Theodor W. Adorno’s Critique of the Critique of Reification Brendan Harvey

 

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.”[1] 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[2]—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”[3]—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.[5]

 

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. [6] 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’,[7] 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.” [8] 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.”[12] 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.[13] “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.[14] 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.”[15] Lukács’s own dialectical materialism has both a negative and positive aspect.[16] 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.[18] 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.”[19]

 

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.[21] 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.[23] 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 19^th and early 20^th 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,[26] they also sought to grasp the movement from the liberal paradigm of the 19^th 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.[31]

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.”[32] 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.”[33] 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.”[34] 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.”[35] 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;[38] 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.”[40] 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.[43] 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,”[46] 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.[48] 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.[49] 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.[50]

 

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.”[51] 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.”[52] 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.[53] 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.”[54] 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.[55] 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[56] (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.[57] 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.”[58]

 

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.”[59] 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.”[60]

 

If ‘critical theory’ is a single coherent intellectual tradition its ‘first generation’ is made up of those intellectuals known retrospectively as the Frankfurt School[61]—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.[62] 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[63]—from the former and works in Adorno’s old office. All the old furniture was replaced at Honneth’s insistence.[64] 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.[65] The critique of economic categories, in other words, has become a non-topic.[66] 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.”[67] Having “taken the concept of reification from a simple level…to a complex level,”[68] 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.”[69] 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.[70] 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.”[71] 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.”[72] 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. [73]

 

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,”[74] 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.”[75] 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.”[76] 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,’”[77] the former expresses an even more “totalizing view” in which, “commodity exchange is merely the historically developed form of instrumental rationality.”[78] 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.”[79] 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.”[80] 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.[81] 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.”[82] “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.”[83] 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,[84] 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. [85] 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 18^th century Europe. The reader is instructed by Horkheimer & Adorno to understand Enlightenment however in its “widest sense” as “the advance of thought.’”[86] 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.”[87] 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.[88] In this early text Lukács describes second nature as a “charnel house of long-dead interiorities,”[89] where the interiority of bourgeois subjectivity leaves those subjects powerless in the face of historical and societal forces. [90] 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.”[91]

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.[92]  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.”[93] 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.”[94] 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;”[110] 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”[115]—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.”[116] 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.”[118] 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.” [119]  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.”[120] 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.”[121] 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.”[122]  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.”[123] 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.”[124] 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.”[125] 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.[126] 

 

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.”[127] 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” [128]—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.”[129] 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.”[130]  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.[131] While Sohn-Rethel’s text was later published in English as Intellectual and Manual Labour: Critique of Epistemology,[132] 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.”[133] 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.[134]  As Zizek describes it, “before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market.”[135] 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.[136]  “Out of itself,” Adorno writes, “the bourgeois ratio undertook to produce the order it had negated outside itself”[137]—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.”[138] 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.”[139] 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).[140] 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.”[141] 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.”[142] 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.”[143]  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.[144]

 

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”[145]—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.”[146] 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.[147]  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. [148]

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.”[149] 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.”[150] 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.[151] 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.”[152] 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.[153]

 

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].[154] 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.[155] 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”[156] for it is this very condition. After all, “thoughts without intuition are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”[157] 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.”[158] However for Kant to maintain this duality, Adorno argues, he posits “a kind of fundamental stratum of knowledge”[159] 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.[160]

 

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.”[161] 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.”[162] 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?”[163] 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.”[164] 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”[165] 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. [166]  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.”[167]

 

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.[168]

 

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.[169] 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.”[170] 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.”[171] 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.[172]

 

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.[173] 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.[174] 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.”[175] 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[176]—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.”[177] 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”[178]—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.[179] 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.”[180]  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[181]—that one finds the line “the dualism of form and content is the schema of reification.”[182] 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.[183]  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.”[184]  This is the precisely the antinomy between genesis and validity that, as Muller Doohm points out, Adorno hoped Sohn-Rethel to solve.[185] 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.”[186] 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.[187] 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.[188] 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.[189]

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.[190]

 

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.”[191]  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.”[192] 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.’[193] 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.[194]

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,”[195] 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.”[196] 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.[197] 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.’[198] 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.[199]

 

 

 

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.[200] 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.”[201]  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.”[202] 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.[203] 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.”[204]

 

In his Introduction to Dialectics Adorno himself recounts Hegel’s critique of the correspondence theory of truth. He does in the following suggestive demonstration.[205] 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.”[206] 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.”[207]  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.”[208] 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.”[209] 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.”[210] 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.”[211] 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.”[212] 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.”[213] 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.”[214] The sense in which the “whole is the false”[215] 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.’”[216]  

 

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.” [217] “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.”[218] 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.” [219]

 

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).[220] When faced with any object we can only have one partial view at any one time.[221] 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.”[222] 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.”[223]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;”[224] 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.”[225]  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.”[226]

