are symptoms of the integration of the subject into a rationalised, “Enlightened” society that is tendentially hostile to that difference which really matters, namely that which is different from itself.34 The importance of this difference (from the production process, from society at large) consists, for Adorno, in enabling the vision of something better, something beyond the confines of the current order. The success of the culture industry depends not on an elaborate brainwash-ing-scheme, but on diminishing the possibility of experiencing something which is not already schematised, or, in other words, on the dissolution of the subject. Or, put differently, the schema itself takes precedence over the subject: “[t]he active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of subjects – that they should, from the first, relate sensuous multiplicity to fun-damental concepts – is denied the subject by industry. It purveys schematism as its first service to the customer.”35
33 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 127 34 Ibid., 118
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That the schema takes precedence over the subject means that culture industry intervenes into the very constitution of subjectivity, which is to say: it is not the argument that “bad” cultural products at the more superficial level lamentably disturb the subject’s capacity for free experience, but that commodity production as such prohibits the subjective experience of ob-jects as different from the subject by instituting the commodity-form as the form in which ex-perience as such is captured. The subject is thereby reduced from contributor to the synthesis of experience to a mere receiver; it is reduced to its objective side as a pre-determined entity, while the subjective aspect of social institutions – the fact that they are man-made, not natural – is hidden from sight, leaving the commodity as the only entity with agency.36 As a result of
this configuration, experience is “wrong” from the outset, as consciousness is false, which is, of course, the traditional definition of ideology. So the point is that experience in the strong sense cannot take off in a social reality which is ideologically constituted in this sense; the kind of thinking that is left is what Adorno calls identity-thinking, to which we will return in the next section.
The Impossibility of Experience
Would the appropriate course of action then be to abjure culture as such? Or at least ignore television, pop music and social media? Apart from the fact that the latter option is virtually non-existent given the pervasiveness of mass media, such a wholesale indictment of modern culture would be a conservative rather than a critical move. More importantly, it would be to mimic the seeming omnipotence of the social whole: it would be too much of an “honour” to the System to recognize it as inescapable.37 On the other hand, it would be equally one-sided to analyse separate cultural goods as discrete semiotic ensembles that bear no symptomatic rela-tion to the society in which they arise, as if they dropped out of the sky for emancipated audi-ences to interpret. So the question is how we get from a macro-structure to concrete influence on subjective life, or as Hall asks: “if ideology is the product or function of the economic ‘struc-ture’ rather than a group of conspirators, how does an economic structure generate a guaranteed set of ideological outcomes?”38 According to him, it remains unclear how the economic
struc-ture can be considered to automatically produce surface effects that are then, in an equally au-tomatic way, reified into an ideology that apparently colonises and determines the
36 Baeza, 360 37 Adorno, Prisms, 30
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consciousness of all of those who live in a capitalist society. If this were the case, getting rid of this ideological false consciousness would amount to a cognitive cure; simply acquiring the “right” terms to understand one’s predicament would be enough. The model for this, Hall ar-gues ironically, is that of seeing the light after the scales fall from one’s eyes, or to wake up from a dream.39 This discontent with traditional critique of ideology informs cultural studies’ preference for the idea of decoding. However, the solution for this discontent develops a little too smoothly; rather than quickly recognizing the persevering autonomy of rational agents against the idea of all-pervasive ideology, one might actually indeed wonder where such a ra-tional agent arrives when she “wakes up” from false consciousness. Wouldn’t she simply wake up in another dream? That is: the one where there is no ideology?
