Theodor W. Adorno’s
Critique of the Critique of Reification
Brendan Harvey
MPhilStud
Centre For Research in
Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP)
2015 – 2017
There
is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run
so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short
once more before the bulldog in my own backyard—the yard, in the meantime,
having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, (New York: Vintage,
2013): 6.
The
trouble is with the conditions that condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and
would yet be changeable by human action; it is not primarily with people and
with the way conditions appear to people. Considering the possibility of total
disaster, reification is an epiphenomenon, and even more so is the alienation
coupled with reification, the subjective state of consciousness that
corresponds to it.
TW Adorno, Negative Dialectics, (London: Continuum,
1973): 190.
Word Count: 29905
Abstract
The following
essay tracks a basic intellectual-historical trajectory running from Marx to
Lukács to Adorno—from the section on commodity fetishism in Capital Vol. I, to
the inauguration of the category of ‘reification’ in History and Class
Consciousness, to Adorno’s critique of the critique of the concept in Negative
Dialectics. The argument that follows will claim that Lukács’s emphasis on the
overcoming of the ‘basic phenomenon of reification’ and the
self-objectification of labour power in the realm of capitalist production
leads to an emphasis on the category of alienation. He fails, however, to
appreciate the implications of his own insight regarding its potentiation in
the form of a ‘relation of a thing, of money, to itself.’ Moreover, he neglects
the way in which, for Marx, when money and the commodity—both of which are
merely two modes of appearance of the value-form—are considered together, value
cannot be grasped as a static thing. “Those who consider the autonomization of
value as a mere abstraction,” Marx writes, “forget that the movement of
industrial capital is this abstraction in action.”
Since Kant’s subjective constitution of
objectivity the concept ‘objectivity’ has been double coded. On the one hand,
there is its objective side—the knowable side able to be synthesized in a
relationship of identity with the subject because it has been constituted by it.
On the other, is its thingly non-identical side—the object’s irreducible
particularity unknowable by the subject. Adorno’s essential charge is that
Lukacs philosophically conflates objectification (the former) and reification
(the latter). This philosophical conflation informs his reading of Capital. “It
is not only due to the economic themes of Das Kapital,” Adorno writes, “that
the concept of self-alienation plays no part in it any more; it makes
philosophical sense.” It is the potentiation of reification in the form of a
single thing that is always already beyond the activity of individuals that
Adorno emphasizes in his own formulation of the concept; or rather, that
determines his critique of Lukacs’s critique of the concept. The essay that
follows is concerned with the fundamental philosophical arguments determining
Adorno’s critique.
Acknowledgements
I would be remiss not to mention my parents,
both of whom have patiently supported this work despite my inability to clearly
explain its content. Peter Osborne provided very helpful guidance—both as a
supervisor and as a lecturer. I would also like to thank Joe Walsh. Without his
insight this piece would not have been possible.
Table
of Contents
I.
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………4-5
II.
Contextualizing Lukács.……………………………………………………………..6-12
III.
Reification in ‘Reification and
the Consciousness of the Proletariat’……………………………………………………………………………..12-17
IV.
Honneth’s Theory of
Reification………………………………………….......17-23
V.
Dialectic of
Enlightenment………………………………………………….......23-25
VI.
Form and Content—The Schema of
Reification………………………...25-30
VII.
The Schema of Reification &
the Dialectic of Enlightenment……...30-33
VIII.
Social Philosophy as
Tautology………………………………………………..33-38
IX.
The Thing Itself, Non-Identity, and One Sense of Thing……………...38-41
X.
Habermas’s Critique of
Adorno………………………………………………..42-44
XI.
Reason & the
Aesthetic……………………………………………………………44-47
XII.
Genesis &
Validity…………………………………………………………………...48-50
XIII.
Contextualizing Adorno’s
Critique of Lukács.……………………………50-51
XIV.
Hegel’s Materialist
Element……………………………………………………..52-56
XV.
The Other Sense of Thing………………………………………………………...56-58
XVI.
Lukács’s
Idealism…………………………………………………………………….58-59
XVII.
Lukács and the Thing as Money……………………………………..59-62
XVIII.
Lukács’s
Romanticism……………………………………………………………...62-65
XIX.
Subject &
Reification………………………………………………………………..65-70
XX.
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………70-73
I.
Introduction
When Adorno first
mentions the category of reification in his Lectures
on Negative Dialectics he
describes it as, “one that I very much hope to be able to articulate fully for
once and to expound to you at a theoretical level –even though it may be
thought to be more of a sociological task than a philosophical one.”
While this is a hope that will go unfulfilled—despite the numerous notes for a
project on ‘reified consciousness’ he never managed to carry through—there
are two points implicit here. First, Adorno’s phrasing moves between a demand
for a sociological task—or at least, what ‘may be thought to be more of a
sociological task’—and a philosophical one. Reification appears to function
simultaneously as a socio-historical and philosophico-epistemological concept
inspired by a double problematic: on the one hand, a set of reified social relations
(and the problem of combatting them through praxis)
and on the other, reified consciousness (and the problem of bourgeois
theory; or, put more simply, the problem of how not to think in a ‘reified’
way). The second point is Adorno’s own admission that at least up until that
lecture—which was given in November 1965—he had not yet offered a full
articulation of the concept despite its frequent invocation. Given the
centrality of reification to Adorno’s thought—it is, after all, the “polemical
starting point of all dialectical thinking”—this
lack of exposition is surprising.
In the opening paragraph of “Reification
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” the central essay in History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács formulates
the problem of reification as a ‘riddle’ to which “there is no solution that
could not be found in...the commodity-structure.”[4] Here is Marx’s famous
passage on the fetish structure of the commodity in Capital Vol I, which Lukács identifies as the “basic phenomenon of
reification”:
A commodity is
therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of
men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product
of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their
own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between
themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why
the products become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same
time perceptible and imperceptible by the sense...It is only a definite social
relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a
relation between things.
After decades of
irrelevance the category of ‘reification’ has reappeared in an unexpected
location. Axel Honneth, perhaps the most well known of the so-called ‘third
generation’ of the Frankfurt School, offers a reworking of the concept in his
2005 Tanner Lecture delivered at the University of California, Berkeley. In retrospect, Honneth’s
lecture appears simultaneously prophetic and tinged with irrelevance. Prophetic
because his re-introduction of reification anticipates both the minor ‘Lukács
revival’, as well as how the
category appears to capture the social conditions determining the endemic
failings of the Left, where even the wildest swings at the status quo—even by the so-called forces of regression or
reaction—leave it, if not reinforced, punch drunk but still standing; tinged
with irrelevance because, just before an explosion of interest in Marx with the 2008 financial crisis, he attempts
to wrestle ‘reification’ away from its grounding in the categories of the
critique of political economy—specifically its origin in the analysis of
commodity fetishism in Capital Vol I.
As a witness to this maneuver away from the economic, Honneth invokes Adorno,
specifically the line from Dialectic of
Enlightenment that “all reification is forgetting.” The essay that follows
will give an account of the philosophical grounding of Adorno’s critique of Lukács’s
formulation of reification. This will show the way in which, despite Honneth’s
critique of Lukács, both formulations hinge on a philosophical elision of the
non-identical. Before returning to Honneth I would like to begin by outlining the
fundamental arguments in Lukács’s History
and Class Consciousness.
II. Contextualizing Lukács
In the postface Lukács’s retrospective A Defense of History and Class Consciousness,[9] Slavoj Zizek describes its 1923
publication as one of the few authentic events in the history of Marxism. From
the 1930s onwards however, Lukács desperately tried to distance himself from it.
He only allowed republication in 1967—and even this republication was
accompanied by a long self-critical introduction in which he accuses his
younger self of idealism and subjectivism.[10]
In it he concludes dramatically that, “it is precisely those parts of the book
that I regard as theoretically false that have been most influential.”[11]
Insofar as the text is one of the founding texts of the tradition that has come
to be known of as ‘Western Marxism,’ this comment stands as a critique of the
tradition it went on to inspire, including that of the Frankfurt School.
There are two intellectual-historical clarifications useful
at the outset. The first is that History
and Class Consciousness must be situated within the context of the
rejection of scientistic Soviet orthodoxy. “Orthodox Marxism does not imply the
uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations,” Lukács writes
in “What is Orthodox Marxism?” the opening essay of the collection, “it is not
the belief in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the
contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.”
In recoding
‘orthodoxy’ as method Lukács doesn’t merely go against the Soviet Marxism of
his day, but attempts a complete redefinition in the face of the vulgar dogma
of the Second International. This redefinition
went on to serve as a source of inspiration for the legacy of post-Hegelian
social science that he later rejected. Indeed, the question of the relation
between dialectics and method is a key point of contention between Adorno and
Lukács. “Dialectics is neither a pure method nor a reality in the naive sense
of the word,” writes Adorno in Negative
Dialectics.
“It is not a method,” he continues, “for the unreconciled matter—lacking
precisely the identity surrogated by the thought—is contradictory and resists
any attempt at unanimous interpretation.”
The intellectual-historical importance of History and Class Consciousness extends
beyond its rejection of Soviet Marxism however. Between Kierkegaard, Hegel, and
Marx, and Lukács’s existentialist and Marxist works (Soul & Form in 1911 and History
and Class Consciousness in 1923), positivist thought dominated European
philosophy.
As Lucien Goldman points out, between 1910 and 1925 a true philosophical
turning-point occurred, which resulted in the creation of existentialism and
contemporary dialectical materialism.”
Lukács’s own dialectical materialism has both a negative and positive aspect.
The negative is Lukács’s metacriticism of ‘bourgeois thought,’ which takes the
form of a demonstration of the antinomies that constitute it and the limits
that follow. The positive is the affirmation of the revolutionary consciousness
that follows from the negative critique. Mediating between the two is a concept
of historical totality that, through what Lukács takes to be a materialistic
interpretation of Hegel, reveals the proletariat as the subject-object of
history. Although he never directly quotes him, rather mysteriously, Heidegger
writes the following in the closing paragraphs of Being and Time:
We have long known that ancient ontology deals with ‘reified’
concepts’ and that the danger exists of ‘reifying consciousness.’ But what does
reifiying mean? Where does it arise from? Why is being ‘initially’ ‘conceived’
in terms of what is objectively present and
not in terms of things at hand that do, after all, lie still nearer to us? Why does this reification come to dominate
again and again and again? How is the being of ‘consciousness’ positively structured so that
reification remains inappropriate to it? Is the ‘distinction’ between
‘consciousness’ and ‘thing’ sufficient at all for a primordial unfolding of the
ontological problematic?[17]
It is of no little comfort to the author
that the concerns currently under discussion are precisely those that Heidegger
turns to in the conclusion to his magnum
opus.
The second intellectual-historical consideration that is not
only relevant to Lukács but to Adorno is that Lukács’s formulation of
reification in 1923 precedes the
discovery of Marx’s early 1844 manuscripts published in 1932. Indeed, the
initial Marxist-philosophical interventions of the Frankfurt School’s were
prefigured by Lukács more than by the early Marx, hence Lukács’s importance to
‘Western Marxism.’ Because Lukács’s discussion of reification seems a
description of the way men’s productive activity becomes alien and objectified
under capitalism he was seen to have anticipated Marx’s theory of alienation.
Adorno himself, however, distinguishes between alienation and reification:
“what we call reification and what we call alienation are two concepts …which
are far from identical.”
There are a
number of aspects at work in the ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat’ essay: (1) Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, (2) a Weberian
account of rationalisation, (3) a broadly Hegelian understanding of
objectification, and (4) an account of the commodification of culture taken
from Georg Simmel. There is a tendency in the secondary literature to treat
Lukács’ concept of reification as a phenomenological fil conducteur describing modern-life under bourgeois dominance—a
tendency that might itself be symptomatic of what, as will be shown, Adorno
takes to be Lukács’s romanticism. Winfried Kaminski, for example, calls
Lukács’s account a ‘Phenomenology of Class Consciousness.’[20]
Andrew Arato, Michael Lowy, and Jurgen Habermas all take a similar approach.
Andrew Feenberg is particularly insistent on the Hegelian ontological dimension
of Lukács’ notion, where Lukács “reformulates Marxist theory in terms of
Hegelian categories.”[22]
Reification as a simultaneous expression of how capitalist modernity appears
and what constitutes it is very much Lukács’s own. Gillian Rose points out that
the category has no canonical source—Marx did not actually use the German term
Lukács used to designate reification, Verdinglichung—and
has become prominent and debased as much by insinuation as by close examination.
In the interest of philological and philosophical specificity, Rose
distinguishes between Lukács’s theory of reification and Marx’s sense of
fetishism. Mitzman describes the concept of reification as, “one of the most
important legacies of the German intellectual tradition to modern social
thought,” tracing the concept to Schiller who, “worked with the idea (if not
always the term).” [24] To
explain the central thrust of History and
Class Consciousness, some, perhaps sensing its slippery nature, make no
effort to articulate it in specific terms at all.[25]
I’d like to first situate Lukács’s analysis within broader
sociological trends in the late 19th and early 20th
century. This will hopefully clarify the previous remark describing reification
as a sociological generalization of the commodity form. At the turn of the
century, against ‘traditional Marxism,’ social theorists such as Emile Durkheim
and Max Weber argued that modern society cannot be analysed adequately simply
in terms of the market and private property. While Durkheim emphasized the
division of labour and Weber focused on processes of rationalization and
bureaucratization, both theorists pointed to what they considered features more
fundamental to the constitution of modern society. Although these theories of
modernity may have been reactions to both socialism as a movement and socialist
theory,
they also sought to grasp the movement from the liberal paradigm of the 19th
century to the bureaucratic state-centric paradigm of the 20th. Lukács’s
approach can be understood as an attempt to grasp the historical changes
addressed by Weber and Durkheim by embedding their concerns within a theory of
capitalism.[27]
For this reason, when considered simply as a sociological category, reification
appears to subsume Weberian and Durkheimian analyses.
Indeed, Lukács begins the essay by arguing that the
increasing intensification of the process of quantification and rationalization
identified by Weber is rooted in the development of the commodity form.[28]
As the commodity-form becomes increasingly determinate of society, labour is increasingly organized
according to a division of labour. The specialized, calculable, and abstract
experience of work that becomes the empirical reality of the worker severs his
or her connection to both the product of their own labour and the social
product of his labour, hence the reading of reification as alienation. Human
labour, measured in time, is treated as a thing. “Time sheds its qualitative,
variable, flowing nature,” Lukács writes, and “freezes into an exactly
delimited, quantified continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified,
mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his
total human personality”).[29]
“The problem of labour time...shows reification at its zenith.”[30]
The most straightforward area of applicability of the concept is Marx’s
category of labour power and that, in order for capitalism to function, labour
must be treated as a commodity. As quoted previously, Lukács identifies the
passage on the fetish structure of the commodity in Capital Vol I as the “basic phenomenon of reification,” where a
definite social relation appears as a relation between things. The commodity,
in other words, which is actually constituted by the social character of men’s
labour, appears as a relation between itself and another commodity, thus value takes the form of exchange
value—i.e., the value of the commodity appears as determined by its relation to
other commodities on the market, while the origin of its value in socially
necessary labour time is veiled. Six pages later however, when Lukács describes
the “potentiation of reification,” Lukács quotes not the Marx of Capital I but Capital III, in particular his description of interest bearing capital:
In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this
automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, is brought out
in its pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its
origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of
money, to itself. Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital,
we see here only form without content…thus we get the fetish form of capital,
and the conception of fetish capital. In M—M’ we have the meaningless form of
capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their
highest degree, the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which
it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or
of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction—which is
the mystification of capital in its most flagrant form.
In the case of the ‘potentiation of reification’ Lukács
describes in terms of interest-bearing capital, which is the “objectification
of production relations in their highest degree,” social relations “consummated
in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself” no longer bear “the
birth-marks of its origin [i.e., in Labour].” Indeed, in the “capacity of
money” to expand its own value independently
of production through financial instruments such as credit this expansion
occurs not due the exchange of commodities (i.e., the relation between things),
but is rather one thing expanding as
a purely formal “automatic fetish.” There is no content in this second
instance—not just in the social relations that appear as a thing qua commodity, but the relations between things themselves in the context of the “basic phenomenon of
reification.” This presents the terminological problem of just what thing reification is referring to.
One does not need to read as far as Volume III to find instances
of such self-sufficient valorisation—where “valorization is therefore
self-valorization.”
In the section on the ‘General Formula for Capital’ in Volume I, Marx describes
how capital, in “constantly changing form from one form [from the commodity
form to the money form and back again] without being lost in this movement…becomes
transformed into an automatic subject.”
The
argument that follows will claim that Lukács’s emphasis on the overcoming of
the ‘basic phenomenon of reification’ and the self-objectification of labour
power in the realm of capitalist production leads to an emphasis on the
category of alienation. He fails, however, to appreciate the implications of
his own insight regarding its potentiation in the form of a ‘relation of a
thing, of money, to itself.’ Moreover, he neglects the way in which, for Marx,
when the money form and the commodity form—both of which are merely two modes
of appearance of the value-form—are considered together, value cannot be
grasped as a static thing. Capitalist reproduction depends, after all, on the
unity of production and reproduction. “Those who consider the autonomization of
value as a mere abstraction,” Marx writes, “forget that the movement of
industrial capital is this abstraction in action.”