 

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.”[227] 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.”[228] 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.”[229] The abstraction can only be in action, as it were, because of the money-form.[230] Money is the condition of capital flowing ‘behind the back of the social body’ in a movement of circulation leading to appreciation.[231] 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;”[232] 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.[233]

 

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”[234]—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.”[235] 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.[236] 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.[237] 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.” [238]

 

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[239]

 

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.”[240] 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.[241] 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.”[242] 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.[243]

 

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.”[244] 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.”[245] 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.”[246] 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.”[247] 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.”[248]

 

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.”[249] 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.”[250] 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?[251] 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.”[252] 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,’[253] 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.[254] 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.[255] 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.”[256] Indeed, it leads the rational psychologist to connect a major premise[257] (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.”[258] It takes the purely formal unity of consciousness underlying all categorical use of the understanding as a “real object…existing outside the thinking subject.”[259]

 

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.[260]

 

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.”[261] 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.[262] 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.”[263] 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.”[264] 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.”[265] 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.”[266] 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”[267]—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.” [268] 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.”[269] 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.”[273] 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.”[274] “The categorical captivity of individual consciousness,” he writes, “repeats the real captivity of each individual,”[275] and that therefore, “the subject’s reflection upon its own formalism is reflection on society.”[276] 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.”[277] 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.”[278] 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”[279]—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.”[280]  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,”[281] 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.”[282] 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008): 23.

[2] Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 218n4.

[3] Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, (London: Polity Press, 2017): 11.

^[4] Georg Lukács, trans. Rod Livingstone, History and Class Consciousness,  (London: Merlin Press, 1975): 83.

[5] Karl Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, Capital Vol. 1, (London: Penguin Classics, 1990): 486.

[6] Later published in 2008. Axel Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[7] For examples of how art theorists and literary critics have turned to Lukács concept of realism in order to understand the political and realist turn in contemporary art and literature see Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds., George Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, (London: Continuum Press, 2011).

[8] Horkheimer & Adorno, trans. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 230. In this translation the sentence reads: “All objectification is forgetting.” The ambivalence in the translations between objectification and reification is representative of the relevant philosophical problem.

^[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.

[12] Georg Lukács, “What is Orthodox Marxism?” in History and Class Consciousness, 1.

[13] Theodor W. Adorno, trans. EB Ashton, Negative Dialectics, (London: Continuum, 1981): 144.

[14] In German, the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg school, oriented toward logic and the theory of the sciences, and the Heidelberg school, oriented toward the historical sciences.

[15] Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, (New York: Routledge, 2009): 4.

[16] Susan Buck-Morss, Origins of Negative Dialectics, 25.

^[17] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010): 414.

[18] The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, for example, concludes its definition of reification with the sentence, “reification is a ‘special case’ of alienation, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.” See Tom Bottomore (ed). The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, (London: Blackwell, 1998): 463.

[19] Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, (London: Polity Press, 2000): 304.

^[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

[21] See Andrew Arato & Paul Feinberg, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism, (London: Pluto Press, 1979). Michael Lowy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, (London: Verso, 1979).

^[22] Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986): 79.

[23] Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978): 28.

^[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.

[26] Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 11.

^[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.

[31] Marx, Capital III, Chapter 24. Quoted in Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 93-94.

[32] Marx, Capital I, 255.

[33] Marx, Capital I, 225.

[34] Karl Marx, Capital Vol II, (London: Penguin Classics, 1992): 185.

[35] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 278.

^[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

[38] 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.

[40] Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, 79

^[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.

[43] Cf Lukács, Soul & Form, 87. In his early essay on the poetry of Stefan George Lukács captures this dialectic of closeness and distance: “Closeness and distance: what is the meaning of the relationship between these two? From the standpoint of human relationships it means the rhythm that the alternation of telling and not-telling creates. Today we tell everything, we tell it to someone, to anyone, no matter to whom, and yet we have never really told anything; other people are so close to us that their closeness transforms what we have to give them of ourselves; yet they are so far from us that everything becomes lose on the way from us to them….Our knowledge of humanity is a psychological nihilism: we see a thousand relationships, yet never grasp any real connection. The landscapes of our soul exist nowhere, yet every tree and every flower in these landscapes is concrete.” This feeling will be familiar to anyone who has ever used twitter. Cf. Adorno, Introduction to Metaphysics, 36. Cf. Adorno, Introduction to Metaphysics, 140.

^[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.

[46] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 197.

^[47] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, (London: Penguin, 1993): 164.

[48] The Grundrisse was first published in 1939.

[49] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.

[50] I’m thinking here of the ‘epistemological break’ in Althusser and the multiple Marx’s in Derrida. See Louis Althusser, For Marx, (London: Verso, 2005) and Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, (London: Routledge, 2006).