In the culture industry chapter the authors usually refer to ideologies in the plural when referring to the content of movies or other works and in other cases when referring to particular interests that motivate the executives and managers of the industries of monopoly capitalism. In many cases, what they say is actually more ‘testable’ than it might seem at first glance; Shane Gunster for example quotes some television producer who directly corroborates Adorno’s claims: this executive “observes ‘The only thing they [the network executives] know works is something that has worked. So they will try and clone what has happened before and keep the writers and the producers in the reins.’”40 There can be no risks, new work has conform to the schema. But it is probably not very difficult to compile a list of “ideological” statements of executives of any colour or stripe in whatever industry. This, as a matter of fact, is hardly a riddle: advertisement agencies, consultancy bureaus, social research organisations, tech com-panies and political parties hardly disguise what they’re up to, i.e., manipulating their public into doing what is profitable, however profit is defined. The “unmasking” of unsavoury inten-tions would, under such circumstances, be the job of investigative journalism rather than of philosophy, one might argue. Indeed, in his famous essay Cultural Criticism and Society, Adorno admits that ideology is a somewhat uncomfortable term, if it is reserved for discrediting as surface effects of the discrepancy between base and superstructure everything cultural – that would amount to barbarism. But analysing cultural phenomena solely for the sake of exposing the particular interests that are disguised in them would be to neglect the way in which it is the most powerful interests as such that constitute the social totality. Therefore, “ideology is not simply reducible to a partial interest. It is, as it were, equally near the centre in all its pieces.”41
39 Ibid. 40 Gunster, 302 41 Adorno, PriSms, 31
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But what does this then mean? Does ideology refer to a cognitive lack of sorts (the type which Hall doesn’t consider plausible) or to the way “social totality” as such is shaped? Is a post-ideological society possible through, ironically, accepting that every truth claim is mere shadow play, a hoax, elaborate play-acting? Indeed, Slavoj Žižek argues that it is a characteristic of what by lack of a better term we may call the postmodern condition that it relies on a certain cynical lack of illusions as to the way modern society functions: people know (or have the ability to know) that politicians lie, that there is mass inequality, that the market isn’t free, that Face-book is a profit-driven multinational rather than an idealistic start-up, etcetera.42 While Marx, in describing commodity fetishism, wrote: “sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es”,43 it would be
more appropriate now to say that they know very well what they’re doing, and yet they keep on doing it (delivering their digital privacy to Facebook, buying iPhones, watching bad TV pro-grammes…).44 If that counted as post- or non-ideological, it would seem that people still act in
the same way as before, only they think about it differently – they have fewer illusions. But then it does indeed seem like after waking up from the ideological dream, one is still acting in the same way as during that dream, but, like a somnambulist, without being able to do anything about it. To be awake in a dream landscape – isn’t the post-ideological wake the real nightmare? Or does the idea of living in a non-ideological world simply belong to a form of consciousness that is itself determined by the post-Cold War fantasy that the age of great contradictions is over, that, hence, the ideal of political transformation is not only unfeasible but also redundant? If so, the lesson to be learned from the culture industry chapter would be to avoid the rhetoric of “judgemental dopes” and, instead, to question how the very act of judging itself is possible, i.e. to question what that notion relies on. The core business of the culture industry is, again, not so much to brainwash entire populations, but to integrate the subject into a schematism that itself functions as a reduplication of social reality. The judging that occurs under such circum-stances may be entirely correct or entirely false, but more precisely it would be a kind of judging that, in accepting the spectacular reproduction of reality by cultural means as “the” reality, re-mains tautological. Judging would be the confirmation of what one already knows, because the cultural items on exhibition must represent “an exact, accurate and reliable reflection of the relevant item of reality”, where reality must not differ too much from the way it is usually represented.45 If this position seems radical, it is because Adorno is prepared to give up entirely
42 Žižek, 26 43 Ibid., 27 44 Ibid., 30
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on the inherited notion of bourgeois subjectivity as constituting its own powers of judgment, for – and here he resembles Foucault – the category of the bourgeois subject is itself historically formed, and is, in its original Kantian conception, no longer necessary for the reproduction of society.46 The ideological somnambulist, on that account, is a Kantian in an anti-Kantian world. The trouble is of course that if we consider modern society to be a machine of integration by means of culture industry, and that this effectuates subjective dissolution leading to the impos-sibility of experiencing in a manner different from the one constituted by the schematism pur-veyed by the commodity form, different from, ultimately, what society determines, then how can we think “rightly”? Adorno construes society as a totality, which he also calls
Im-manenzzusammenhang47 indicating that every phenomenon – whether material or intellectual,
practical or theoretical – is mediated by the same principles that govern the exchange-society (capitalism) as a whole, such that no actual escape is possible or even conceivable. This is one of Adorno’s main concerns: if there is no experience of reality which is not defined by the way this reality is structured by the exchange-principle, then there will be only the distorted experi-ence of the wrong state of affairs (the falsche Zustand).48 The dissolution of the subject, then,
amounts in this sense to the impossibility of experience. To complete the circle, it is a result of this impossibility that thinking cannot be right either, for it will only reflect the wrongness by which it is conditioned. As Adorno put it succinctly in Minima Moralia: “difference between ideology and reality has disappeared” as ideology “resigns itself to confirmation of reality by its mere duplication”.49 This deadlock, this aporia, is the seal which in Adorno closes the totality
as which modern society imposes itself on the understanding. But then how do we “know” this? Do we not need something that in some sense does lie beyond the horizon of pure immanence? Isn’t critique impossible otherwise? For an answer, we will need to go into Negative Dialectics.