The condition of this self-valorisation is the money-form.
Since Kant’s subjective constitution of
objectivity the concept ‘objectivity’ has been double coded. On the one hand,
there is its objective side—the knowable side able to be synthesized in a relationship
of identity with the subject. On the other, there is its thingly, non-identical side—the object’s irreducible particularity unknowable
by the subject. Adorno’s essential charge is that Lukács philosophically conflates
objectification (the former) and reification (the latter) and this philosophical
conflation informs his reading of the Marx of Capital. “It is not only
due to the economic themes of Das Kapital,”
Adorno writes, “that the concept of self-alienation plays no part in it any
more; it makes philosophical sense.”
It is the potentiation of reification in the form of a single thing that is always already beyond that Adorno emphasizes in his own formulation of the concept;
or rather, that determines his critique of Lukács’s critique of the concept. The
essay that follows is concerned with the fundamental philosophical arguments
determining Adorno’s critique.
III. Reification in “Reification and the Consciousness of
the Proletariat”
Capitalist society qua
totality is formally determined
by the value form, that peculiar abstraction that “in capitalist society, functions concretely.”[36]
The value form is a historically specific abstract form imposed on a
transhistorical substantive content. It is an objectification of historically
specific relations; a ‘structural effect’ misrecognized ‘as an immediate
property’ of a given object.[37]
When considered only in terms of the formulation of the ‘basic phenomenon of
reification,’ where Lukács directs us to Capital
Vol. I, reification appears as a kind of mental or epistemological mistake
in which the social relationships between people are misrecognized as quantitative relations between things. If this
were the case the solution might look something like the following: people
ascribe false properties to the products of their labour by failing to see that
really, lying behind this
relationship between things, is a relationship between people. Read this way
reification is a form of false consciousness which can be dissolved once the
mistake is unveiled.
Indeed, reification qua
epistemological misrecognition—the problem of false consciousness—is
certainly present in Lukács’s text and leads to Adorno’s critique; however, Lukács
also claims understanding is not the
root of this misrecognition and that it is a practical misrecognition that
occurs ‘behind the back’ of the social body;
i.e., in the act of commodity
exchange rather than being limited to a case of mental misrecognition. Indeed,
there is a fundamental ambivalence in Lukács’s text about the different modes
of reification he points to in Marx. This is reflected in the confusion in the
secondary literature. Reification, however, is not limited to a particular
moment in the process of production. It negotiates all social relations as a
universal structuring determination “[penetrating] society in all its aspects
and [remoulding] it in its own image.”[39] It is a historically
specific socio-historical relation bearing
upon the phenomenological while constituting a specific epistemological
standpoint. In his defence of History and Class Consciousness Lukács states this explicitly: “the
direct forms of appearance of social being are not, however, subjective
fantasies of the brain, but moments of the real forms of existence.”
That he needed to retrospectively clarify is informative about the text itself.
For Lukács, reification formally determines the categories
with which one thinks about and how one experiences the world. Inasmuch as
these relations appear empirically as apparently immutable transhistorical and
transcendental absolutes, “the individual can use his knowledge of these laws
to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own
activity.”[41]
The sense in which reification bears upon
both the phenomenological and epistemological explains a strange aspect of
the reification essay, that much of it consists of a discussion of modern
philosophy—particularly that of Kant, illustrating as it does the ‘antinomies
of bourgeois thought’ that are symptoms of the “phenomenon of reification.”
These symptoms include a tendency to formalism, the identification of a split
both between subject and object, and a worldview valorising natural science as
the sole source of truth. Perhaps the central antinomy is the Kantian
distinction between fact and value, where values emerging from the noumenal
realm have no effect in the realm of phenomena (i.e., the realm of experience)
determined as it is by natural laws. In the face of such a distinction one can
adopt either an affirmation of values against actual events (the tragic view)
or submit to the status quo. This
antinomy replicates itself at the level of political practice in the conflict
between the reliance on the deduction of certain laws of history (reliance on fact)
and appeals to principle regardless of empirical analyses of the situation (reliance
on value). In the figure of the proletariat Lukács attempts to dialectically resolve
this antinomy. Indeed, Honneth critiques Lukács’s solution to the problem of
reification as lacking an ethical or normative dimension, but this is only
possible insofar as Honneth himself adheres to the distinction. Lukács’s
theory—as an attempted solution to the fact/value dichotomy—already possesses
an implicit normative foundation. The resolution to the problem of the
relativity of bourgeois values is possible only once the proletariat objectify
its own ethical principles in the form of a Communist society. His normative
solution is internal to his
ontological solution—indeed, it would have to be to avoid the positing of a
transcendental and ahistorical morality. In the eyes of Lukács—as well as those
of Adorno—to establish explicit transhistorical normative foundations would
itself be a ‘reification of ethics.’ In the process of Lukács’s elaboration of the problem of
class consciousness and its connection to modern philosophy, the term
‘reification,’ which subsumes economic and epistemological phenomena, slips
into the background and leaves the specificity of the concept ambiguous and
uncertain.[42]
What is clear is that reification is comprised of a
double-movement that appears paradoxical. On the one hand, as older forms of
social relations become relations of exchange, a totalising formal abstraction
comes to dominate social relations by subsuming these heterogeneous elements
within a unity mediated by the value form. On the other hand, this unity
produces an experience of disjuncture, fragmentation, and alienation.
Jameson describes it as a moving contradiction insisting on, “extreme
fragmentation as a social norm.” In the same moment that it “separates,
compartmentalizes, specializes, and disperses” it also operates “uniformly over
everything and [makes] heterogeneity a homogenous and standardizing power.”[44]
“Fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the
fragmentation of its subject.”[45]
If the absolute is, “nothing but a fixation of thought” and a, “projection
into myth of the intellectual failure to understand reality concretely as a
historical process,”
then ‘bourgeois contemplation’ remains stuck within a series of antinomic
positions due its failure to recognise itself as historically determined. At
best, bourgeois thinking grasps the social totality merely as the movement of
the abstract Idea rather than the
movement of concrete and historical productive relations.
Marx describes capitalist modernity’s tendency towards the
increasing domination of abstract and
real determinations of value in the following description of the move from
personal relations of dependence of pre-capitalist societies to the
value-mediated dependence characteristic of capitalism:
These objective
dependency relations also appear… in such a way that individuals are now ruled
by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction,
or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those
material relations which are their lord and master. Relations can be expressed,
of course, only in ideas, and thus philosophers have determined the reign of
ideas to be the peculiarity of the new age… This error was all the more easily
committed from the ideological standpoint as this reign exercised by the
relations… appears within the consciousness of individuals as the reign of
ideas.[47]
The relation between abstract ideas and historically
concrete relations grounds the category of reification. Now because the above
quotation is from Marx’s Grundrisse—which,
published in 1939, was not available to Lukács while he was writing his
reification essay—its use to explain Lukács’s position is problematic. What I
want to emphasize however is not the sense in which Lukács is directly inspired
by the category of ‘real abstraction’ in the Marx of the Grundrisse, but how Lukács anticipates Marx’s arguments that only
became available after Lukács’s own
work.
Indeed, the way in which he
anticipates them is muddled by his own idealism. That the abstract is not
determined as some sort of transhistorical absolute but rather in and through
the social process for example—which is the position of both Marx and Lukács—is
overshadowed in Lukács by the emphasis on the problem of the ‘imputation’ of class
consciousness and bourgeois philosophy. Again, in its emphasis on false
consciousness and alienation, Lukács anticipates the more philosophical and
idealistic early Marx who, as Adorno
quips, found certain popularity with theologians.
There is a sense in which both Marx’s, so to speak, are at work in Lukács’s
text. Indeed, the broader ‘Western Marxist’ tradition often faced the
problematic of disentangling one Marx from the other—or, more specifically, the
question of how many Marx’s there actually are.
The Marxian category invoking the most straightforward
application of reification is that of labour power and its commodification.
During each moment of life the worker is forced to sell their labour by the
imperatives of the labour market. Lukács describes the problem of Labour-time
as “reification at its zenith.” It is the worker’s
relation to this problem as simultaneously subject and object that permits the overcoming of the immediacy of this
situation. “On the one hand,” Lukács writes, “the worker is immediately placed
wholly on the side of the object: he appears to himself immediately as an
object and not as the active part of the social process of labour.” In the capitalist mode of
production the worker, in other words, is forced to objectify his own
labour-power. This stands in contrast
to ‘organic forms of society’ where work is defined as the direct function of a
member of the social organism, thus precluding any self-consciousness of actually
existing social conditions. For the worker meanwhile,
becoming aware of this self-alienation is the condition of it’s overcoming.
“The worker,” Lukács writes, “can only become conscious of his existence in
society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity…once it becomes evident
how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system
begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own
relations with capital.” Any attempt to unveil
society qua totality requires the
collective recognition of this condition in the form of heightened
class-consciousness, thus constituting the proletarian as subject-object. The
standpoint of the proletariat is the standpoint of the worker as both
object-commodity and subject and thus of society as a totality. According to
this schema political praxis becomes
the struggle for the consciousness ‘imputed’ to the proletariat so that it is
possible for them emerge from this fragmented immediate reality. From the
perspective of the present, this formulation is problematic on a
number of levels. Setting aside the question of political expediency, the
attribution of potential political agency solely to the proletariat qua subject-object of history might
appear as an attempt to usurp the heterogeneity of emancipatory struggles in
the name of a totalizing political project; perhaps the Leninist appeal to a
political party that mediates between class and society seems unfeasible. Yet
at the same time, the privileged standpoint of the proletariat outlined by
Lukács—which is derived from their unique experience and location within the
capitalist totality—also anticipates the privileging of particular
epistemological standpoints in the wake of the demystification and
deconstruction of universal subjectivity. Wherever one falls on this
contemporary issue, Lukács’s conclusion is that the critique of reification
necessarily leads to the recognition and affirmation of the labouring social body qua
totality. Lukács critique is therefore a critique from the standpoint of labour
that treats the Marxian categories as determinate forms of social being and
social consciousness.
IV. Honneth’s
Theory of Reification
Judith Butler describes
Honneth’s lecture as the most extended and thoughtful engagement with Lukács’s
concept in years. Given this rarity of
appearance one would think that, in such an extended and thoughtful engagement,
the other appearances deserve mention. The absence of Timothy Bewes’ 2002 Reification; or, the Anxiety of Late
Capitalism
(published by Verso with a blurb by philosopher and dialectical pop icon
Slavoj Zizek no less) in both Honneth’s lecture and the responses by Butler,
Raymond Guess, and Jonathan Lear, is, at best, a case of simple unawareness,
and at worst, a forgetting or at worst intentional repression. Honneth would have done
well to consider Bewes’s analysis of reification as “precisely the theory of
its own inadequacy” as well as heed Bewes’s warning that reification is “all
too susceptible to the process it denotes.”
Honneth’s chosen epigraph
for his text is taken from Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Adorno’s statement that “all reification is forgetting.” Honneth calls upon Adorno in support of
his reading of reification. Not mentioned is Adorno’s critique of the concept.
Drawing on the thought of John Dewey and Martin Heidegger, Honneth attempts to
dissolve the dominance of instrumental reason by reminding us of “a more
primordial and genuine form of praxis, in which humans take up an empathetic
and engaged relationship towards themselves and their surroundings.” It is an ethical praxis
that combats the increasing tendency of human relations under capitalist
modernity to take on a character of relations between things, but also
exempting those spheres of society where ‘instrumental’ or ‘reified’ thinking
is necessary for ‘reasons of efficiency,’ thereby avoiding the totalizing
propensity he locates in Lukács and Adorno. This emphatic engagement ontogenetically precedes a neutral stance
towards reality. If it can be shown that humans are first emphatically engaged
with the world and subsequently lose it, then somewhere along the line the
subject has reified the world and/or
the other. While Honneth offers a bevy of philosophical
and sociological citations (from Adorno to Heidegger, from Donald Davidson to
empirical studies of developmental psychology), his claim that this antecedent
form of recognition takes place prior to cognition requires empirical evidence,
forcing him to turn to the research of developmental psychology. Honneth certainly desires to edit and revise Lukács’s theory
with the latest empirical findings, citing research
that has conclusively “demonstrated with astounding regularity that…[Children]
must first have emotionally identified with an attachment figure before they
can adopt the stance of this person toward the world.”
If ‘critical theory’ is
a single coherent intellectual tradition its ‘first generation’ is made up of
those intellectuals known retrospectively as the Frankfurt School—Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, among others—then Axel Honneth is a part of that
so-called ‘third generation’ who came of age under the tutelage of Jurgen
Habermas. The intellectual-historical question of the continuity of the
Frankfurt School is not irrelevant. Habermas and Honneth refrain from
identifying themselves with this retrospective construction. The latter, however,
inherited the chair in ‘Social Philosophy’ at the University of Frankfurt—a
designation, which, in the addendum ‘Social,’ implies that Philosophy without
it somehow lacks any social determination—from the former and works
in Adorno’s old office. All the old furniture was replaced at Honneth’s
insistence.
Werner Bonefeld argues that if at its inception critical theory struggled to
deal with the question of why human social reproduction, under capitalism,
takes the form of money as more money, as well as the effects of this process
on human consciousness or subjectivity, then the contemporary critical theory
flowing from Habermas asks instead about the ways and means of fulfilling the
promise of the Enlightenment by proposing communicative action to free
capitalism from profit making, class exploitation, war, gender oppression, etc. The critique of economic
categories, in other words, has become a non-topic. In line with this shift,
Honneth attempts to break off reification from Marx’s critique of political
economy and replace it with a concept of ‘recognition,’ thereby identifying
reification as social pathology. For
Lukács of course, reification is inextricable from the economic—it is
determined by the reproduction of the capitalist economy and the valorization
of capital. “Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces
itself economically on higher and higher levels,” Lukács writes, “the structure
of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more
definitively into the consciousness of man.”
Having
“taken the concept of reification from a simple level…to a complex level,” Honneth refuses this
position—the (vulgar) Marxist relation between economic base and cultural
superstructure cannot be the source of reification. Indeed, he criticizes Lukács on the grounds that, “the only phenomena
Lukács regards as cases of reification are all very closely connected with
processes of economic exchange.” Yet Honneth himself locates
the concept’s birth in Weimar Germany and the context of “rising unemployment
and economic crises” that gave it its “distinctive character” and found a
concentrated expression in this concept and its related notions. Honneth offers his own
brief intellectual history of the concept. With the publication of History and Class Consciousness,
reification became something of a leitmotiv for social and cultural critique,
as well as a fount of inspiration for a generation of philosophers and
sociologists. In the postwar period, “social theorists and philosophers were
instead content to analyze deficits of democracy and justice, without making
use of concepts referring to social pathologies such as reification or
commercialization.” With the exception of the
Frankfurt School and the brief resurgence of interest in Lukács during the
student movements of the 1960s, there appears a gulf separating the original
Weimar invocation of reification and today. “Like a philosophically unprocessed
nugget,” he writes, “the category of ‘reification’ has re-emerged from the
immense depths of the Weimar Republic and retaken centre stage in theoretical
discourse.”
With Honneth’s observation regarding the appearance and distinctive character
of ‘reification’ as determined by a specific economic moment, one might wonder
which economic categories might be at work today in determining its
contemporary reappearance. Honneth however does not seem to pose this question.
Regarding this jettisoning of the economic, Honneth’s book immediately
preceding his work on reification—Disrespect:
The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory—consists of a collection of essays
exploring the possibility of adjusting the central categories in various
disciplines to the concept of recognition, with a view towards normatively
grounding not only a critical theory of society through the concept, but
‘social philosophy’ in general.
In terms of the
theoretical jockeying within the trajectory of Frankfurt School this emphasis
on normativity is part of a broader effort to supplant Adorno’s thesis
regarding prehistorical domination and ego formation in favor of, on the one
hand, an anthropological claim that has recourse to a “distinctively human
dependence on intersubjective recognition,” and on the other, the
assertion of a prehistorical normativity that is the condition of ego
formation. This effort is present in Honneth’s earliest theoretical
formulations. In his initial critique of previous strands of critical theory in
his first work Critique of Power, Honneth
accuses Horkheimer & Adorno of, “generalizing Marx’s critique of
capitalism, making it possible to view the theoretical perspective of an
increasing reification not only as the history of liberal-capitalist society,
but the whole course of civilization.”
In the same text Honneth distinguishes between the critical theory of
Horkheimer & Adorno and the “tradition of the Marxist analysis of capital
from Lukács to Alfred Sohn-Rethel.” Whereas the latter holds
that, “the forms of consciousness of bourgeois society are thought to have
developed from the forces of abstraction of commodity exchange, in which
subjects acting with reciprocal disregard for their needs and experiences are
transformed into ‘objects,’” the former expresses an
even more “totalizing view” in which, “commodity exchange is merely the
historically developed form of instrumental rationality.” In the former
perspective, forms of consciousness are determined by society; in the latter,
society qua the exchange of
equivalents organized according to the schema of a division of labour is
determined by the particular act of self-preservation that Horkheimer &
Adorno claim is the source of the separation of subject and object. The
pertinent question is over the status of reification’s origin and whether its origin lies in the mind
or in society; whether it is a question of recognition or functionality.
