Adorno, ideology and ideology critique

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 1-20

  Cook, Deborah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR   (Canada)

Author keywords

Adorno; Critique; Identity; Ideology; Liberalism; Positivism

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997860329     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370102700101     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 66 passim.
2. Martin Jay makes some preliminary remarks about these connections in his Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 116: ‘Traditionally, ideologies had been generated by the need to justify a problematic social condition, which was perceived as such.
3. Although apologetic in intent, ideologies also contained a critical impulse in the space between their justifications and the reality they claimed to embody. But the Nazi experience, Adorno lamented, when no one took the content of ideology seriously as more than a tool of manipulation, signalled the collapse of this distance.’ Unfortunately, Jay never follows up these remarks with a more detailed analysis. In a more recent work, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), Simon Jarvis recognizes the importance of rational or ‘speculative’ identity in Adorno's work but he does not make the connection between this form of identity and Adorno's views about ideology and ideology critique.
4. I have myself already attempted to make this connection in the fourth chapter of my book The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996)
5. as well as in ‘The Rhetoric of Protest: Adorno and the Liberal Democratic Tradition’, Rethinking Marxism 9(1) (Spring 1996–7): 58–74. This paper represents a further refinement of this attempt.
6. It was Gillian Rose who first recognized the importance of rational identity for negative dialectics. In The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 44, Rose writes: ‘According to Adorno, there are three ways of thinking: identity thinking, non-identity thinking, and rational identity thinking.… [C]oncepts also refer to their objects, and by this he [Adorno] means to the conditions of their ideal existence. This is the utopian aspect of identifying. For the concept to identify its object in this sense the particular object would have to have all the properties of its ideal state.
7. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 147. Cited henceforth in the text as ND.
8. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 172.
9. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 65.
10. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, New German Critique 56 (Spring 1992): 124.
11. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 60.
12. There are numerous examples of such readings in the secondary literature. On p. 87 of his Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), Martin Jay claims that Adorno manifested a ‘sympathy for non-identity as an end itself’.
13. On p. 52 of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), Lambert Zuidervaart writes: ‘Dialectical logic must sometimes be suspended on behalf of the “non-identical”.’ These interpretations of Adorno's work give short shrift to the important function filled by universal concepts in negative dialectics.
14. Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker, ‘Between Impotence and Illusion: Adorno's Art of Theory and Practice’, New German Critique 57 (Fall 1992): 107, 101.
15. On p. 172 of Negative Dialectics, Adorno deemed ‘pathic’ the prevailing rationality that is characterized by identitarian thinking: ‘The circle of identification … was drawn by a thinking that tolerates nothing outside [of itself].… Such totalitarian and therefore particular rationality was historically dictated by the threat of nature. That is its limitation.… For the present, reason is pathic [pathisch]; to cure ourselves of it would be rational [Vernunft].’ I have modified E. B. Ashton's translation.
16. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 178. In fact, Jarvis argues that ‘thinking needs to be contaminated with experience in order even to be possible’. But if thinking is possible only when it is so contaminated, such contamination must be conceived as the condition for the possibility of thinking in general (as, indeed, Jarvis argues earlier in his discussion of Adorno's critique of Kant). It is, therefore, somewhat misleading to claim that thought needs to be contaminated with experience since this claim seems to imply that such contamination is an optional requirement, i.e. that thought could exist without it.
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 1974), p. 44. Cited henceforth in the text as MM.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre’, in Soziologische Schriften, Vol. I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p. 474. Cited henceforth in the text as BI. All translations are my own.
19. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), p. 32.
20. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 6, p. 7.
21. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adley and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 29. Cited henceforth in the text as PDGS.
22. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 147–8.
23. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Fernsehen als Ideologie’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 10.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 522.
24. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 148.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Prolog zum Fernsehen’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 10.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 514.
26. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 29.
27. This passage is also cited in Jay's Adorno, p. 43.
28. Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, p. 228, 229.
29. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 37.
30. It is in this crucial respect that Adorno's emphatic concepts differ from Habermas's normative ideal of rational consensus. Although it is itself instantiated in particular speech-acts, as a quasi-transcendental ideal, rational consensus does not have the historical contingency that Adorno attributes to his emphatic concepts. Whereas Habermas originally located the ideal of rational consensus in a specific set of historical practices (the emergence of a relatively autonomous public sphere in the 18th century), he now believes that this was too ‘idealistic’. Once he had repudiated his earlier ‘idealization’ of the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas began to claim that the ‘normative foundations of the critical theory of society [can] be laid at a deeper level’. As he wrote in ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, there is a ‘rational potential intrinsic in everyday communicative practices’, which can be traced ‘back beyond the threshold of modern societies’ — see Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 442.
31. This potential can be located in rational consensus as an ideal that regulates communicative practices universally. To quote Thomas McCarthy, rational consensus is grounded in ‘universal pragmatic features of communication’. The basis for political justice in Habermas's work ‘becomes what all could will … as participants in practical discourse, whose adoption of the moral point of view enables them to transcend not only interest-oriented perspectives but also value-based perspectives’ (see Thomas McCarthy, ‘Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, p. 52).
32. In contrast to Habermas's characterization of the ideal speech-situation, Adorno stressed the historically contingent nature of ideals such as freedom: ‘What … congeals as values for historical memory are, in fact, question-forms (Fragegestalten) of reality.’ Values are projected on to demands arising from a particular historical situation: for example, the claim that all human beings should have something to eat is the value-form of the demand that hunger be abolished ‘in view of the available and potential wealth of goods’ — see Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, p. 62. Similarly, the moral claim that all human beings should be free is itself tied to demands made under conditions in which unfreedom could be avoided either actually or potentially. These conditions may well change. If Habermas ascribes a universal status to rational consensus, Adorno believed that the rational identity on which his critique was grounded was thoroughly historical and thus itself ‘particular’. Moreover, in historical conditions like our own, which are characterized by increasingly successful social integration, particular ideals such as freedom might actually wither away without a trace because our experience would no longer be such as to allow us even to formulate the demand that unfreedom be abolished.