46 Sherman, 359
47 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11 48 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11
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Section 2: Negative Dialectics: Precarious Freedom and Changed Experience
As was noted before, a reading of the culture industry chapter as a mandarin rejection of mass culture misses the more fundamental question regarding subjectivity. The whole Dialectic of
Enlightenment, as Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, can be seen as a sort of speculative
history of the subject against the grain.50 The issue with which he is concerned in the latter work
is to think through the possibility of a “changed philosophy” that is informed by an experience which is not a priori subjugated to the requirements and functions of instrumental rationality.51
Why this procedure? If ideology cannot be seen as something like an epistemic deficiency that can be corrected by dropping the scales from one’s eyes, this has mainly to do with the fact that social reality is structured in such a way as to disable at the very outset the subject’s powers of judgment. Adorno seeks to formulate a path in which an understanding of reality must not be affected by the terms that the social whole imposes on the subject, while retaining, without hypostasising the subject, the means to make judgments in a truthful manner. Thought, in other words, must reflect on its difference with the reality that it tries to grasp in order to be a truthful thought about reality. This is only possible in a situation that allows the subject to have “unre-duced” experience of what is fundamentally different from the subjective itself.52 Here Adorno
ties together dialectically two seemingly opposing tendencies: on the hand the objectification of the subject, and on the other hand the subjectivation of the object. That is to say: if the dis-solved subject isn’t able to experience – the result, as we saw, of culture industry – one might wonder in which way it then interacts with objective reality. In effect, exactly by suppressing in the object what cannot be identified according to same mechanisms that contribute to the disappearance of subjective experience. This suppression is the fallacy of constitutive subjec-tivity that is at the heart of thinking itself, inasmuch as it is identity-thinking: the full domination of the object by the concept.53 I will show in the next section, through an analysis of the relevant
passages of Negative Dialectics what Adorno exactly means by this. By briefly outlining in which way he uses such key terms as the non-identical and the preponderance of the object I will first discuss the basic commitments of the method by which he criticises what he calls
50 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 185 51 Ibid., 13
52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 311
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identity-thinking. The issue then becomes how the type of critique as developed in Negative
Dialectics helps to understand what was discussed in the previous section as the dissolution of
the subject, which will also serve to get the sense of how, according to Adorno, the difference to the prevailing state of coercion can be thought. A certain, qualified understanding of freedom will turn out to be crucial. In the final subsection we can then see in which way a “changed experience” may still be conceivable even under the disadvantageous conditions as imposed by culture industry.
The Non-Identical and the Preponderant Object
“[F]or Adorno, the slippage between thought and its concept marks the built-in and inevitable inability of thought ever completely to capture its object”, Carrie Hull writes,54 thereby
indicat-ing the insurmountable disagreement with Hegel, accordindicat-ing to whose dialectics the absolute Spirit will in the end become completely identical with its objects. As the real becomes rational and the rational real, there will remain nothing unenlightened in the darkness outside of the sphere of absolute knowledge. This goal (to the extent that any philosopher ever strived for it) would be the pinnacle of identity-thinking and ipso facto the fully accomplished horror of the totalitarianism of which imperious consciousness is capable. The remainder-less equation be-tween concept and object, that is, is the violent gesture by which the thing is forced to conform to its subjective identifications. If a certain X is determined to be so-and-so – a piece of music has to be moulded into the commodity form for it to be sold on the market – it will necessarily be intolerable if it behaved differently, as it would be inexplicable. However, for an object to be an object, i.e., different from what it is subjectively made out to be, it must retain something of its own which is not reducible to the subjective. This is the central contradiction to which modern philosophy since Kant has given rise: how can the object be understood as being dif-ferent from the subject, how can being be difdif-ferent from thought, without it falling out of the reach of (rational) understanding? Kant’s own critical idealism solves this problem by intro-ducing the unsurpassable border between the phenomenal realm – the way objects appear for the subject – and the noumenal realm of the Dinge an sich that are unknowable, while the He-gelian project aims at dissolving this division by designing a philosophical method that allows for the ascent to absolute knowledge through the dialectical sublation (Aufhebung) of external limits to thought. The latter option aims at the reconciliation of the difference between being