Just as Adorno &
Horkheimer’s argument that society qua the
exchange of equivalents organized according to the schema of a division of labour
is determined by a particular pre-historical act of self-preservation is too total, Lukács’s extension of
reification is as well. Lukács, “gravely underestimates the extent to which
highly developed societies require—for reasons of efficiency—that their members
learn to deal strategically with themselves and others.” Indeed, Honneth’s critique
of Adorno, like that of Habermas, is grounded in an interpretation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. “Adorno and
Horkheimer,” Honneth writes, “conceive the process of the conceptual
structuring of reality as the initial phase of reification.” Such a theory figures
logical identity—the subsumption of the particular under the universal in
abstract thinking—at the heart of instrumental reason, from which one can then
derive every further form of social domination. To comprehend the “inner
psychic parallel to the process of the control of nature” Horkheimer &
Adorno rely on a “sketchy theory of the ego” that “plays out solely between the
individual conscious subject and his or her natural environment.” “The formation of the
human capacity for identity,” Honneth writes, “is conceived as the primarily
individual process of formation of a subject in relation to natural reality.” For Honneth, Adorno fails
to take into account that a social relation
to other subjects is the condition of one’s own subjectivity. While Honneth
claims his account of reification departs significantly from Habermas’s
‘functionalist’ analysis in his Theory of
Communicative Action,
they share an understanding of reification as an erosion of forms of
intersubjectivity—either through the forgetting of a primordial stance of
recognition that is the intersubjective condition of subjectivity, or the
erosion of the necessary conditions for communicative reason—rather than as an
objective fact of modern social life.
V.
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Both Honneth and Habermas read Dialectic of Enlightenment as
anti-Enlightenment—as a Nietzschean attack allied with irrationality. Habermas’s critique will
be returned to. What I want to point out for now is that the way in which thetext
is not merely critique of Enlightenment, but an attempt to salvage its
potential is connected to Adorno’s ambivalent relation to reification. It makes
sense to outline some of the key arguments of this text.
Enlightenment tends to refer a concrete historical
moment—the growing emphasis on reason over revelation in 18th century
Europe. The reader is instructed by Horkheimer & Adorno to understand
Enlightenment however in its “widest sense” as “the advance of thought.’” This ‘advance of
thought’ involves both a liberation and a mastery; a liberation from fear of
omnipotent nature and the human mastery over nature that follows. No
longer subjects to the logic of heterogeneous nature, human beings are
established as subjects for whom nature is objectified. This liberation from
nature and its correlate process of ‘installing’ subjectivity is primarily
concerned with the extirpation of myth, which Enlightenment rationality sees as
irrational. ‘Myth’ and ‘Enlightenment,’ however, are not opposites but a
conceptual pair in which each reflectively determines the other such that one
cannot be understood on its own.
The text is revolves
around two theses that must be read together: “myth is already Enlightenment”
and “Enlightenment reverts to mythology.”
If one reads only the former it could easily be believed Horkheimer &
Adorno are advocating irrationalism or a return to myth. If one reads only the
latter Horkheimer & Adorno seem to be calling Enlightenment not enlightened
at all. The fundamental point is that Enlightenment is not enlightened enough.
In the same way that, for Adorno, every thought has within it an aspect that is
not thought, reason is irrational—or rather, Enlightenment is mythical—because
of its attempt to expel every non-rational moment from it. The form of reason
that lacks any capacity for reflection on its irrational aspect is instrumental reason. Reason is
instrumental reason when the instruments or means of thought have become
independent of the purposes of thought. In this way reason itself becomes
irrational and the separation of means and ends relies on the very
reinforcement of those aspects of irrationality. In liberating humanity via reason from the heterogeneity of ‘primary
nature,’ reason forces humanity to submit to ‘second nature.’
It is Lukács who Adorno credits with dragging the concept of
‘second nature’ back into philosophical relevance, going so far as to urge his
students to read the newly released edition of Theory of the Novel despite the latter’s critique of him therein. In this early text Lukács
describes second nature as a “charnel house of long-dead interiorities,” where the interiority of
bourgeois subjectivity leaves those subjects powerless in the face of
historical and societal forces. The former fails to even
recognize these forces as historical and societal but instead hypostasizes them
as natural. Lukács invokes the concept in the following passage from History and Class Consciousness:
In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the
origin of social institutions. The
objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws. History
becomes fossilized in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real
nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary,
men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and
cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, people fail to
realize “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of
men as linen, flax, etc.”
Society
appears as ‘second nature’ when its historical origins are veiled and the laws
that govern it are treated as natural and immutable. An example of this
inability to recognize historical origins is the misrecognition of the
commodity as a relation between things rather than as constituted by social
labour. Indeed, when Honneth accuses Adorno of having a “sketchy theory of the
ego” in Adorno’s limitation of ego formation to its relation to nature Honneth is
not clear which nature he means. Yvonne
Sherrat, for example, has pointed out the natural and historical aspects
simultaneously at work in Adorno’s conception of the self. Sherrat argues that, with regard to Freudian
psychoanalysis, Adorno historicizes a naturalistic human selfhood. At the same
time, to Hegelian-Marxist theories of history, Adorno brings to bear a powerful
psychological dimension via Freud by
placing the human psyche at the center of historical change. Whereas Honneth
attempts to recover a form of self identity whose condition of possibility is a
primordial form of intersubjective recognition—thereby positing an ideal
‘natural self’ in the form of a new positivity—Adorno holds that the essential
core of the self consists of psychosexual drives, but that the variable
qualities of these drives are determined historically.
I want to
highlight the term ‘formalism’ in the passage above—a formalism that Adorno and Lukács
see as archetypal of bourgeois thinking. “The dualism of form and
content,” writes Adorno in his book on Husserl, “is the schema of reification.”
What
then, is this ‘schema of reification’ and what is its connection to the Dialectic of Enlightenment?
VI. Form and Content—the Schema of Reification
For Kant, given
the limits of sensibility any object that is not an appearance necessarily
cannot be an object of experience.
Insofar as knowledge is concerned, understanding can only relate to appearances
qua objects of experience. Once the
understanding stretches using principles that bring us beyond the realm of the empirical, one has entered the realm of
‘Transcendental Illusion.’ This leads to the ‘hypostatization’ ‘of ‘objects’
that lie outside of experience, such
as ‘God’ or the ‘soul. A critique of transcendental illusion is necessarily a
“critique of the understanding and reason in regard to their hyperphysical use.” That
the understanding will step past its empirical bounds is constitutive of
reason, and to guard against it Kant provides
three regulative principles of reason in the Appendix to the Transcendental
Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant presents these regulative
principles as the condition for securing unified and systematic knowledge: (1)
the principle of homogeneity, (2) the principle of specification, and (3) the
logical law of the continuum of species of logical forms and its transcendental
presupposition, the transcendental law of the continuity of nature.[95]
For Kant,
reason is faced with a demand for unity in the face of the seemingly infinite
series of correlations it encounters in the world of appearances.[96]’
This demand is best expressed in the following passages:
It is indeed difficult to understand how there can be a
logical principle by which reason prescribes unity of rules unless we also
presuppose a transcendental principle whereby such a systematic unity is a
priori assumed to be necessarily inherent in the objects…We must therefore,
in order to secure an empirical criterion, presuppose the systematic unity of
nature as objectively valid and necessary.[97]
But this logical maxim can only become a principle of pure
reason through our assuming that if the conditioned is given, the whole series
of conditions, subordinated to one another—as series which is therefore itself
unconditioned—is likewise given, that is, is contained in the object and its
connection. [98]
This demand
for systematicity is a principle in the transcendental sense as it neither
prescribes nor determines any object in the field of appearances. It is that
principal that must be presupposed for concepts to secure empirical criterion
at all. His view is that finite human subjects with ‘sensible’ rather than
‘intellectual’ intuition necessarily act as
if an unconditioned unity
has already been given by making a rational and practical assumption of the
unity of appearances. In line with his ‘Copernican revolution,’ the
unconditioned unity is given to nature by reason and is not
already an objective characteristic of nature itself: “reason, in order to be
taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand,
according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws.”
[99] The
series of correlations in experience and the inability to ascend to a final
determination necessitates an a priori regulative unity, the three modes
of which are described in the paragraphs below.
First Mode—Kant expresses reason’s demand for
unity first of all in the form of a logical maxim: “find the unconditioned for
conditioned cognitions of the understanding, with which its unity will be
completed.”[100]
The first interest of reason is its
necessary predisposition to ascend in pursuit of the unconditioned. For
Kant it is intrinsic to reason that it has a “propensity to overstep all
boundaries”—to keep ascending to the final condition. This propensity manifests
itself in the problem of taxonomic classification:
a certain systematic unity of all possible empirical
concepts must be sought insofar as they can be derived from higher and more
general ones: this is a scholastic rule or logical principle, without which
there could be no use of reason, because we can infer from the universal to the
particular only on the ground of the universal properties of things under which
the particular properties stand.[101]
Kant defines
this propensity as the principle of homogeneity as it asserts the
“sameness of kind in the manifold under higher genera,”[102]
which is representative of that chiefly speculative tendency of thought that is
“hostile to differences in kind,”[103]
and concerned with universality.[104]
It is precisely this yearning for a universal condition that is the
peculiar fate of reason, for when reason extends and finds security in
“principles that overstep all possible use in experience,”[105]
it finds itself awash in illusion, the liberation from which is possible
through critique. Relevant to the specific topic here is that when faced with
the manifold of phenomena, the tendency of reason according to the principle of
homogeneity is to move higher and higher towards a universal abstract category
applicable to the entire domain of phenomena—to act as if the infinite
diversity of phenomena can be classified perfectly and completely.
Second Mode—the logical
principle of reason Kant dialectically opposes to the law of homogeneity is the
law of specification which, “has its aim the systematic completeness of
all cognitions, if, starting with the genus, I descend to whatever
manifold may be contained in it, and thus in this way seek to secure extension
for the system.”[106] It
is still concerned with taxonomy, but, as it were, attempts to classify by
moving in the opposite direction. “Every genus requires different species, and
these subspecies, and since none of the latter once again is every without a
sphere…reason demands in its entire extension that no species be regarded as in
itself the lowest.”[107]
The interest of reason is therefore “content in respect of the
manifoldness of species.”[108]
Whereas the law of homogeneity is concerned solely with the form of the concept
applicable to the manifold of phenomena, the tendency of specification is to
grasp the infinite manifold not via a
universal form that, if you like, stands above it, but to “constantly seek to
split nature into so much manifoldness that one would almost have to give up
the hope of judging its appearances according to general principles.”[109]
The principle of homogeneity is therefore despotic insofar as it is hostile to
difference, while the principle of specification taken to its conclusion would
not allow reason to approach nature at all. Reasoning exclusively according to
the principle of specification gives up the search for that “ancient wish;”
i.e., insofar as it realizes the futility of complete codification, it gives up
on the very idea of codification at all. It is in this sense that Kant
describes skepticism as anarchic and “shatterers of civil unity.”[111]
The interest of the law specification is therefore the determinacy of the
content of the manifold. It is out of this dual-tendency of reason to both
ascend and descend that is the dialectical nature of pure reason explored in
the Transcendental Dialectic.
Third Mode—through the
“systematic connection”[112] of
the previous two arises a third logical law that “offers a continuous
transition from every species to every other through a graduated increase of
varieties”[113]
and therefore “prepares the field for the understanding.” The combination of
diversity and homogeneity and the affinity that arises out it guarantees the systematicity
of reason; i.e., a field of vision whereby phenomena appear unified and
within which concepts can be deployed. However this field only appears as if
it arises after the
combination of homogeneity and specification. The third logical law therefore
presupposes that phenomena always already appear unified; it presupposes what
Kant calls the transcendental law of the continuity of nature.[114]
This systematicity is therefore not a property of phenomena itself; rather,
“systematic unity (as mere idea) is only a projected unity”—a
necessary projection onto phenomena that is the condition of possibility of
cognition. The transcendental subject itself establishes nature as form. This
projection of unity onto diversity is the sense in which, for Adorno, Kant’s
philosophy is a “philosophy concerned to dominate nature.”
This is the example par excellence of
the formalism of Kantian philosophy that concerns both Adorno and Lukács.
The
fundamental thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment is that Enlightenment rationality liberates us from an
omnipotent and heterogeneous nature only to enslave us to the objectification
of both nature and man to the point where it becomes irrational.
“Civilization,” as Horkheimer & Adorno put it, “is the victory of society
over nature which changes everything into pure nature;”[117]
or, ‘second nature,’ where experience appears as determined by natural laws and
historical origins are veiled and forgotten. It might seem at this point that,
in light of the exegesis of Kant and the Dialectic
of Enlightenment above, the actually existing unity of society originates
with the projection of this specific type of thinking—i.e., the Kantian
formalism that subsumes objects under concepts or contents under form. Indeed,
this appears to be Honneth’s reading when he situates Adorno on the side of
critical theory that, in a totalizing gesture, holds commodity exchange to be merely the
historically developed form of instrumental rationality—that exchange and
capitalist social domination follows from
a specific type of abstract thinking. In his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason however Adorno states
clearly that, “unity is not something produced by consciousness, but it is the
essence of knowledge that arises from a consciousness, which itself is nothing
other than unity.” This unity is not
derived from the projection of a certain way of thinking; it follows from a
historical process outside the intention of any individual or group. If this
unity as terror—Enlightenment is, after all, for Horkheimer & Adorno,
totalitarian—does not follow from consciousness, then a mere revolution in
consciousness cannot be its remedy. The ‘forgetting’ that is reification cannot
therefore be the forgetting of a certain way of thinking. Indeed, even if it
were, that a reminder would be a sufficient solution is unclear. In another
passage from the late essay ‘Subject and Object,’ Adorno describes how, “the
human being is a result, not an eidos”—where
“the ontology of ‘the’ human being—the model for the construction of the
transcendental subject—is centered on the developed individual.” The transcendental subject—the Kantian
transcendental subject that, in a reign of terror, projects unity onto nature qua second nature—is a historical result. In what sense?
VII. The
Schema of Reification & the Dialectic of Enlightenment
At the very outset of his lecture series on
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Adorno
urges us to conceive of Kant’s philosophy as, “a force field, as something in
which the way abstract concepts that come into conflict with one another and
constantly modify one another really stand in for actually living forces.” Adorno famously spent
his Sundays as a teenager reading the Critique
of Pure Reason with Siegfried Kracauer. About those meetings he makes a
similar comment—under Kracauer’s tutelage the text became, “a kind of coded
text from which the historical situation of the spirit could be read… he [Kracauer]
showed me how the objective ontological and subjective idealist moments warred
within it, how the more eloquent passages in the work are the wounds this
conflict as left on theory.” The battle between
ontological realism and subjective idealism is another version of the classic
debate between realism and nominalism. For the metaphysical realist reality
consists of concrete things that are ordered according to abstract universals.
For the metaphysical nominalist reality only
consists of concrete things and to talk about the actual existence of
abstract ideas is absurd. The ‘historical situation of spirit’ in 1781—when
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was
published—was certainly that of the
Enlightenment, and in his lectures on the text Adorno clarifies the usage of
the term as deployed in Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Enlightenment refers to a, “practice in which objectivity,
existence, and absolute dignity have been described to a whole series of
assertions, doctrines, concepts, and ideas of whatever kind, which in reality
can be reduced to the products of human beings.” Kant’s reduction of the unity of nature to a
projection of the subject is, for Adorno, “nothing but the theory of nominalism
brought to the highest pitch of abstraction because it declares not merely
concepts, but everything that can be meaningfully discussed, to be the
consequence of mental activity.” Meaning is thereby limited to that experience we can combine
through synthesis; it becomes subjective through and through—reduced to
opinion. Its tendency is to unveil such entities as merely man-made
projections. In Weberian terms this is experienced as disenchantment. In Dialectic of Enlightenment this tendency
is referred to as anthropomorphism, which, further intertwining the dialectical
relation between myth and enlightenment, is, from the perspective of
Enlightenment, the “basic principle of myth.” Thus we read how, “Oedipus’
answer to the Sphinx riddle: ‘It is man!’ is the Enlightenment stereotype
repeatedly offered as information, irrespective of whether it is faced with
objective intelligence, bare schematization, fear of evil powers, or hope of
redemption. In advance, the Enlightenment recognizes as being and occurrence
only what can be apprehended in unity: its ideal is the system from which all
and everything follows.” This sense in which
Enlightenment thinking can only recognize being as a unity is resolutely
Kantian—in line with the ‘schema of reification.’ This trend continues unabated
today in the critique of social construction, as if then the construction will then
dissolve. From the point of view of Enlightenment, human reason is viewed
merely as a good and is charged with liquidating all dogma, delusion, and
knowledge whose justification appears to be simply that it has been handed
down.
However the
Enlightenment that historically contextualizes the Critique of Pure Reason was, of course, that of the German variety.
Adorno quotes a remark that there in fact was no German Enlightenment, merely
an enlightened theology: “when you look at the most illustrious names of the
representative figures of German intellectual history who are in any way
connected with the concept of the Enlightenment, you will find this saying
confirmed.”
This applies to Kant in the sense that he attempts to preserve that ontological
objectivity in the face of the increasing speed of anthropomorphism and
nominalism by locating it, seemingly paradoxically, in subjectivity. On the one
hand, Kant regards the objectivity of the world—indeed, experience itself—as an
achievement of the subject. On the other, this subjective synthesis can only
come about by recourse to a naturalization of the ideas of the world, soul, and
immortality. Thinking, in other words, is only possible because of a certain
arrangement of concepts and ideas. For Kant, these ideas—the subject of the
dogmatic metaphysics he critiques—are natural to us as a kind of given; they
are nothing but the categories that are applied beyond the realm of experience, but from which we cannot escape; a
kind of necessary illusion. The restriction given to thinking by a certain
pre-arrangement of concepts and ideas is what makes thinking possible at all.
In this sense, the Kantian subject is prototypical of the liberal political
subject—which, via the social
contract, is simultaneously subjected
to the state and a sovereign free subject himself; indeed, the latter is the
condition of the former. It is this Kantian double movement vis a vis nominalism and realism that
leads Adorno to describe him as, “the first to have conceived of the relation
of universals to the particulars subsumed under them as dialectical”—this
was the dialectical relation between mode one and mode two in the section on
the ‘schema of reification’—and the characteristic duality of the Critique of Pure Reason as the,
“mountain pass linking nominalism and realism.” This mountain pass hinges on transcendental
synthesis—namely, in the way in which the transcendental unity relies upon
concepts that exist in themselves, without which thinking as such could not be
imagined. In the section above I described how this transcendental subject is a
historical result and that the domination internal to Enlightenment unity is
not “something produced by consciousness.” Recall that the second clause in
that quotation was, “the essence of knowledge that arises from a consciousness,
which itself is nothing other than unity.” The section that follows will show the way in
which this ‘essence of knowledge’ becomes synthesis—how knowledge as ‘nothing
other than unity’ is historically determined and the sense in which the concept
of a ‘human being’—i.e., the free and equal human being which takes as its
model the transcendental subject—is a historical result.
VIII. Social
Philosophy as Tautology
In 1936 Adorno received a
130-page piece titled ‘Sociological Theory of Knowledge’ from Alfred
Sohn-Rethel, and later that year Walter Benjamin, Krackauer, and Adorno met in
Paris in to discuss his ideas for up to seven hours at a time. While Sohn-Rethel’s text
was later published in English as Intellectual
and Manual Labour: Critique of Epistemology,
both this translation and German original only appeared in the late 1970s. His
fundamental project was the combination of Kantian epistemology and Marx’s
critique of political economy. In what has become known as the ‘Nottingham letter’
Sohn-Rethel claims to prove the “identity between the formal elements of the
social synthesis and the formal components of cognition.” That
the exchange of equivalents in the exchange of commodities at the level of social synthesis —i.e., the exchange
between two equivalent things—is, in other words, formally identical to
abstract cognition; i.e., the act of synthesis establishing identity between
concept and object. For Sohn-Rethel, the fundamental forms of abstract
thought—in, for example, mathematics, the natural sciences, or, most
importantly for the purposes here, the a
priori forms of space and time and the synthetic function of the Kantian
transcendental subject—originate historically with the introduction of
the commodity form and the spread of the principles of calculability and
abstract exchange. Exchange as social activity involves an abstraction that precedes ‘thought.’ “It is the action of
exchange, and the action alone, that is abstract,” Sohn-Rethel writes. As Zizek describes it, “before thought could
arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction
was already at work in the social effectivity of the market.” Thought
here is of course not the general mental activity of human beings, it is the
intellectual labour involved in a historically specific type of thinking —where
thinking is always already the synthesis of concept (form) and
object (content) in a relation of identity. The exchange relation qua social form inaugurates a division
between intellectual and manual labour. When individuals exchange commodities
they abstract from the specific use of a good, for it is only according to its
exchange value that it can be said to be worth anything vis a vis the
market, and the particularity of this abstraction is that it originates in
action. Sohn-Rethel holds that all of the fundamental categories of Kantian
epistemology are implicit in this act, suggesting the transcendental subject
depends for its genesis on historical development—a rather scandalous thesis from
a transcendental point of view, because implicit is the historical
determination of individual subjectivity as conceived epistemologically as a knowing subject. This abstraction is real in the sense that it takes place
outside of consciousness in the act of exchange itself. That abstract thought
according to the ‘schema of reification’ is not simply a search for validity
but a reflection of historically specific social conditions clarifies the sense
in which Adorno describes the “compensatory purpose” of systematic philosophy. “Out of itself,” Adorno writes, “the
bourgeois ratio undertook to produce
the order it had negated outside itself”—the
order, in other words, of all those traditional arrangements of society previously
heterogeneous to it. “The pedantries of all systems, down to the architectonic
complexities of Kant—and even of Hegel, despite the latter’s program—are the
marks of an a priori inescapable
failure, noted with incomparable honesty in the fractures of the Kantian
system.”
The incomparable honesty of the fractures of the Kantian system will be
returned to, what I want to highlight for now is the a priori failure; namely that the failure to arrive at a completely
unified system—where the content of the world is completely captured by the form of thought according to the
schema—is itself determined by the inequality
of the exchange of commodities, dependent as it is on the exploitation of labour
and the domination of nature. As Adorno describes in Negative Dialectics, “from olden times, the main characteristic of
the exchange of equivalents has been that unequal things would be exchanged in
its name, that the surplus value of Labour would be appropriated.” Indeed,
the complete systematicity of Hegel’s system lends it a special status.
In Marx’s
theory of social form, form is not reducible to its permutations as eidos (‘idea’), morphe (‘form’) or Begriff
(concept).
For Marx then, form is not derived from an act of cognition that abstracts from
experience. There
is an objective moment constitutive of the unity of society that is not merely
a product of subjectivity—society is
not merely shaped according to some sort of additive process of the intentional
action of human beings according to a certain worldview. Form
is both real and abstract. It is precisely in this sense that, “unity is not something
produced by consciousness, but it is the essence of knowledge that arises from
a consciousness, which itself is nothing other than unity.” The unity of knowledge,
which is itself conceptual, therefore always aims at something nonconceptual. “In
truth,” Adorno writes, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to
nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality
that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature.” Domination is not
derived from the projection of a certain abstract way of thinking; this abstract
way of thinking follows, for Adorno, from a historical process outside the
intention of any individual or group. That Honneth situates Adorno on the side
of a critical theory wherein the totalitarian unity of society follows from
consciousness is incorrect. Unity is, again, not produced by consciousness:
unity is the condition of knowledge that follows from the historical
introduction of the commodity form and the integrative tendency of its
expansion. This is not, however, to
imply Adorno reduces the constituens (that
which constitutes; i.e., subject) to something empirical—i.e., society—in place
of the transcendental subject. This would be a slide into idealism. “There is
in short neither a constituens nor a constitutum, but instead these two
elements mutually produce one another in a way that can be determined but not
so that the one can be reduced to the other.” His aim is not to demonstrate the ontological
priority of the constitutum, but the
reciprocal relation between the two. It is not so much that Honneth places
Adorno on the wrong side of his distinction between the two strands of
critical—one where unity arises from consciousness and the other from
society—but that the distinction, predicated upon the establishment of a first
principles and on the establishment of an origin, is itself faulty from
Adorno’s point of view.
A similar dynamic is at
work in Adorno’s dialectical notion of progress. The dichotomy between
conceptual (subject) and nonconceptual (nature) is
itself a product of the self-preservation internal to reason which gives birth
to society, in the same way that, for Hobbes, the state of nature is not
immoral but amoral. It is only in a
cultural context that the dichotomy between nature and culture makes sense at
all. The escape from the state of nature (which, in light of ‘second nature,’
reappears now as a rather deceiving designation)—where “every man has a Right
to every thing; even on another’s body. And therefore, as long as this naturall
Right of man endureth, there can be no security for man”—itself
inaugurates the nature/culture binary. To secure self-preservation we sacrifice
this ‘natural’ right that is merely the absence of rights to enter a state of
contract so that collectively first
nature can be dominated and the preservation of each can be secured. This
integrative tendency—common to social contract theory and political philosophy
as a discourse in general—which is rational in the sense of being the condition
of self-preservation, becomes irrational when it endangers the integrated state
of preservation it itself conditioned. Adorno remarks in History and Freedom that, “the crucial contribution to a theory of
history is to be found in the idea that mankind preserves itself not despite all
the irrationalities and conflicts, but by virtue of them.”
What mankind relies on to preserve itself as a totality—i.e., reason—does so by virtue of its conflicts and
irrationalities rather than in spite of them. He goes on to describe how this
insight into society as an inherently conflictual totality can be found in the
“great bourgeois philosophers themselves”—namely, Hobbes and Kant. For Adorno, Enlightenment progress is
dialectical not because society survives despite conflict, but because of it. Not coincidentally, just
moments before this comment, Adorno says the following:
In this connection let me add that you will find that Marx
too [like Hegel] approves of this affirmation and coming together of mankind,
as well as the idea that mankind reproduces itself notwithstanding its
sacrifices and sufferings. And if we look for an element of idealism in Marx,
an idealist element in the precise philosophical meaning of the world, this
would certainly be the place to find a truly affirmative strand of his thought.
It is a strand, moreover, that fits with his predominantly optimistic view of
history. The form this Hegelian theme takes in Marx is transformed almost out
of all recognition, but retains extraordinary power. It is the highly obscure
and difficult theory of the so-called law of value. This is the summation of
all the social acts taking place through exchange. It is through this process
that society maintains itself and, according to Marx, continues to reproduce
itself and expand despite all the catastrophes that may eventuate.
Adorno
agrees with Marx that society maintains itself through exchange as an
antagonistic totality, but, as will be shown, sees no guarantee for the
reconciliation—indeed, in the reconciliation of subject and object or form and
content there is a swallowing of that thingly
part of objectivity which, in turn, robs the subject of the other that
defines it (namely, its relation to object). This
exchange relation both threatens everything with destruction by homogenizing
all that is heterogeneous at the same time as it is the cohesive force to which
society owes its growth and survival. Insofar as the form of thinking that
follows from social synthesis in exchange is the ‘schema of reification’—i.e.,
thinking according to form and content—than this sort of thinking is a
historical result. Indeed, the concept ‘human being’—insofar as this concept
has as its prototypical sediment the universal epistemological subject capable
of knowledge; where each individual ‘human being’ is capable of knowing—is as
well.
Adorno’s materialism follows partly from Marx’s theory of
social form; however, there is another way in which it can be said that Adorno
is a materialist, which is derived rather paradoxically from his reading of
Kant as bearing witness to the non-identical It is this reading that Adorno
will levy against Lukács. In the section on the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno was shown to have identified two
warring perspectives internal to the Critique
of Pure Reason—the subjective idealist and objective ontological
perspective. In Adorno’s reading, Kant’s theory of constitutive subjectivity is
his attempt to capture the two in a system. There is on the
one hand constituens (that which
constitutes; i.e., the subject) and on the other constitutum (that which is constituted; i.e., the object). Now vis a vis Marx’s theory of social form, Adorno obviously sees the
actual subjective constitution of objectivity as a fallacy. In this sense his
epistemology is materialist—the question of how actuality determines concept
formation would not occur to an idealist. Kant’s philosophy, rather than being
a statement of transhistorical validity, is a reflection of a type of thinking
that follows from the integration of society according to the exchange of
equivalents. Yet in relation to the specificity of the German Enlightenment,
Kant also attempts to salvage those
ontological categories. “The transcendental,” Adorno describes, is “the realm
through which experience becomes possible although it does not arise from
experience.”
In other words, he attempts to salvage ontology by recourse to the realm of the
transcendental—a kind of “no man’s land of knowledge positioned somewhere
between psychology and logic.” Now the transcendental
realm in Kant is not limited to those concepts and ideas that are the condition
of experience, there is of course the transcendental thing itself that is always already inaccessible to knowledge. It
is here that Adorno locates the materialism hiding in the heart of Kantian
idealism and why, Kant’s philosophy, in being the first to have conceived of
the relation of universals to the particulars subsumed under them as dialectical, is itself a kind of
dialectic of Enlightenment.
IX.
The Thing Itself, Non-Identity, and
One Sensc of Thing
Kant’s Copernican
Revolution however heralds an important terminological shift. The semantic
field at issue here involves three terms: Gegenstand,
Objekt, and Ding. For
pre-critical philosophers such as Christian Wolff, Ding designates metaphysical thinghood—everything that is possible
if not actual. The first two are two
different senses of the English word ‘object,’ Ding is the German word for ‘thing.’ Gegenstand is the object as constituted by the subject—the
phenomenological object, or, the ‘object of experience.’ Objekt refers to an object of knowledge. For Kant, Gegenstand turns into, so to speak, an Objekt once it has been related to the
functions of the understanding. Gegenstand
appears in the first sense of Ersheinung—akin
to merely looking out in one’s field of vision. Objekt appears in the second sense of Erscheinung as an object of knowledge already subsumed by the
concept given to it by the subject. This will be clarified as the section moves
along. The knowledge of the understanding “consists in the determinate relation
of given representations to an object [Objekt],”
and Objekt is described as “that in
the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united.” The Objekt of knowledge able to be known through the concepts of the
understanding first requires the mediation by sensibility that, in turn, is the
condition of possibility of Gegenstand.
Ding is then recoded as the unknowable thing
itself.
These three different
types of objectivity correspond to Kant’s three-layered epistemology. For Kant,
knowledge only comes after, so to speak, the object passes through three
layers. The first is the ‘given-ness’ of the object that is the condition of
possibility of intuition,
defined as “that through which it [cognition] immediately relates to
them [objects]. The second is the
condition of possibility of this ‘given-ness,’ or sensibility; i.e.,
“the capacity to acquire representations through the way in which we are
affected by objects.” The third is the sovereign act of synthesis of the
subject—i.e., the “transcendental unity of apperception” which bestows unity
upon this diversity. Kant’s so called ‘Copernican Revolution’ is precisely that
objects conform to knowledge rather than vice
versa.
These a priori forms are the
formal subjective conditions that
allow the matter of intuitions to appear (in the first sense) at all—the pure a
priori forms of intuition: space for objects exterior to the subject
and time for those interior to the subject, which are both “transcendentally
ideal” and “empirically real.” The former in the sense that they do not really
exist as properties of things in themselves, the latter in the sense that space
and time are applicable universally to experience. Space “is nothing as soon as
we leave out the condition of the possibility of all experience” for it is this very
condition. After all, “thoughts without intuition are empty, intuitions without
concepts are blind.” Without this relation knowledge
is impossible because concepts would be empty of content. The Critique of Pure Reason as a whole is dependent
on this relation to pure intuition, without which knowledge would be empty of
content. The relationship between constituens
and constitutum cannot be reduced
to one or the other; “subject and object do not solidly confront each
other…they reciprocally permeate each other.” However for Kant to maintain this duality, Adorno
argues, he posits “a kind of fundamental stratum of knowledge” that presents itself to
the subject as pure empirical immediacy, such that it appears as if the
spontaneity of the understanding outlined in Transcendental Logic depends on
the positing of this stratum. Kant’s critical analysis of consciousness, in
other words, is, for Adorno, dependent on the positing of a
transcendental realm of ‘things in themselves’ that is not coextensive with but
from which consciousness receives
content. The objective ontological moment of Kant’s philosophy is therefore not
limited to the realm of transcendental categories and ideas but is reflected par excellence in the Kantian thing itself.Adorno’s point is basically
the following: if what marks Kant’s Copernican revolution is the move from the
question ‘how does cognition conform to objects?’ to one that asks ‘how do
objects conform to cognition?’ does one not necessarily posit an aspect of
objectivity that simply cannot conform
to cognition (i.e., the ‘thing itself’)?
Recall how I claimed
that Adorno, unlike Lukács, emphasizes the ‘potentiation of reification’ that
appears always already beyond human
beings in the sense that it was not reducible to the self-alienation of the
subject in the form of objectification. Recall how I also claimed that Adorno
saw the a priori failure of
systematic philosophy to establish a relation of identity in accordance with
the social synthesis of commodity exchange as reflective of the actually
existing inequality and exploitation
that is the condition of the exchange of commodities in the first place, and
that it was Kant who expressed this failure with an incomparable honesty.
The sign of this honesty
is the thing itself—that inequivalence which is the condition of equivalence
or identity between form and content, in the same way that the inequality of the exploitation is the
condition of the production and then exchange of commodities as equivalents.
This is Kant’s materialist aspect that Adorno mobilizes against the
reconciliation of form and content in Lukács and Hegel. The same philosophy,
therefore, that formulates the schema of reification in the relation between
form and content—that totalitarian systematicity that dissolves all that is
other than it—contains internal to it a moment that is not it: thing-ness that is not reducible to
objectivity as self-alienated subjectivity. Kant of course was not unaware of
the fractures in his system. Reason, by its own definition, is realizable. The understanding
however—which, according to the Critique
of Pure Reason, was supposed to ‘legislate for nature’—had failed to
permanently drive out the possibility of anarchy:
Although
experience constitutes a system in accordance with transcendental laws, which
contain the condition of possibility of experience in general, there is still
possible such an infinite multiplicity of empirical laws and such a great
heterogeneity of forms of nature, which would belong to particular experience,
that the concept of a system in accordance with these (empirical) laws must be
entirely alien to the understanding, and neither the possibility, let alone the
necessity, of such a whole can be conceived.