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and thought and the former at respecting it, but both are founded on the power of a subject that is capable of grasping the object as it is determined by the concepts that can be applied to it. Much of Negative Dialectics is devoted to exposing the contradictions to which this identity-thinking gives rise. What is lost to idealist philosophy, Adorno maintains, is the experience of the non-identical, or the insight in the non-conceptual that is constitutive of the concept.55 That is, the “insight” referred to is the experience of the real as non-conceptual. This insight, inas-much as it occurs, is due to the “preponderance of the object”56, i.e. the acceptance that reliable experience of an object has to recognise that it is subjective reason which constitutes the antag-onism between subject and object, and that it is this very antagantag-onism which both veils the object as being something in itself and by the same token legitimates its liquidation in subjective cat-egories. Reason is the use of concepts as a means to grasp the object. However, as it hyposta-sises the subject as self-grounding and constitutive of (the way) the object (appears), conceptu-ality becomes the measure against and with which reconceptu-ality is judged; as a result, the non-con-ceptual as constitutive of the concept is neglected, and thought becomes tautological. It can’t recognise in the object anything that it has not already put in it itself.57 In other words: thought
reacts to the representation, or the image, that it creates of the real, and it makes, where and when it is manipulative, the real resemble its image. This state of affairs is reified and repro-duced in modern society, which functions by and as integrating subjects into objectified social structures that together constitute the image of the real. Depending on the extent to which the image is objectified – represented, forcefully, as the way things are, which is the ideology of administered society – the “[i]nsight into the constitutive character of the non-conceptual in the concept”58 is barred from the subject. If the subject is to know or understand anything in a sense
that is distinct from the correct reiteration and application of the concepts that are handed to it by the subjective reduplication of reality – the System – that determines the limits of thought, it must recognise the non-identical, as “the thing's own identity against its identifications.”59 As David Sherman puts it:
“Concepts must generalize, and in generalizing, they will necessarily do violence to the individual ob-jects that they classify, which are not altogether identical either with their concept or with one another. What concepts must not do, however, is excessively abstract from, not to mention lose contact with,
55 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12 56 Ibid., 183
57 Ibid., 171 58 Ibid., 12 59 Ibid., 161
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these individual objects if they are to perform their epistemic tasks. Our concepts will never fully capture the experiential ground from which they arise, but our proper aim is to struggle to have them do precisely this.”60
As Adorno writes that one should “strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept”61,
by this enigmatic formulation he means that the concepts that we use to maintain our grasp on reality are not innocently subjective. It is not a matter of simple free choice to use this rather than that concept, as the concepts and categories by which discursive thought develops do not spontaneously generate from subjective, individual consciousness. Instead, they are conveyed to the subject by the social order in which it is integrated, thus setting up something resembling a mirror palace between subject and object. The “experiential ground” that informs the need for conceptual understanding in the first place drops, in a way, out of the equation. The non-iden-tical, that in the object which the concept did not grasp, returns as this negativity: the disap-pearance of the “substrate”62 of experience resulting from the domination of the conceptual
haunts the subject as that which it cannot grasp. To transcend the concept, then, is not to throw away the conceptual apparatus and fling oneself into Life, but to de-fetishize the wrong con-cepts and making them adequate to the experience that could inform the right concon-cepts. As a matter of fact, such a move would not be called adequation anymore, but affinity – between subject and object.63 Asha Varadharajan is therefore right to point out that negative dialectics is not a negative theology64, where the problem of what the subject is capable to know is simply shifted to another level, a level at which some wholly negative entity (as in supposedly beyond the limits of thought) retains its unknowability while still affecting the real world; this problem results from hypostasising one concept above the real, social relations in which life is structured. The critique of ontology that is the main theme of the first chapter of Negative Dialectics – above all Heidegger’s concept of Being – is meant to establish this point. In effect, subject and object are fundamentally only opposed in the sense that the subject positions itself antagonisti-cally towards what is not itself, which only then becomes object (in the traditional epistemo-logical relation). Thought must be about the thing itself, not its commodified image; the control over the object as the latter’s reduction to its depiction amounts to the administered integration of all things, including subjects.65 Thought must think the thing, but it can only do so if it
60 Sherman, 355
61 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 15 62 Ibid., 149
63 Ibid., 270 (“Without affinity there is not truth”) 64 Varadharajan, 63
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experiences it as the other. Without experience as the recognition of the non-identical, i.e. the irreducible difference between the object and its identifications, thought is, in a precise sense, cut off from reality.