This possibility of
anarchy and the inconceivability of the systematic whole that follows drive
Kant into the labyrinthine Critique of
the Power of Judgment, where the aesthetic sweeps in to salvage
systematicity. The aesthetic, in other words, saves the ‘schema of
reification’—the unified whole under which all content must fall for knowledge
to be possible. It is now possible to return to Habermas’s critique of Adorno
as a partisan of irrationality in Dialectic
of Enlightenment. I will then
discuss the connection between the realization of reason and the realm of the
aesthetic for Adorno, the clue to which is located in the thing itself.
X.
Habermas’s Critique of Adorno
Habermas characterizes Dialectic of Enlightenment as a
Nietzschean attack on Enlightenment reason: “It is no longer Marx, but
Nietzsche who points the way. It is no longer a theory of society saturated
with history, but a radical critique of reason denouncing the union of reason
and domination.” Habermas’s fundamental
critique of Nietzsche is his equation of power and validity: “a theory is
without foundation if the categorical distinction between claims of power and
validity is the basis on which every theoretical
work must take place.” The unmasking that is
the supposed function of critique is liquidated. The shock one experiences in
reading Nietzsche is not the experience of original critical insight, but the collapse of the very categories
which account for category mistakes of existential relevance—precisely those
category mistakes which critical theory is supposed to remedy. In being unable
to account for its own grounds, such a radical criticism finds itself enmeshed
in a performative contradiction: “If Enlightenment is caught up in an
unstoppable process of self-destruction, where then would such a critique,
which made this diagnosis, have a right to such a diagnosis?” Adorno and Nietzsche
find themselves in the same predicament. “If they do not want to give up the
goal of an ultimate unmasking and want to carry
on their critique,” Habermas writes, “then
they must preserve at least one standard for their explanation of the
corruption of all reasonable standards.” For both, this standard
is an aesthetic one. Indeed, the reason why the comparison with Nietzsche is
instructive is because the latter “calls attention to the aesthetic horizon of
experience which both guides and motivates cultural diagnosis” common to both. For
Habermas, Adorno’s turn to the aesthetic is a turning away from reason. Adorno
the unrelenting pessimist—a characterization so common it does not need
citing—offers a critical theory allied with the counter-Enlightenment. Never mind that Horkheimer and Adorno, in the
preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, state
that the intention of the text is precisely a conceptualization of a “positive
concept of Enlightenment.”
Before expanding on this
connection between the aesthetic and reason it should first be noted that any
critique of Adorno centering itself on a reading of Dialectic Enlightenment stumbles upon the question of the text’s
construction. Horkheimer and Adorno are listed as the authors, unless of course
it was Adorno and Horkheimer, at times Horkheimer and at times Adorno, or a
genuine hybrid. As Hullot-Kentor points out, for Habermas to square his
critique of Adorno as Nietzschian in light of this issue of a textual
construction, he attributes the lines allowing for the possibility of a
recuperation of the Enlightenment to Horkheimer, while attributing the overly
pessimistic ones to Adorno:
In the text…the
points of reference for this position [the recuperation of Enlightenment] can
only be found in those chapters that betray Horkheimer’s hand. I mean that the
insistence on an almost eschatologically potentiated power of theory; the
belief in an anti-authoritarian tendency in Enlightenment; and finally, the
conjuring of a self-transcendent enlightenment. Other passages, which I would
attribute rather to Adorno, stand in crass contradiction to these positions.
This charge protects
Habermas from the multiple passages that suggest the purpose of the text is not
to destroy the Enlightenment but to save Enlightenment from itself—to salvage
the Enlightenment through a critique of Enlightenment, in the same way that
Adorno reads Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason as a rescuing of metaphysics through a critique of metaphysics. This would certainly fall
in line with the dialectical concept of progress outlined above. Consider, for
example, this sentence: “by virtue of this remembrance of nature in the
subject, in whose fulfillment the unacknowledged truth of all culture lies
hidden, Enlightenment is universally opposed to domination.” How can Enlightenment be
universally opposed to domination when Enlightenment is domination? Or, consider this formulation—“ruthlessly, in spite
of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own
self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to
shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.” What is the meaning of
the appositive phrase here? In what sense is the extinguishing of
self-consciousness from Enlightenment in spite
of itself? Perhaps the critic can claim that Adorno unknowingly contradicts
himself; however, this charge could be countered with Adorno’s own words, which
are worth quoting at length and can be found in the eighth lecture—titled,
fittingly, “the concept of the self”—in the series on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
You may have had
the experience of finding yourself in a discussion in which, instead of
focusing on the subject in question, people have tried to pin you down by
arguing that you have contradicted yourself. They mean by this that you have
failed to use a concept consistently, or that before using a particular
concept—usually a highly emotive one—it is important to arrive at a clear
definition of it…I do not wish to discuss the psychology of this approach. It
is in reality a kind of compartmentalized thinking, the thinking of the
ordinary man, the petty bourgeois who likes everything to be neat and tidy, and
who feels secure if his machinery does not break down and his ideas all
function smoothly and without disruption. But such criticism makes us forget
what philosophy is all about…I should like to assert that the profundity of a
philosophy…is not a matter of its capacity for revolving contradictions, but
rather of its ability to bring to the surface contradictions that are deeply
embedded in the subject under investigation, to raise such contradictions to
the level of consciousness, and at the same time, to understand the necessity
for them; that is, to understand their meaning.
The subject of
investigation is Enlightenment, and perhaps ironically but not surprisingly,
Enlightenment is a highly emotive concept for Habermas. Any critique of Adorno
that claims his ‘turn’ to the aesthetic (which, if the thesis regarding the
inextricability of reason and aesthetics is true, is not a turn at all) stems
from a pessimism towards reason misses that, for Adorno, as for Kant, reason
and the aesthetic are internal to each other. The division Habermas draws between reason and aesthetics is not
Adorno’s but Habermas’s. The radical nature of Kant’s epistemology established
in the Critique of Pure Reason relies
for good reason fundamentally on a Transcendental Aesthetic.
XI. Reason & Aesthetic
Alongside the doubling
of objectivity into the empirical (phenomena)
and transcendental (noumenal) comes
the doubling of the world itself into a physical world and a metaphysical
world; into a knowable empirical world—i.e., the nature of natural science—and
a beyond—the unknowable noumenal realm of things-in-themselves.
Existence becomes simultaneously wholly undefined, abstract and ethereal
(the noumena) and immediate (phenomena, although only immediate
insofar as it is mediated by the subjective a
priori of space and time) albeit the latter is relegated to mere appearance—the
mere immediate interconnection of phenomena that acts as a fundamental stratum.
The true nature of existence, so to speak, appears as if it were always already
outside our grasp—and the human path to truth is, as is so often reiterated by
Wise Men, never-ending but edifying anyways. It is never ending because it does
not actually appear; indeed, it cannot
appear, as the condition of appearance is precisely the subjective mediation of
the a priori forms of space and time
from the Transcendental Aesthetic. It is rather the possibility that is the unique status of the judgment of the
beautiful, as will be shown below. The constitutive (non)apparent opacity of Ding both pulls reason along a path of
infinite self-perfection at the same time that it threatens to crush reason
altogether.
Reason must be realizable, but if experience is limited to the empirical this
possibility is precluded a priori. As
mentioned above, it is this preclusion of the realization of reason and the
possibility of anarchy driven by the opacity
of the thing itself; indeed, it
necessitates the Kantian distinction between a reflective and determinate
judgment derived from his analysis of aesthetic experience in the third
critique.
The difference between a
reflective and determinate judgment can be thought in terms of the distinction
between application and acquisition. Whereas a determinate judgment subsumes an
object under a concept so as to acquire knowledge, a reflective judgment finds
and applies concepts to a given particular object. The demand of a
reflective judgment is not identity between concept and object. It is a search
for unknown concepts expressing the uniqueness of a particular object. In a
determinate judgment the subject limits his
or her own experience of an object via determinate
predication. The weight of inexpressibility felt in the presence of beauty is
precisely this experience of lacking a definitive concept that halts experience
with a determination. This inexpressibility is captured in Kant’s definition of
the beautiful as, “that which pleases universally without requiring a concept.” The specificity of a
judgment of beauty—indeed, for aesthetic judgments in general—is neither immediate sensation, for this would make
it merely agreeable, nor is it a concept, for this would make it logical.
Beauty is neither merely felt nor merely understood—the ground of a judgment of
pure beauty is rather a kind of aperture caused by the suspension of mere
feeling and mere understanding. This momentary interruption of determinative
cognition is what Kant describes as the free play of the faculties—the free play of the
imagination, which presents the object to concepts lying within the domain of
the faculty of understanding, and the understanding itself. For Kant,
imagination is that which ‘synthesizes the manifold of intuition’ under the
legislation of the understanding; it is only after the imagination presents the manifold of intuition to
the understanding and that manifold is synthesized with a concept that an object
becomes an objekt—i.e., an object of
perception. When a manifold is synthesized with the concepts blue and round,
for example, the outcome of the experience will be that of a blue and round
object, yet the sense in which there exists a ‘free play’ between the
imagination and understanding is the lack of conceptuality of the
relation—experience is not halted at the mere observation that the object is
blue and round. Adorno describes this the following way in Aesthetic Theory: “Aesthetic feeling is not the feeling that is
aroused: it is astonishment vis-à-vis what is beheld rather than vis-à-vis what
it is about; it is a being overwhelmed by what is a conceptual and yet
indeterminate, not the subjective affect released, that in the case of
aesthetic experience may be called feeling. It goes to the heart of the matter,
is the feeling for it and not the reflex of the observer.” The ‘key to the critique
of taste’ is precisely that the disinterested
subjective movement of the mind grounds the pleasure of an object.
Aesthetic form in this sense is subjective. The pure judgment of beauty is
characterized by a “purposiveness without purpose”—it remains in the realm
of the understanding in that it engages in “free play” with the imagination,
but also has no purpose in the sense
of a definitive end because there is
no eventual subsumption under a concept resulting in synthesis. Indeed, it is disinterested pleasure in that there are
no extrinsic considerations in the judgment of the object itself—it is not
derived, in other words, from any inclination or desire one might have towards
the object, for if the pleasure of beauty was derived from desire or other
extrinsic inclinations there could be no universality; the object’s beauty
would be as varied as all the possible inclinations each subject might bring to
it. In other words, there can be nothing given
in thought on the side of the subject in its approach to the object. If
Enlightenment reason is totalitarian in the sense that the concept subsumes the
object without deference to its individual particularity, the harmonious free
play of the faculties without subsumption that is the specificity of aesthetic
judgment points towards that part of Enlightenment reason that is not, and
intimates towards the possibility of utopia in the postulate—but only a
postulate—that, “if one calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to
have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone, whereas any
private sensation would be decisive only for him alone and his satisfaction.” In this sense a reflective judgment is
simultaneously inside and outside the ‘schema of reification.’ On
the one hand, it is inside in that it involves both form and content—after the
division between intellectual and manual labour, one must, after all, think according to the schema. On the other, it is
outside in that it does not end in
predication; it does not conclude
with an act of synthesis that establishes a relationship of identity between
form and content. The disinterested judgment of pure
beauty is that type of judgment that, while not jettisoning the schema of
reification (to do so would be to have recourse to irrationality; thinking is
always already thinking according to form and content qua intellectual Labour) avoids the totalitarian moment of
synthesis, where the object is subjected to the straightjacket of form. That Adorno ends up in
the realm of aesthetics is not evidence of his pessimism towards reason but
because, as it is for Kant, aesthetics is precisely the realm of the
possibility of reason’s realization—even if this possibility is only salvaged
through recourse to an indeterminate infinity. This is consistent with the
stated aim of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment—a positive concept of Enlightenment.
XII.
Genesis & Validity
It is in Adorno’s book
on Husserl—his Metacritique of
Epistemology—that one finds the line “the dualism of form and content is the schema of
reification.”
In Adorno’s reading, Husserl’s primary concern was not how experience was
generated, but what content experience would have to have to be objectively
valid. The interest
of Husserl’s thought was a scientific one in that it prioritized the
objective validity of experience. Yet as Adorno points out, the thesis that
restricts itself to the validity of the content, “ignores the fact that the
content of experience is itself a ‘generating’ in which subjective and
objective moments are chemically united…judgments must both express some
thingly content and originate it through synthesis.”
This is the precisely the antinomy
between genesis and validity that, as Muller Doohm points out, Adorno hoped
Sohn-Rethel to solve.
To disregard the generation of the content of experience is to disregard the
immanent tension in synthesis itself—the immanent tension which Kant bears
witness to in the thing itself—that
concepts always refer to nonconceptualities. In eliding this tension however,
Husserl concerns himself solely with the form
of a logical judgment, and therefore the very dynamic internal the schema
of reification. Adorno attributes Husserl’s lack of interest in becoming—his
lack of interest, in other words, in the transformation of the representation
of the world which, qua second
nature, is historical—to the ‘attitude of science,’ which “anxiously fences
itself off from the structure of science as a whole for the sake of its own
putative dignity.”
The primary interest of Husserl’s
thought was the ‘attitude of science’ and its concern with validity of the
contents of experience. Recall that a condition of a pure judgment of beauty is
precisely that it is disinterested.
Adorno’s considerations of the problem of genesis and
validity can be traced all the way back to his inaugural lecture in 1931—titled
“The Actuality of Philosophy”—where the young Adorno first laid out his
conception of a philosophical program.
Drawing on the early work of Walter Benjamin, in particular the latter’s
‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to his The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, Adorno argued against all existing schools
of European philosophy must jettison the category of totality—the idea that
function of philosophy is systematic explanation—shifting the discipline
towards interpretation.
Both Benjamin and Adorno reject the idea of philosophy as a self-sustaining
system as though it were scientific or mathematics. After critiquing the
various main schools of philosophical thought in Europe at the time, the one
example he gives of what can properly be called a philosophical program is precisely Lukács’s attempt to harness
Marx’s analysis of the commodity form to “unriddle the Kantian problem of the thing-in-itself.” Adorno does not,
however, see his program as synonymous, for problem of the thing-itself is not solved by Lukács in the sense that,
…somehow the social conditions might
be revealed under which the thing-in-itself came into existence, as Lukács even
thought the solution to be; for the truth content of a problem is in principle
different from the historical and psychological conditions out of which it
grows. But it might be possible from a sufficient construction of the commodity
structure the thing-in-itself problem absolutely disappeared: that the
historical figure of the commodity and of exchange value just like a source of
light laid free the form of a reality over whose hidden meaning the
investigation of the thing of the thing-in-itself problem troubled itself in
vain, because it doesn’t have any hidden meaning which would be redeemable from
its one-time and first-time historical appearance.
Whereas, in Adorno’s reading, Lukács believed the solution
to the thing-in-itself problem could be located in the revelation of the social
conditions that gave birth to it—such as the proletariat overcoming the society that finds the origin of its value in their
own labour—for Adorno, “the truth content of a problem is in principle
different from the historical and psychological conditions out of which it
grows.” The truth-content is not a question of historical origin. Indeed, there
may not be any deeper meaning to the problem than its one-time historical
appearance. Adorno characterizes the category of origin in the following way:
The category of the root, the origin, is category of
dominion. It confirms that a man ranks first because he was there first; it
confirms the autochthon against the newcomer, the settler against the migrant.
The origin—seductive because it will not be appeased by the derivative, by
ideology—is itself an ideological principle.
The claim to origin is,
“itself the act in which domination insists that, where rights are concerned,
priority must be ceded to what has come priori.” In Dialectic
of Enlightenment reason’s turn to the irrational turn leaves history in
thrall to regression if it remains determined by the domination of nature.
Indeed, calls for returning to some edenic reflects for Adorno merely a desire for
nature to be dominated in the name of itself and the institution of natural homogeneity—the
institution of which is precisely the modus
operandi of that first mode of the schema of reification.
XIII. Contextualizing Adorno’s
Critique of Lukács
Whereas the 1927 study on Kant and Freud shows no influence
of Lukács’s ideology critique, the critical analysis of Kierkegard written in
1930 was heavily indebted to his concepts of ‘reification,’ ‘commodity
structure,’ and ‘fetishism.’ Here, Adorno praises Lukács for being the only one
who fully understood the extent to which Kierkegaard “steadfastly challenged
the identity of thought and being.”
In terms of the ‘Actuality of Philosophy’ lecture discussed above, it is at
least clear that, if Lukács’s solution is not Adorno’s, the problematic laid
out by the former orients latter’s work. The tendency to treat Lukács as a kind
of negative object is repeated in Adorno’s critique of method in the context of
Lukács’s attempt to reground Marxist orthodoxy as method, reflected in Adorno’s repeated claim that ‘dialectics is
not a standpoint.’
As Adorno’s career progressed and Lukács’s continued loyal to the Soviet Union—even
as it was overtaken by Stalinism—the tenor of Adorno’s criticism increased in vigor. In his Introduction
to Dialectics Adorno offers a broad assessment of Lukács’s intellectual
arc:
If we consider the entire later work
of Gyorgy Lukács, who must undoubtedly be credited in the early years with
reawakening a real sense for dialectical thought in the materialist version of
the dialect we can observe at every stage just how dialectic in its most
dogmatic form has prevented him from reaching genuine dialectic at all…we are
confronted with a host of value judgments spun out of rigified concepts simply
adopted from the dialectic.
In the same series he describes his 1952 Destruction of Reason as “symptomatic of
the vulgarization of dialectics” and branded the book as one that, “should
never have seen the light of day,”
going on to describe Lukács’s “total indifference to matters of linguistic
expression” as representative of the “undeniable measure of the ossification or
abandonment of the inner dialectical movement of thought.”
Marcus Huhr points out that, despite Adorno taking up a very similar set of
problems, there is no reference in his entire oeuvre to Lukács’s Young
Hegel.
Thanks to Huhr’s sifting of the Frankfurt archives we know that there
exists a two-page summary of Lukács’s book bearing the title ‘re: economy and
society in the young Hegel.’
Adorno seems to have been impressed. No less than twice, according to Huhr,
Adorno inscribes the phrase “important passage.” Towards the conclusion of an
otherwise positive summary, Adorno notes that Lukács, “out of anxiety in
respect to the guns” did not dare bring out the “materialistic element” in
Hegel himself, but only from the perspective of Marx. This materialist element
will be explored in the section that follows. The “guns” here are presumably
Soviet, and Adorno’s quip here foreshadows what is Adorno’s most full-throated
and distilled critique of Lukács in Negative
Dialectics, which is worth quoting at length:
There is a good deal of irony in the
fact that the brutal and primitive functionaries who more than forty years back
damned Lukács as a heretic, because of the reification chapter in his important
History and Class Consciousness, did
sense the idealistic nature of his conception. We can no more reduce dialectics
to reification than we can reduce it to any other isolated category, however
polemical. The cause of human suffering, meanwhile, will be glossed over rather
than denounced in the lament about reification. The trouble is with the
conditions that condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and would yet be
changeable by human action; it is not primarily with people and with the way
conditions appear to people. Considering the possibility of total disaster,
reification is an epiphenomenon, and even more so is the alienated coupled with
reification, the subjective state of consciousness that corresponds to it.
XIV.
Hegel’s Materialist Element
If, via Sohn-Rethel, Kant bore witness in the thing itself to the inequality that is the condition of equality at
the level of social synthesis, then the systematic equivalence between subject
and object Hegel locates in the concept Spirit that is both abstract and real
is a reflection of the principle of equivalence generally. Such an equivalence
pledges allegiance to domination. Hegel’s idealism, by positing the
idealistic identity of identity and non-identity, where, “everything ultimately
collapses into the subject as absolute spirit…becomes false when it mistakenly
turns the totality of Labour into something existing in itself, when it
sublimates its principle into the actus
purus of spirit, and tangentially transfigures something produced by human
beings, something fallible and conditioned, into something eternal and right.” With Hegel, Adorno believes thought to be
dialectically driven by its response to objects. Against Hegel, Adorno holds
that, “to equate the negation of negation with positivity is the quintessence
of identification; it is the formal principle in its purest form.”
On the one hand, negation is constitutive of thought in its experience of
objects, but on the other hand, there is no guaranteed production of a positive
outcome or reconciliation.
Before moving onto the relation between Spirit and Labour I will refer briefly Hegel’s
critique of formal logic which both bears witness to the experience of the non-identical but, driven into positivity by
determinate negation, ends up in the absolute idealism. “Philosophy,” as Adorno
puts it, “can neither circumvent such negation nor submit to it.”
In his Introduction to Dialectics Adorno
himself recounts Hegel’s critique of the correspondence theory of truth. He
does in the following suggestive demonstration. Take the proposition ‘X
is a human being,’ where the logical species ‘human being’ subsumes X. The
argument runs as follows: If you say ‘X is a human being” as is the case in the
usual logical form A is B, the A that is supposed to be B is not the whole of
B. B is simply a universal, and A is an instance—one specific example—of B.
There is identity in the sense that A [i.e., X] is subsumed under the concept B
[i.e., human being] but the identification
is not complete. The problem is with concept B [i.e., the human being] for if I
subsume A under B, then B includes everything possible which the individual A
is in fact not—or rather, the concept human includes everything possible which
the individual X is not. The point is that implied in the concept of human
being are a whole host of categories (for example, freedom, individuation,
autonomy) that are excluded when a strictly identical relation is drawn between
it and X. “He [Hegel] would not simply content himself, therefore, with a
primitive biological definition of ‘human being’” Adorno claims, “it is nothing
but an act of arbitrariness to omit or ignore such categories in order to
provide an operational definition of the human being as something which
actually possesses these or those generic characteristics of a biological
kind.”
The latter joins subject and object in a connection of identity, and
abstraction is made from the fact that the subject has a greater number of
determinacies then the predicate. In the logical judgment X [subject/form] is
Human Being [predicate/content] one abstracts from X so as to fit it under
Human Being. This judgment is speculative in the sense that, once one tries to
fit X under Human Being, one realizes that there are a number of determinations
in the predicate Human Being that overflow X—a surplus Adorno describes as an
‘emphatic moment.’ The specificity of a speculative as compared to a logical
judgment is derived upon reflection. Recall
that for Kant, content somehow reaches the form from outside; the material on
the side of content flows into these forms that are valid for those contents,
but not valid in themselves. Hegel’s point is that, when the subject reflects
upon on those forms, those forms themselves become content to the subject
performing the judgment, thereby rendering the absolute distinction between the
two inconceivable. The
non-identity of subject and predicate
becomes essential to the judgment and the experience
of this non-identity and then determinate negation of this non-identity is
the condition of the subject overcoming the contradiction between its
categories and the world. Adorno is resolutely Hegelian in his assertion of the irreducible
relation between constitutum and constituens and thus the experience of
the non-identical, but the Hegelian identity between conceptual and the
non-conceptuality is precluded by a materialist epistemology that holds the
formal unity of consciousness that is itself conceptual to rely on
conceptuality.
“If, as in Hegel, in the totality everything
ultimately collapses into the subject as absolute spirit, idealism thereby
cancels itself out, because no difference remains through which the subject
could be identified as something distinct, as subject.” That the particular cannot be subsumed is, in
other words, simultaneously affirmed and denied in Hegel’s philosophy. Affirmed
in the fact that non-identity is essential to judgment; denied in its
overcoming via determinate negation
that ends up as a positive. Hegel's philosophy is contradictory according the
criteria it gives itself. In the first instance, it is dynamic—“the microanalysis of
individual categories, which simultaneously appears as their objective
self-reflection, was to let each concept pass into its otherness without regard
to an overlay from above; to Hegel, the totality of this movement meant the
system.”
Form itself becomes content; constituens and
constitutum are shown to be
reciprocal. And yet in his “Unitarian principle”—i.e., absolute spirit—that is
simultaneously “being-in-itself and becoming” thinking is arbitrarily halted.
“At
each new dialectical step,” Adorno writes, “Hegel goes against the intermittent
insight of his own logic, forgets the rights of the preceding step, and thus prepares
to copy what he chided as abstract negation: an abstract—to wit, a subjectively
and arbitrarily confirmed—positivity.” This
is the sense in which Hegel proceeds methodologically. “Idealism becomes false,”
Adorno writes, “when it mistakenly turns the totality of labour into something
existing in itself, when it sublimates its principle into a metaphysical one,
into the actus purus of spirit, and
tendentially transfigures something produced by human beings, something
fallible and conditioned, along with labour itself, which is the suffering of
human beings, into something eternal and right.” In
the subsumption of non-identity by labour one subsumes the non-identical at the
level of social synthesis in the domination of nature, thereby jettisoning this
genuinely objective and turning it merely into alienated subjectivity that
returns to itself. The ‘object’ in the dialectic between subject and object,
insofar as it is subsumed, is not a genuine objectivity beyond the subject.
Whereas Hegel escapes the subject’s confinement in the subject-object dualism
by positing the identity between the two, for Adorno, this confinement is
constitutive of thinking qua intellectual
labor—that kind of thinking that is a historical product. At the level of
social synthesis, Adorno agrees with the Marx of the Critique of the Gotha Program, quoting Marx’s comment regarding the
claim that “labour is the source of all wealth and culture.” Marx writes: “Labour
is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use
values…as Labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature,
human Labour power.”
Hegel cannot read spirit as an isolated aspect of labour—namely intellectual labour—but
dissolves labour into a moment of spirit. Adorno finds this conflation endemic finds
this endemic to philosophy and bourgeois thought in general: “those who have at
their disposal the Labour of others [such as the philosopher] consider it
absolute and primary, precisely because Labour is only Labour for others. The
metaphysics of labour and the appropriation of the labour of others are
complementary.”
Hegel’s philosophy is the bourgeois celebration of labour taken to the extreme,
yet at the same time, the identification of labour with the absolute expresses
a truth about labour: “to the extent to which the world forms a system, it
becomes one precisely through the closed universality of social labour; social
labour is in fact radical mediation, both between man and nature and also
within spirit, which exists for itself, which tolerates nothing outside itself
and forbids remembrance of anything outside it.”
In other words, the truth of Hegel’s absolute idealism is the ‘closed
universality’ of the integrated antagonistic totality that has formed over society,
making it impossible to step outside or backwards into a different world. It
did not occur to Hegel that, “the Kantian discontinuities register the very
moment of non-identity that is an indispensable part of his own conception of
the philosophy of identity.” The
sense in which the “whole is the false”
is the self-sufficiency of human labor at the expense of nature. The world in
which labour mediates between society and nature is inescapable; indeed, the
self-sustaining expansive nature of capital is inescapable. Against the drive
determining Hegel’s interest in systematic presentation, Adorno suggests “Negative Dialectics might be called an
‘anti-system.’”
XV.
The Other Sense of Thing
In his lectures on
metaphysics Adorno identifies in the concept ‘concept’ a “curious detemporalization
of what it [the concept] refers to.” “The concept as such,”
he remarks, “once established, is not temporal; it relates, of course, to
something temporal, it has its temporal content…but in the first place, through
its formation, the concept is independent of time.” When an object is
subsumed under an object, in other words, the object is frozen; frozen for us—namely, we freeze it by
appropriating it; by thinking of it as our own; by thinking of it as something. Adorno points out the way in
which, for Kant, the timeless transcendental subject is dependent on something
temporal and subject to change. “As soon as you actually take what amounts in
this theory to the constitutum and
interpret it as the precondition of the constituens,” Adorno claims, “you will destroy the entire system. Literally. Because this would
be to make the transcendental dependent on the temporal and it would become
subject to change and modification.”
Now this lack of
temporality is not limited to the concept ‘concept’ but has implications for
the concept of the thing. Not the Ding—the thing itself—but the thing that appears as an object of
knowledge, which, at the level of social synthesis, is the relation between
commodities qua exchange value rather
than necessary labour time and use value—a relation between things rather than a social relation. To
explain this thing Adorno offers his
students essentially a summary of the shift in Hegel’s Phenomenology from “Sense-Certainty” to “Perception” to “Force and
Understanding.” This movement mirrors the previously mentioned three
epistemological stages that, for Kant, the object must pass through for
knowledge to be possible. “Sense-Certainty” refers to the claim of direct
immediacy passively received by the mind from the outside word. This
corresponds to the contents of the sensory manifold that are mediated by the subjective
a priori intuitions of space and time
in Kant. “Perception” is this form of awareness of the object considered as a
thing with properties given in experience. In Kant, this stage corresponds to
the experience of objects occurring after the sensory manifold of
“Sense-Certainty” is first, presented to
the understanding by the imagination and then brought under a category to
produce the object of knowledge; i.e., as an objekt. In “Force and Understanding,” the subject itself reflects
upon the unity of the single object and its multiple properties. In Kant, this
corresponds with the analysis of the possibility of objects of knowledge in the
context of a Newtonian theory of natural science—i.e., that empirical nature
functions according to certain mechanical laws. Hegel directs ‘natural
consciousness’—i.e., both the consciousness of the reader and the modern
philosophical consciousness that Hegel sees as resolutely Kantian—to follow
phenomenologically the different stages of appearance.
Adorno replays the first
movements of the Phenomenology, showing
how things of perception are bundles
of relations held together by a subjectively given law rather than a
self-sufficient being (in that same way that a commodity, whose value at first
appears a relation between things, is actually constituted by relations between
human beings). When faced with any
object we can only have one partial view at any one time. The students at first
can see only the front of the lecture hall. If they were to turn around they
would see the back wall. If they were to turn left…etc. The law that tells you
to link all of these perceptions with the memory of previous perceptions holds
the ‘lecture hall’ qua single Thing
together. “The law, in short,” he claims, “tells you what will happen and what
has transpired;” “it is nothing but the law which tells you that by linking a
present perception, connecting it in accordance with laws, with past and future
perceptions, and with whatever expectations you may have…this law is in fact
the thing you are concerned with at that particular moment.” The function of the law is the provision of unity to
the lecture hall between the different points of view one can have of it, and
the fact that this functional equation of phenomena operates in a strange zone
in-between ‘what has transpired’ and ‘what will happen’ renders it outside
time; frozen—so that the thing can be thought as a totality of moments. “A
Thing is nothing other than the synthesis
of its individual appearances.”Adorno equates this
function of law with conceiving of an object mathematically—predictable based
on certain laws not subject to change. Social relations appear as relations between
things in the following way—the
historical generation of concepts and social constitution of value is
perpetually forgotten, as the movement of the social totality appears as if it
were determined according to natural laws. Reification is indeed a forgetting,
but not merely that of a type of thinking or worldview.
XVI. Lukács’s Idealism
Recall
how there is, on the one hand, the objectivity that is subjectively constituted
and, on the other, the completely alien thing that exceeds the subject. In the
identity between concept and actuality posited by Hegel he collapses the two,
rendering objectivity as merely a limit to subjective autonomy, yet the experience of the non-identical is the
‘materialist’ aspect in Hegel insofar as it bears witness to non-identity. Lukács
misses this materialist aspect when he takes the identity posited by Hegel
between concept and non-conceptuality and applies it to the level of social
synthesis, thus Adorno criticizes Lukács for conflating objectification and reification—for conflating what is
just the alienated subjective activity of the proletariat and objectivity that
is always already outside its grasp. Now Lukács himself accuses History and Class Consciousness of
idealism, describing how “objectification is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be
eliminated from human life in society;” human
thoughts and actions always objectify themselves into societal forms and this
cannot be overcome. Adorno’s critique however is not over the inescapability of
the objectification of human action, but the reduction of social institutions
to the mere objectification of human
action rather than as the inexorable mediation of subjective activity. It is
not the act of positing the proletariat as subject, but the positing of a first at, which leads to a definition of
autonomy as the lack of objective mediation rather than its condition. Because objectivity is
not reducible to objectification of human action alone, Adorno wants to replace
an understanding of autonomy as freedom from
objectivity to an acknowledgement of the “priority of the object.” Whereas Lukács’s emphasis is on the subjective
mediation of the object, Adorno’s is on the objective mediation of the subject.
The emphasis in the former case leads not simply to an overestimation of the
capacity of overthrowing these institutions, but the fear of re-creating
precisely those conditions of domination.
XVII. Lukács and the Thing
as Money
At
the level of social synthesis the liquidation of reification involves the collective
realization that the value of a commodity is not derived from its relation to
other commodities, but the social labour congealed in it, and that therefore the
social totality is not governed by natural laws but is historically and
socially constructed. What is necessary is to rise to a certain standpoint of knowing—rise, in other words, as
natural consciousness does in the Phenomenology,
to the point where the thing of
perception is shown to be not self-sufficient based on objective natural laws
but by subjectivity. The unity of the
thing is then demystified as subjectively constituted; exchange and the value
of commodities are then revealed as the product of human labor; the appearance
of exchange value is unveiled as use value; what appeared as a relation between
things becomes a relation between persons, yet I want to argue that Lukács’s focus
on appearance in this the ‘basic phenomenon’ leads him to elide aspects of
capitalist reproduction that quite literally do not appear. “The trouble” after all, “is with the conditions that condemn
mankind to impotence and apathy and would yet be changeable by human action; it
is not primarily with people and with the way conditions appear to people.”
The
way in which the emphasis on appearance misses, in Adorno’s phrasing, the ‘conditions
that condemn mankind to impotence,’ is the way in which capital, “circulates in
the shape of a constant change of form, its existence is process, it is the
unity of its form, it is the constant change between the form of generality and
the form of particularity, of money and of commodity.” Capitalist
reproduction does not simply depend on the production of commodities but the
unity of production and circulation where each is the respective mediation of
the other. As a process of valorization, exchange value needs an independent
form that is universal in exchange, which it finds in money. Money and
commodity “represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the
money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say,
disguised form.” Indeed,
it is in money that the thinglike nature
of the commodity precludes overcoming at the level of realization or overcoming
through consciousness. Only as money
can the commodity enter circulation. Marx, in Capital Vol II, in the section of the three circuits of capital
circulation, describes how capital “can only be grasped as a movement, and not
as a static thing. Those who consider the autonomization of value as a mere
abstraction forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction
in action.”
The abstraction can only be in action, as it were, because of the money-form. Money
is the condition of capital flowing ‘behind the back of the social body’ in a
movement of circulation leading to appreciation.