Ideology and Freedom
Indeed, “[t]he project of Negative Dialectics is radical”, Varadharajan explains, “because the logic of identity is the failure…of thought itself.”66 The sometimes slightly inconspicuous
Marxism that is one of the pillars of critical theory (in its first generation version at least) is very much noticeable in this formulation: thought itself, and its carrier, the bourgeois subject, fails, always, to the extent that it is captivated by the logic of identity. That this is not a matter of individual choice derives from the fact that thinking is not an individual, solipsistic activity; in fact, to consider it to be so is one of the fallacies inherent to the conception of the autonomous subject. Marxian critique departs from the diagnosis that such a subject – independent, rational, free, self-grounding etcetera – is precisely the subject that is required by an exchange society, i.e. a society whose version of capitalism is based on the exchange principle or the reduction to the commodity form of all products, goods and services, including labour – manual or intellec-tual – itself.67 The much-maligned base-superstructure model of explanation can only be con-sidered to be overly simplistic and deterministic if it is taken to translate the given mode of production causally and directly into the ideas that legitimise that mode (which is roughly the
German Ideology conception of ideology68), but the implied idea that the social and economic structures determine to a large extent the way reality appears in consciousness isn’t less forceful for it. In many ways, bourgeois consciousness comes “after the fact”; its specific rationality is an effect, the post facto contribution to an already sanctioned state of affairs – let’s say eco-nomic inequality – which such rationality does not redeem but simply affirms and thereby re-doubles: not only is this the case, it will and must remain the case.69 But this does imply a change of focus in the critique of ideology. Ideology critique cannot content itself anymore with unmasking/exposing the contradictions between prevailing theory/ideology and actual praxis (although this still also needs to be done), but has to critically understand the consequences of the illusion of the constitutive sovereignty of subjective consciousness as it most strongly takes
66 Varadharajan, 62
67 This is at least important for the Frankfurt School’s first generation’s Marxism. It is one of the core ideas of
Alfred Sohn-Rethel for instance, whose work Adorno valued; see Negative Dialectics, 177
68 Marx, German Ideology: “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes” 69 Cook, 10
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shape in Kant. As we saw above, however, this is not the first nor the only form of ideological delusion. Rather, the form of thought that Adorno calls identity-thinking imbues thought with an ideological deflection from the start. Whenever thought identifies, it mis-identifies. This is what makes ideology so intransigent, and every ideology critique should take into account this tendency.70 That is, identity-thinking is “wrong” from the outset, in that it reproduces the irra-tionality under the spell of which modern society disowns the fulfilment of the promise that could make it better. Critical thinking, according to Adorno, must intervene at the very level that inhibits the understanding of the irrational aspect of rationality.71 It is for this reason that Adorno consistently couples social criticism to the immanent critique of the thought-systems that he takes to reflect and legitimate that state of affairs which necessitates philosophical re-flection in the first place. The contrast, on the one hand, between the dissolution of the subject as determined by the societal conditions that render the individual superfluous and an emphatic sense of experience impossible – as different from immersion in what the social order allows to be experienceable: itself –, and, on the other hand, the theoretical construal of the subject as autonomous, is therefore of great importance to the critical enterprise.