This is not to say that the sphere of production and the sphere of circulation
obey different logics—with, on the one hand, the sphere of production being
the, so to speak, immobile objectification
of capital in the commodity or congealed dead labor in the form of machinery
used for production and, on the other, and the sphere of circulation as the mobility of capital throughout its
different circuits—rather, it is precisely the contradictory unity of the two
and the continual movement and change of one type of capital into another that
is the unity of capitalist reproduction. When Marx describes how the “money
relation is itself a relation of reproduction if production is looked at in its
totality;”
exploitation in production is clearly not external
to money here. And yet, as a mere
representation of the commodity it appears as such. Indeed, the extent to which
money appears as external to
production is tied to the ‘potentiation’ of capitalist reproduction (or, in Lukács’s
term, reification). Marx describes the interrelation of the development between
production and circulation below:
The need for
exchange and for the transformation of the product into a pure exchange value
progresses in step with the division of labour, i.e. with the increasingly social
character of production. But as the latter grows, so grows the power of money,
i.e. the exchange relation establishes itself as a power external to and
independent of the producers. What originally appeared as a means to promote production
becomes a relation alien to the producers.
The first sentence of the passage can be read in terms of Adorno’s
category of integration—as more and more of society is integrated into the
division of labour and the sphere of commodity production grows, the need for a
means by which these commodities can be exchanged also increases. This means is
located in money as a universal equivalent, and yet this integrative process
makes the producers of commodities dependent on exchange—workers, after all,
are paid in money. Indeed, the more integration the more interdependent the
producers of commodities are on exchange—and therefore on money. In this sense
the power of money increases with the
development of the division of labour—i.e., the potentiation of
reification—thus widening the gap between the product as product and the
product as money. Indeed, this widening shapes production itself, as the
objective of production, initially use-value, becomes increasingly geared
towards exchange value. A means to an end turns into an end in itself, and when
the latter contradicts the initial purpose of the former—the fulfilment of
human needs—it becomes irrational, in the same way reason does. At the point of
development where production loses this purposiveness, money negates its own
content and capital assumes the form of an “automatic subject”—where
the subject of capital is capital rather than labour. It is in this sense that
it is purely formal. Capital appears as a value-creating thing consisting of
things related to other things. The self-sufficiency of this relationship
completely obscures the connection between value and its social constitution.
However in the same way that consciousness does not produce the unity of society but is the essence of knowledge in a
society that is itself a unity, “money does not create these antitheses and
contradictions; it is rather, the development of these contradictions and
antithesis which creates the seemingly transcendental power of money.”
In money, bundles of social relations appear as if they are congealed as a
single thing, but it is not simply a functional category—it is not as if, in
other words, money was invented for the purpose of facilitating the circulation
of capital. Recall the way in which, following from Honneth’s distinction
between two strands of critical theory, the relevant question was whether
reification was a question of recognition or functionality. Indeed, it is
tempting to use the category of real abstraction as a bludgeon with which to
point out the limits of restricting capitalist domination to a failure of
intersubjective recognition—namely the way in which it elides the way this
abstraction has its roots in practice—and yet money relies precisely on
recognition—on the continued recognition of money as valuable; on the continued
activity of people as if it were the
case. Indeed, the positing of practice as
a first against thought is Adorno’s central criticism of Marx. Simply posing practice
against theory—or, more specifically, to pose a conceptual realm and a
non-conceptual realm—is to pose an idealistic dichotomy. In merely replacing the
concept with non-conceptuality one “hypostasizes the concept of
nonconceptuality” and thus renders it as counter to its own meaning. The dialectical
materialist critique of idealism that poses ‘practice’ as against ‘theory’, in
other words, is idealistic in the same way that the critique of ontology simply
posits another ontology; another “first” on which a philosophy can be built,
even if this “first” refers to itself as non-ontological. “Whether one is for metaphysics or against metaphysics, both positions are metaphysical.”
XVIII. Lukács’s Romanticism
It
follows from Lukács’s emphasis on the demystification of appearance via the imputation of class
consciousness that is the condition of proletarian self-objectification as
concrete totality that all of these
relations—those facilitating both production and circulation—would dissolve,
including those facilitating the circulation of capital. Adorno specifically references
the sphere of circulation in a critique of Brecht:
Events
in the sphere of circulation, where competitors are cutting one another’s
throats, take the place of the appropriation of surplus value in the sphere of
production, but in comparison with the latter, the cattle dealers’ brawls over
loot are epiphenomena that could not possibly bring about the great crisis on
their own; and the economic events that appear as the machinations of the
rapacious dealers are not only childish, as Brecht no doubt wanted them to be,
but also unintelligible by any economic logic, no matter how primitive
The
cutting of throats over profits by traders is epiphenomenal in comparison to
the appropriation of surplus value in the sphere of production precisely
because the cutting of throats is metaphorical. The more important point
however, is the connection between circulation, integration, and Adorno’s
dialectical notion of progress, where society grows because of its internal antagonisms rather than in spite of them. This
is the case even for exchange: “The fulfillment of the
contract of exchange, whose terms are constantly being broken, would converge
with its abolition; exchange would disappear if the objects exchanged were
truly equivalent. Genuine progress is not simply quite different from exchange;
it would be exchange worthy of the name.” Indeed, money, for Marx,
represents the basis of equality and freedom, insofar as the power of money is
precisely that it treats exploitative relations among individuals as equal as
buyers and sellers on the market. In the
self-objectification of the proletariat and the liquidation of all capitalist
forms that follows Lukács makes a move common to anti-capitalist critics of
circulation, which is to claim that all it would take to overthrow capital is its
democratization; however, this elides precisely the non-identical objective
moment in society that is irreducible to the objectification of human action. Indeed, if society is
reducible to such objectification one can see the temptation to step outside
and objectify anew. However for Adorno, there no ‘outside’ society qua antagonistic
totality as constituted by exchange in the same way that there is not outside Hegel’s systematic absolute
idealism. This is the reason why the immediacy of the step outside and fetishism
are, for Adorno, two sides of the same coin: “the total
liquefaction of everything thinglike regressed to the subjectivism of the pure
act. It hypostatized the direct as indirect. Pure immediacy and fetishism are
equally untrue. In our insistence on immediacy against reification we are
relinquishing the element of otherness in dialectics.” The
image of a society made up of relations that are completely immediate is simply
the abstract negation of the position that sees the objective moment of society
as a boundary to freedom rather than, as Adorno does, dialectically—containing
both the moment of domination and the possibility of freedom. In Adorno’s view,
this is the case for those urging some sort of prelapsarian return as much as
it is for the miracle of proletarian overcoming. Adorno accuses Lukács of precisely
this sort of romantic irrationalism:
The
meaningful times for whose return the early Lukács yearned were as much due to
reification, to inhuman institutions, as he would later attest it only to the
bourgeois age. Contemporary representations of medieval towns look as if the
execution were just taking place to cheer the populace...the transfiguration of
past conditions serves the purpose of a late, superfluous denial that is
experienced as a no-exit situation; only as lost conditions do they become
glamorous. Their cult, the cult of pre-subjective phrases, arose in horror, in
the age of individual disintegration and collective repression. With the
delivery of natural science, reification and reified consciousness also brought
about the possibility of freedom from want.
The feeling of
alienation is precisely the experience of the gap between some sense of a
‘true’ or ‘natural’ objectification of human action and the lack therof, thus
invoking a feeling of disenchantment
from the ‘false’ objectification; however, “alienation is
produced by anxiety” Adorno writes, “consciousness—reified in the already
constituted society—is not the constituens
of anxiety.” It
is indeed tempting in the face of totalizing rationality—where everything has
been reduced to its exchange value and all happiness calculable—to assert the
goodness of irrationality at the almost total dominance of the rational; to
affirm a return to better times—times when society was not dominated by
calculation but by natural laws maintaining some retrospectively attractive
order, but what of the millions of lives made possible by the expanse of
exchange? Indeed, as reification progresses, these calls for a return to the
irrational increase; “irrationality,” Adorno writes, “is the scar which the
irremovable non-identity of subject and object leaves on cognition…the
philosophemes of irrationalism too depend on concepts.” Irrationality
is internal to rationality in the same way as in Dialectic of Enlightenment in that the latter is the abstract
negation of the former—it too thinks according to that ‘schema of reification’
of form and content. An increase in reification leads to an increase in irrationality—in
the increasing mediation of subjective life by objective moments and the
feelings of isolation and impotence that are its correlate, subjects seek
immediacy via the irrational. For
good reason, Adorno, to open his introductory lectures on sociology, suggests
a ‘moratorium’ on the concept of alienation due to its emphasis on a “spiritual
feeling of strangeness and isolation that conceals something which is really
founded on material conditions.” Lukács’s
figure of the proletariat as subject-object, in whose freedom comes into being
by objectifying itself totally and overcoming all objectivity external to it,
thus replacing that objectivity with the concrete totality it itself has
produced, subsumes the non-identical at the level of society in the way Hegel
overturns his own materialist insight in the essential non-identity between
subject and object in a speculative judgment.
XIX. Subject & Reification
In
the section on the materialist aspect of Hegel it was hopefully clear how the
return to subjectivity of the self-alienated objectivity robbed subject and
object of their definition—i.e., subject is only subject when it has an object
and vice versa, althought definition is a problematic term to use here:
“defining means as much as subjectively, by means of a rigidly applied concept,
capturing something objective, no matter what it may be in itself. Hence the
resistance of subject and object to the act of defining.” The
subject qua human being—the result of
reification—cannot be rendered according to the schema of reification; i.e.,
formalistically. Further, any attempt to identify a collective subject (either
ontologically as in Lukács or through its formal construction at the level of
theory) runs into another problem, which is that, for Adorno, the concept
subject is constitutively individuated: “no concept of the subject can have the
element of individual humanity—what Schelling called ‘egoity’—separated from it
in thought; without any reference to it, subject would lose all significance.”
Before
continuing with this line I would like to return to Adorno’s reading of the Kantian
subject, which was glossed in the discussion of the detemporalizing function of
the concept. Recall
how Adorno claims the thing itself to
be necessarily posited as that ‘fundamental stratum of knowledge’ from which
subjective form receives content. Recall also how this transcendental realm of
subjectivity is rendered outside of
time. Indeed, both the transcendental subject and the thing itself are
posited as a transcendental “unifying point that gives rise to these two realms
[the logical and psychological] and from which they follow.” In Adorno’s lecture
devoted to Kant’s Deduction of the Categories he describes this ‘unifying
point’ as purely given. “It might be
supposed,” Adorno remarks, “there must be something to represent what is given
in nature, something that has not been given in advance, and which could be
described as a pure given.” Now, for Kant, this
given cannot be empirical, because the very condition of the empirical is the
subjective mediation of appearances via the
a priori forms of space and time. The
question is rather: what is left after all subjective additions—space, time,
and the determining factor provided by the categories of the understanding—are
subtracted?
Given that it is Hegel’s critique of Kant that is the source of Adorno’s
insight into the reciprocity of constituens
and constitutum it makes sense to
quote Hegel here: “apart from the self that is sensuously intuited or
represented, it is above all the name as name that designates the pure Subject,
the empty unit without-thought content…the proper name, the fixed point of rest of the underlying
Subject.”
This is Hegel’s description of the Kantian ‘I think’ of the ‘transcendental
unity of apperception’ in the Phenomenology
of Spirit—that gathering of dispersed phenomena into a unity through
synthesis. It is nothing—pure
function without content. There can be no name for that pure content-less ‘I
think’ to which, if thinking is to be possible at all, everything must refer.
Nominalism at the highest pitch of abstraction depends on a pure functionality
that cannot be named. This pure synthetic function finds its most intense
expression in the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason,’ where Kant offers his
critique of rational psychology—the attempt to derive the soul as a unified self-identical substantial being
purely through logical deduction.
By ‘rational psychology’ Kant
means a metaphysical theory of the soul, mind or self based solely upon an analysis
of its capacity to think of its presumed nature as a thinking being (or
substance). Insofar as it is rational, such a science abstracts from all
appearances and attempts at a demonstration of the soul’s simplicity,
materiality, and enduring substantiality.
The position is inaugurated by Descartes, who finds in the act of doubting the
certainty of an existing ego. Dubito ergo
sum (“I doubt therefore I am) implies the famous cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) as doubting is a form of
thinking.
For Descartes, the self exists as a thinking being (res cogitans) distinguishable from corporeal beings in the external
world (res extensae). Kant maintains
the basic Cartesian idea of the primacy of the subject; i.e. the ‘I think’ or cogito is a necessary condition of all
knowledge for, as quoted above, “the I must be able to accompany all my
representations.” The primary issue where Kant and Descartes differ, at least
according to Kant, is the claim of self qua
substance. For Kant it is precisely transcendental illusion that leads to
the belief of a substantial soul insofar as reason tempts us into making
further and further inferences with regard to said “thinking being.”
Indeed, it leads the rational psychologist to connect a major premise
(A) insofar as it asserts a transcendental “formal vehicle for all concepts,”
to a minor premise (B) a real self as an object of inner experience and
therefore knowable. It mistakes a subjective principle for an object; it
mistakes maxims or rules guiding empirical inquiry for objective truths about
things. “One can place all illusion,” Kant writes, “in the taking of the
subjective condition of thinking for the cognition of an object.”
It takes the purely formal unity of consciousness underlying all categorical
use of the understanding as a “real object…existing outside the thinking
subject.”
Here is Kant’s remark
that Adorno quotes vis a vis the
substantiality of the soul:
I do not know an
object merely in that I think, but only in so far as I determine a given intuition
with respect to the unity of consciousness in which all thought consists.
Consequently, I do not know myself through being conscious of myself as
thinking, but only when I am conscious of the intuition of myself as determined
with respect to the function of thought.
In Adorno’s reading, implicit in
this passage are two concepts of the self. On the one hand there is the
transcendental unity of apperception—the “unity of consciousness in which all
thought exists,” the, “I think that must accompany all my representations.” This reflective
consciousness of oneself is not psychological, all it means is that some sort
of connection between experiences can arise only if they flow into an identical
stream of experiences; i.e., into one stream
of experiences. Recall that the interest of the regulative principles of
reason was precisely the establishment of unity without which it was impossible
for the understanding to legislate with concepts—without which, in other words,
synthesis is possible. Vis a vis this
unity that is the condition of knowledge Adorno says the following: “that
knowledge is one and the fact that
this one has primacy over the many may be said to be the metaphysical premise
of Kantian philosophy. It is also the point in which Kant concurs with the
Enlightenment in the broadest sense, as indeed with early Greek thought and
with Christian thought in its entirety.” Knowledge, for it to be
knowledge, must be one—and Kant’s
model for this unity is the unity of consciousness itself. This unity of
consciousness comes prior to all knowledge in the identity of the subject of
knowledge to itself. This is the sense in which unity is not something produced by consciousness, but is the essence of
knowledge that arises from a consciousness, which is itself nothing other than
a unity. “The ‘I think,’ that accompanies all my representations,” Adorno
writes, “means nothing but the unity that combines to make all my
representations mine and not those of another human subject.” The person—the individual person—mediates between this unity and the
plurality of things. This is the second self that is implicit. As Adorno puts
it, “by making such a singularity the foundation—instead of a universality or
plurality—Kant already points to a factual existence…to an already constituted
individual.”
In other words, the transcendental subject itself relies on the presupposition
of something empirical, in the same way that the transcendental thing itself was posited so that objectivity
could be grounded in the subject and knowledge could be rendered systematically
unified. The synthesis of the Kantian subject is nominalism at the highest
pitch of abstraction in the sense that the concept ‘concept’ is completely insulated from the non-conceptual.
Adorno describes in Negative Dialectics how,
“the concept is a concept even when dealing with things in being does not
change the fact that on its part it is entwined with a non-conceptual whole.
Its only insulation from that whole is its reification—that which establishes
it as a concept.” Reification is what constitutes the subject as that
empty place of pure function. For Adorno, the empirical human being is precisely that non-conceptual realm
that is the condition of the concept ‘concept’ being purely a concept—being
identical with itself—in the same way that the thing itself is the non-objective object that guarantees
objectivity. Subjectivity and reification are themselves one—where reification is simply the “reflexive form of false objectivity”—i.e., objectivity robbed
of its thingly aspect. Elsewhere,
Adorno describes subjectivity’s “solidity and invariance, which according to
transcendental philosophy engenders objects or at least prescribes their
regularity, is the reflective form of reification of human beings that has
objectively occurred in the conditions of society.” The meaning of the
riddle of the thing itself is indeed
its ‘one time historical appearance’—the one time historical appearance of the
individuated subject, which is itself the product of historical processes of
increasing reification. The conception of nature
as subjectively constituted as a unity by necessary and universal—i.e., as
an object—is an expression of the subject and its self-alienation: “at the
height of its formative pretention,” Adorno writes, “the subject passes itself
off as an object.” Yet in becoming this
autonomous form that is also object subjectivity forgets the way in which, as itself constituens, was also subject to constitution in the domination of
nature that inaugurates society.
XX. Conclusion
Imagine for
a moment you are a graduate student wading through Theodor Adorno’s ouevre, picking out various moments in
an attempt to elucidate his view of ‘reification,’ only, in horror, to find a
description that could easily be of yourself.