In Negative Dialectics it serves as a lever with which to break open the concept (and, tenta-tively, the experiential content) of freedom. What Adorno does not want is to fully abandon the revolutionary promises of idealist philosophy, even if they are misunderstood by idealism itself and remain unfulfilled by society, for that would be to regress behind Enlightenment philoso-phy. To offer a critique of the coercive integration by means of culture industry therefore also requires an understanding of what would be opposed to that state of affairs, for which we cannot do without freedom. As to the concept of freedom, Adorno writes: “the individual’s concern is not only to hold on to that of which the general concept robs him; he is equally concerned with that “more” of the concept compared with his need”.72 This is to say, as Deborah Cook explains,
that freedom under prevailing conditions is not simply an ideological lie for being objectively unattainable, but serves also an immanent standard to the extent that it holds out something which doesn’t yet exist: “[i]ndividuals are both more and less than what is attributed to them by the emphatic concept of freedom.”73 Freedom isn’t exhausted in its particulars – actual sub-jects – because on the one hand the universality of the concept cannot fully capture the individ-ual’s experiential content of what it designates, and on the other hand it refers to a situation that
70 Cook, 10 71 Ibid., 4
72 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 151 73 Cook,, 7
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stretches beyond the individual experience. That is, the concept would be transcended by its, yet unknown, realisation. What is ideological, then, is not immediately the positing of the con-cept itself. It is rather the belief that the positing itself offsets the circumstances that inhibit its realisation. Neither freedom nor unfreedom, then, is something positive, existing or not existing in the autonomous subject. Unfreedom, as being determined by the general coercion that binds together and structures the subjects of modern society, cannot be side-stepped by taking flight into the declamation that the subject is transcendentally free no matter what. In the Dialectic of
Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno go so far as to argue that the subject is nothing but a
moment of unity in consciousness as it reflects on its own engagement with the object.74 The freedom that is somehow latent in the subject, its will to engage in cognition of its lifeworld is not transcendental but experiential, almost sensual in origin: it is like an impulse, the unreason-able, unthinkable if “the hand no longer twitched”75, or, if historicised, “there has been as much
free will as there were men with the will to be free.”76 Without this recognition, subjective
rationality has the power only to reflect the way things are. The “other side” of the ideological operation is then precisely to reify, or to uncritically accept the reification of, the way things are, which stands in the way of a thinking that aims to transcend the concept. It is this spellbound acceptance that in the guises of identity-thinking and the exchange-principle confound the cat-egories of freedom and coercion, in Kant as much as in the consumerist non-subject of the culture industry.77
This is a serious problem. If freedom is almost impossible to distinguish from its opposite at the very root, it cannot appear as that which holds the promise of difference from the general state of coercion: both object and subject are subsumed under one governing principle which in all of its instances appears as the law.78 As a result, it becomes rather difficult to conceive of something as being antithetical to the law. To think freedom there must be a meaningful dis-tinction between it and coercion.79 Only this distinction would render freedom meaningful, i.e., as a quality that retains its origin as the unbound, the ungoverned, the un-lawful, the impulsive. At the same time, the idea that causal series – causality as the opposite of freedom – can be recognised and determined is, under present conditions, something of a naïve supposition, es-pecially in the current so-called information age in which everything is or is supposed to be
74 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156 75 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 230
76 Ibid., 265 77 Ibid., 232 78 Ibid., 248 79 Ibid., 250
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connected. In a society in which every particular phenomenon is equally close to the centre80, it is not only practically but principally impossible to attribute to every single effect its own cause. This creates the possibility, objectively, of paranoid thinking; there is in fact room for licentiously connecting causes with effects, as there is no real connection that takes precedence over other possible connections. If causality is to denote the relations between things, i.e. the objective world as it appears to the transcendental subject, but the way things relate to each other cannot be properly described in terms of separable causes and effects, then the idea that there be a causally necessary relation between them becomes a subjective fiction that merely signifies the attempt to gather under the control of reason the objective world that as such es-capes this effort: “[a] causality produced by freedom corrupts freedom into obedience.”81 The incessant demand for control and connectivity negates the possibility for both objects and sub-jects to retain something of their own which is different from how their identities are determined by the general state of coercion which limits from the outset the possibility of experience and understanding. The question of the possibility of experience and understanding as based on something that differs from an order that predetermines and delineates it according its own logic, would only be answerable if the integration of all spheres of life into the production cycle of capital recedes. Short of this utopian possibility, freedom remains ephemeral.
Towards a Changed Experience
Of course, it is not the case that Adorno blames Kant for the tragedies of modernity, or that he would want to prove Kant wrong on the basis of the tragedies of modernity. What he is after, as was indicated before, is to develop the possibility of a changed philosophy based on an un-distorted experience, the difficulty of which lies in designing a concept of experience which is precisely not merely a concept, while maintaining the capacity of thought to incorporate such an experience without ceasing to be thought.82 The need, the necessity of the endeavour is how-ever clear enough from Adorno’s vantage: the failure to establish a transformed philosophy will, under the sign of the dissolution of the subject as discussed above, lead to the gradually becoming impossible of both thought and experience in the relevant (at least for our purposes) sense; a thought that is different from and more than the correct application of the subject-less schematism of fully-integrated society (culture industry), and experience that would be
80 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 268 81 Ibid., 232