The candidate here in question searches everywhere for
cover, prescriptions, tracks that have already been laid down, both in order to
find their way via well-worn paths and also to normalize the procedure of the
examination so that precisely those questions for which the entire examination
was first instituted are not posed. One encounters, in a word, reified
consciousness.[270]
Permanently anxious
over the possibility of an experience of the fallible, reified consciousness
closes itself to the experience of a transformative encounter with the
object—it “sees
its objects as mere hurdles, a permanent test of its own form...thinking no
longer means anything more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed
think.”[271]
When one’s object of
analysis is reification more than a few complications abound. Elsewhere Adorno
describes how, “regard for the object, rather than for communication, is
suspect in any expression: anything specific, not taken from pre-existent
pattern, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion”
and further that, “the logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity,
has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech.”[272]
Clarity, in other words, between perfectly unified subjects insulated in
themselves. Yet after subtracting from all of those
subjective additions—space, time, and the categories of understanding— the
substance of transcendental subjectivity reveals itself as illusory. Nominalism,
which initially liquidated all that appears transcendent as a production of
itself—thereby reducing the meaning of particular things to a name the subject
has bestowed upon it—turns on itself to realize it itself is transcendent and
should be liquefied too. Yet this realization that the subject is illusory does
not negate thinking, the same way that the collective realization of the social
constitution of value would not be sufficient to overthrow capital. Indeed, the
anxiety over the liquidation of the subject might itself be a symptom of the
reified consciousness that “mistakenly takes itself for nature” and, “takes
itself, to speak with Husserl, for an ‘ontological sphere of absolute origins,’
and takes the thing confronting it, which it itself has trussed up, for the
coveted matter itself.”
But, as has been said, this illusion is only semblance. Contained in it is the
truth that society is a priori—that
“society comes before the individual consciousness and before all its
experience.”
“The categorical captivity of individual consciousness,” he writes, “repeats
the real captivity of each individual,”
and that therefore, “the subject’s reflection upon its own formalism is
reflection on society.”
Yet this captivity is also the condition of freedom,; or, at least, survival:
“the universality and necessity of those forms, their Kantian fame, is none
other than what unites human beings. They needed this unity for survival.”
For Adorno, subjective experience is therefore permanently
wounded by the objective moment, where the objectivity of “institutions that
have become so independent of individuals” that those individuals are, as he
puts it in the Lectures on Freedom and
History, “scarcely in a position to impinge on them.” He continues in the same lecture series: “we let ourselves
be talked out of everything we experience at any moment as the determining
forces in our lives, and we are taught to regard them instead as a metaphysical
sleight of hand”—as
a kind of fate. According to the popular version of critical theory, only what
is exempt from reification—only, to put it another way, what is ‘outside
ideology’—is true. However
when the primacy of objectivity he so frequently invokes is thought together
with this fallibility that is the condition of metaphysical experience,
reification takes on a meaning that is not purely derogatory: “it is a meaning
in which, as in Marx, the whole of idealism is contained, in that the assumption
is made that even that which is not I, which is not identical, must be able to
resolve itself entirely, as it were, into the actual, resent I, into the actus purus.”
It is not purely derogatory in the sense
that the individual subject is a historical result, thus Adorno’s ambivalent
relation to the critique of the concept. Adorno’s
politics are often critiqued by pointing out his refusal to give up on this
model of individuated subjectivity. The legitimacy of such a position
notwithstanding, such critiques of him that then go on to formulate some
collective subject or novel individual consciousness at the level of thought
suppose that such a resolution has political or practical import; as if
constructing a form of subjectivity to then impute onto society as content does
not run into the problem of the schema of reification itself. “Class-consciousness
must be simply confronted with the realty of individual consciousness,”
Adorno writes, and this is not because class-consciousness does not exist—individuals are indeed arranged in a given position
within the production process—but the act of simply pointing out that objective
situation in the context of diminishing class-consciousness itself becomes a
fetish veiling the actually existing situation—the relevant question becomes
explaining its disappearance.
Despite Adorno’s
critique of the critique of reification the concept seems to have plenty of
relevance today. His suspicion of immediacy and the ready-made is a worthy
ethos in the context of a culture that promotes those who sooner utter
tautologies than admit the possibility of their own fallibility; one which
seems openly hostile to the idea that being an ‘intelligent person’ involves spending
hours fighting a war of attrition against one’s own ignorance only for it to inevitably
re-appear again and again. “Our entire labour or effort and effort is dedicated
specifically to the task of expressing what we do not already know” he writes,
“we nonetheless find ourselves driven again and again to express what it is we
wish to express by rendering it the same in some sense—that is, by reducing
what is new to what is already known, what is already given.” Honneth was certainly on to something
in addressing its re-appearance, and yet the idea that reification can be
stripped from its roots in economic phenomena and then remedied by a new form
of unified consciousness elides the connection between economic phenomena and
unified consciousness itself.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. “Commitment,” in
Can One Live After Auschwitz? Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003: 240-258.
Adorno,
Theodor W. “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos
20 (1977): 120-133.
Adorno,
Theodor W. “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer” in Notes on Literature Vol II. New York: Columbia University Press,
1994.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. London:
Bloomsbury, 2013.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Against Epistemology: A
Metacritique. London: Polity Press, 2013.
Adorno,
Theodor W. An Introduction to Dialectics.
London: Polity Press, 2017.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Critical Models. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Hegel: Three Studies. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994.
Adorno,
Theodor W. History and Freedom. London:
Polity Press, 2008.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Introduction to Sociology. London:
Polity Press, 2002.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. London: Polity Press, 2001.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Lectures on Negative
Dialectics. London: Polity Press, 2008.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Metaphysics: Concepts and
Problems. London: Polity Press, 2001.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections on
Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1995.
Adorno,
Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. London:
Continuum, 1981.
Adorno,
Theodor W. trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Kierkegaard:
Construction of the Aesthetic. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis
Press, 1989.
Allison,
Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism:
An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Anderson,
Joel. “Situating Axel Honneth in the Frankfurt School Tradition,” in Axel Honneth: Critical Essays. Ed.
Danielle Peterbridge. Leiden. Brill, 2011: 1-31.
Arato,
Andrew & Paul Feinberg. The Young
Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism. London: Pluto Press, 1979.
Balibar,
Etienne. “The Subject,” trans. Roland Végső, in Umbr(a): Ignorance of the Law,
No. 1 (2003): 9-22
Bewes,
Timothy & Timothy Hall ed., Georg
Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, (London: Continuum Press,
2011).
Bewes,
Timothy. Reification: or, the Anxiety of
Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2002.
Bonefeld,
Werner. “Authoritarian Liberalism, Class and Rackets,” Logos 16 (1-2).
Bottomore,
Tom ed. The Dictionary of Marxist
Thought. London: Blackwell, 1998.
Buck-Morss,
Susan. “TW Adorno and the Dilemma of Bourgeois Philosophy,” Salmagundi 36 (1977): 76-98.
Buck-Morss,
Susan. The Origins of Negative
Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New
York: Free Press, 1977.
Buhr,
Marcus. “Georg Lukacs and the Bourgeois Mind in the Twentieth Century,” in Tom
Rockmore (ed.) Lukacs Today: Essays in
Marxist Philosophy. Lancaster: D. Reidel, 1988: 30-42.
Butler,
Judith. “Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications.” Reification: a New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
Caygill,
Howard. Kant Dictionary. London:
Wiley-Blackwell, 1995.
Dubiel,
Helmut. Trans. B. Gregg. Theory and
Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2005.
Feenberg,
Andrew. “Culture and Practice in the Early Marxist Work of Lukacs.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 26 (1981):
27-40.
Feenberg,
Andrew. Lukacs, Marx, and the Sources of
Critical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Feenberg,
Andrew. The Philosophy of Praxis: Lukacs
and the Frankfurt School. London: Verso, 2014.
Goldmann,
Lucien. Lukacs and Heidegger: Towards a
New Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Grief,
Michelle. Kant’s Doctrine of
Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Grondin,
Jean. “Reification from Lukacs to Habermas,” in Tom Rockmore (ed.) Lukacs Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy. Lancaster:
D. Reidel, 1988: 86-107.
Guess,
Raymond. “Adorno’s Gaps,” Arion: A
Journal of Humanities and the Classics 12 (2) 2004: 161-180.
Habermas,
Jurgen. “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” New German Critique 26 (1982): 13-30.
Hall,
Timothy. “Reification, Materialism, and Praxis.” Telos 155 (2011): 61-82.
Hegel,
GWF. Trans. AV Miller. Phenomenology of
Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Heidegger,
Martin. Being and Time. Albany: SUNY
Press, 2010.
Heinrich,
Michael. Trans Alexander Locascio. An
Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2004.
Hobbes,
Thomas. Leviathan. London: Penguin
Classics, 2017.
Honneth,
Axel & Nancy Fraser, Redistribution
or Recognition. London: Verso, 2003.
Honneth,
Axel. “Critical Theory” in Social Theory
Today eds. A. Giddens & J. Turner. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.
Honneth,
Axel. “Reification and Recognition,” in Reification:
A New Look at an Old Idea (Berkeley Tanner Lecture). Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
Honneth,
Axel. Critique of Power. London: MIT
Press, 1981.
Honneth,
Axel. Disrespect: The Normatic
Foundations of Critical Theory. London: Polity Press, 2003.
Horkheimer,
Max & Theodor W. Adorno. Trans. John Cumming. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1997.
Hullot-Kentor,
Robert. Things Beyond Resemblance:
Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press,
2006.
Jameson,
Frederic. “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project.” Rethinking Marxism 1 (1) (1988): 49-72.
Jameson,
Frederic. Valences of the Dialectic. London:
Verso, 2009.
Jarvis,
Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. London:
Polity Press, 2007.
Jay,
Martin. Marxism and Totality: The
Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984.
Kant,
Immanuel. Trans. Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University,
2000.
Lowy,
Michael. Georg Lukacs: From Romanticism
to Bolshevism. London: Verso, 1979.
Lukacs,
Georg. Destruction of Reason. New Delhi: Aakar Books, 1978.
Lukacs,
Georg. History and Class Consciousness:
Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Merlin Press, 1971.
Lukacs,
Georg. Soul & Form. London: Merlin, 1980.
Lukacs,
Georg. The Young Hegel. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1975.
Lukacs,
Georg. Theory of the Novel. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1974.
Marx,
Karl. “Critique of Gotha Program,” in Marx-Engles
Reader, ed. Robert Tucker. New York: Norton, 1972.
Marx,
Karl. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Capital Volume
I. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Marx,
Karl. Capital Vol. III. London:
Penguin Classics, 1995.
Marx,
Karl. Capital Volume II. London:
Penguin Classics, 1978.
Marx,
Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the
Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1993.
McBridge,
WL. “Reification Re-examined,” in Tom Rockmore (ed.) Lukacs Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy. Lancaster: D. Reidel,
1988: 108-125.
Mitzman,
Arthur. Iron Cage: A Historical
Interpretation of Max Weber. London: Transaction Publishers, 1984.
Muller-Doohm,
Stefan. Adorno: An Intellectual
Biography. London: Wiley, 2008.
Postone,
Moishe. “Lukacs and the Dialectical Critique of Capitalism,” in Abritton &
Simouldis (eds.) in New Dialectics and
Political Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 78-101.
Reichelt,
Helmut. “Some Notes on Jacques Bidet’s Structuralist Interpretation of Marx’s
Capital.” Common Sense 13 (1993):
68-76.
Robert,
Julian. “Lukacs,” in German Philosophy:
An Introduction. London: Polity Press, 1988.
Rose,
Gillian. The Melancholy Science: An
Introduction to the Thought of Theodor Adorno. London: Verso, 2014.
Sherrat,
Yvonne. “Adorno’s Concept of the Self: A Marriage of Freud and Hegelian
Marxism.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 227 (2004): 101-117.
Sohn-Rethel,
Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour. London:
MacMillan, 1978.
Toscano,
Alberto. “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction.” Rethinking Marxism 20 2008: 273-287.
Wiggerhaus,
Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History,
Theories, and Political Significance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
Zizek,
Slavoj. Sublime Object of Ideology. London:
Verso, 1988.
[4] Georg Lukács,
trans. Rod Livingstone, History and Class
Consciousness, (London: Merlin
Press, 1975): 83.
[9] Slavoj
Zizek, “Postface,” to Georg Lukács, A
Defence of History and Class Consciousness, (London: Verso, 2000): 151.
[10] Cf.
Lukács, A Defense of History and Class
Consciousness, xvii-xix: “What I failed to realize, however, was that in
the absence of a basis in real praxis, in labour as its original form and
model, the over-extension of the concept of praxis would lead to its opposite:
a relapse into idealistic contemplation...what I had intended subjectively, and
what Lenin had arrived at as a result of an authentic Marxist analysis of a
practical movement, was transformed in my account into a purely intellectual
result and thus into something contemplative. In my presentation it would
indeed be a miracle if this ‘imputed’ consciousness could turn into
revolutionary praxis.”
[11] Georg
Lukács, “Preface to the New Edition (1967)” in History and Class Consciousness, xxvii.
[17] Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2010): 414.
[20] Winfried Kaminski, Zur Dialektik von Substanz und Subjekt bei
Hegel und Marx, (Frankfurt/Main: Verlaag & Herchen, 1976): 38. Quoted
in W.L. McBride, “Reification Re-Examined,” in Lukács Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy, ed. Tom Rockmore, Sovietica (Lancaster: Reidel Publishing
Co., 1988): 112
[22] Andrew
Feenberg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources
of Critical Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986): 79.
[24] Arthur
Mitzman, Iron Cage: An Historical
Interpretation of Max Weber, (London: Transaction Publishers, 1984): 5.
[25] See “Lukács” in Julian Roberts, German Philosophy: An Introduction, (London:
Polity Press, 1988): 235 - 252. This is not necessarily a criticism. Despite a
rather in-depth analysis of the essay Roberts offers no concrete examination of
‘reification’ itself. Indeed, the term only occurs when quoting the title of
the essay. Perhaps there is some wisdom in refusing the formalism of a
definition.
[27] Moishe
Postone, “Lukács and the Dialectical Critique of Capitalism,” in Albritton
& Simouldis (eds)., New Dialectics
and Political Economy, (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003): 80.
[28]
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 83-110.
[29]
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 90.
[30]
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 22.
[36] Cf. Alberto Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real
Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism 20
(2008): 273-287.
[37] Slavoj
Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London:
Verso, 1988): 19
Cf. Karl Marx, Capital Vol I, 135: “The various proportions wherein differing species of
labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are
established by a social process behind the back of the producers, and appear to
them consequently as given by tradition.”
[39]
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 85.
[41]
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 87
[42] See
W.L. McBridge, “Reification Re-Examined,” in Lukács Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy, (Lancaster: D. Reidel, 1988):
116.
[44]
Frederic Jameson, “History and Class
Consciousness as an Unfinished Project” in Rethinking Marxism, 1(1): 208. Reprinted in Valences of the Dialectic, (London: Verso, 2009): 201-222.
[45]
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89.
[47] Karl
Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the
Critique of Political Economy, (London: Penguin, 1993): 164.
See Joel
Anderson, “Situating Axel Honneth in the Frankfurt School Tradition,” in Axel Honneth: Critical Essays ed.
Danielle Petherbridge, (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 1-31. See also J. Habermas,
“Bemerkungen zu Beginn einer Vorlselung” in Die
neue Unubersichlichkeit, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985): 209 (quote translated
by J. Anderson): “I have never
had the intention of continuing the tradition of a school…The line of thought
that gets attributed, in retrospect, to the Frankfurt School was a response to
historically specific experiences with fascism and Stalinism, but above all to
the incomprehensible Holocaust. A tradition of thought remains vital by proving
its essential intuitions in the light of new experiences; that doesn’t happen
without giving up those parts of theories that are no longer adequate.”
See Kant, Critique of Judgment, §17: “Beauty is an object's form of
purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation
of a purpose."
That a game of
chess is beautiful does not depend on how it ends. It does not, in other words,
depend on who wins. It depends instead on the harmonious play of two sets of
pieces, according to certain a priori rules,
purposively—i.e., towards an end. When one says “that was a beautiful game of
chess” one attests to the possibility of what chess might be, and yet no one
has ever actually played a perfectly beautiful game. A posse ad esse non valet consequentia.
Stefan
Muller-Doohm, Adorno: An Intellectual
Biography, 220: “What Adorno expected of Sohn-Rethel was nothing less
than ‘the overcoming of the antinomy of genesis and validity’, and he suggested
a link-up with ‘the dialectical logic planned by Horkheimer and myself’. At the
same time, his critical sense warned him of the danger of ‘turning a
materialist dialectic into a prima philosophia (not to say: an ontology).” This
is the sense in which constitutum and
constituens must be thought together,
without granting primacy to either.
The locus classicus here is Marx’s second
thesis on Feuerbach: “The question whether
objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory
but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and
power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the
reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a
purely scholastic question.”
Cf. Marx, Grundrisse, 245: “The general
interest is precisely the generality of self seeking interests. Therefore, when
the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects,
then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives
towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only
respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of
exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom.”
[270]
Adorno, “Philosophy and Teachers,” Critical
Models, 25.
[271]
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, (London:
Verso, 2005): 197
[272]
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 101