[51] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 167

[52] Ibid

[53] Cf. Lukács, History of Class Consciousness, 55: “It follows from the above that for pre-capitalist epochs and for the behaviour of many strata within capitalism whose economic roots lie in pre-capitalism, class consciousness is unable to achieve complete clarity and to influence the course of consciously. This is true above all because class interests in pre-capitalist society never achieve full (economic) articulation.”

[54] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 167

[55] Judith Butler, “Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications,” in Reification: a New Look at an Old Idea, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 97.

[56] Timothy Bewes, Reification; or, the Anxiety of Late Capitalism, (London: Verso, 2002).

[57] While less egregious than forgetting Bewes, which was published just three years previously to Honneth’s lecture, the work of Andrew Feenberg also goes unmentioned, despite being one of the few thinkers writing in English making a consistent attempt to think reification philosophically. That neither Honneth nor the contributors have a history of engaging with the thought of Lukács would have welcomed his addition. Feenberg deals with reification extensively in his 1981 Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). In particular, see Chapter 3, “Reification and the Paradigms of Rationality,” pp. 59-86. The lack of mention of Feenberg might be a convenient one, for the thrust of Feenberg’s analysis attempts to draw out the overlooked methodological implications of Lukács’ theory of reification. In particular, he seeks to explain why “reification cannot be understood as a category of social psychology, an  ‘ideology’ or mode of ‘consciousness’” (71).  These arguments are extended in a more recent volume. See Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, (London: Verso, 2014).

[58] Bewes, Reification; or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, 3.

[59] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 27.

[60] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 114.

[61] For an overview of the history of the Frankfurt School see R. Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); M. Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); H. Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory trans. B. Gregg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). Honneth’s own account can be found in the article “Critical Theory” in Social Theory Today eds. A. Giddens & J. Turner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

[62] 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.”

[63] Cf. Adorno “Progress” in Critical Models, 148: “Philosophy in general, as long as it was at all useful, was also a doctrine of society, except that ever since it consigned itself without demur to societal power, philosophy must professedly isolate itself from society; the purity into which philosophy regressed is the bad conscience of its impurity, its complicity in the world.”

[64] See Anderson, “Situating Axel Honneth,” 1.

[65] Werner Bonefeld, “Authoritarian Liberalism, Class and Rackets,” Logos 16:1-2 (2017).

[66] Ibid

[67] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 93.

[68] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 58.

[69] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 78.

[70] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 17. 

[71] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 18.

[72] Ibid

[73] Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, (London: Polity Press, 2007).

[74] Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A Politico-Philosophical Exchange, (London: Verso, 2003): 138

[75] Axel Honneth, Critique of Power, (London: MIT Press, 1981): 38.

[76] Ibid

[77] Honneth, Critique of Power, 38

[78] Ibid

[79] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 28

[80] Honneth, Critique of Power, 40

[81] Honneth, Critique of Power, 42

[82] Honneth, Critique of Power, 43

[83] Ibid

[84] Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 55

[85] The following discussion of Habermas’s critique of Adorno owes much to Robert Hullot-Kentor’s essay “Back to Adorno” which can be found in the collected Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor Adorno, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006): 23-44.

[86] Horkheimer & Adorno, trans. John Cumming Dialectic of Enlightenment, (London: Verso, 1997): 5.

[87] Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi.

[88] In Lukács’s preface to the 1962 edition of Theory of the Novel he discusses the work’s negative political influence on Adorno and other German intellectuals, commenting that Adorno had up residence in a ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’: “A considerable portion of the leading bourgeois intelligentsia in Germany, among them also Adorno, have taken up camp in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss,’ a—and as I once wrote a propos of a critique of Schopenhauer—‘beautiful hotel, furnished with all the luxuries, at the edge of the abyss, of nothing, of meaninglessness. And the daily view of the abyss, between comfortably enjoyed meals or artistic productions, can only increase the pleasure of these refined comforts.” See Lukács, Theory of the Novel, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973): 22.

[89] Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 64.

[90] Cf. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 29. The first chapter is titled “Integrated Civilizations.”

[91] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 48.

[92] Yvonne Sherrat, “Adorno’s Concept of the Self: A Marriage of Freud and Hegelian Marxism,” in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 227 (2004): 101-117. Cf. Yvonne Sherrat, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, chs. 8 & 9.

[93] Adorno, Metacritique of Epistemology, 75.

[94] Howard Caygill, Kant Dictionary, (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995): 79-80.

^[95] See A658/B686 and A306/B636 where reason is presented as “a subjective law of economy for the provision of the understanding.” See also A646/B674. All references from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) trans. Allen Wood and Paul Guyer. Henceforth referred to as CPR.

^[96] My account of Kant’s discussion of the systematicity of knowledge owes much to Michelle Grier. See Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

^[97] CPR, A651/B679

^[98] CPR, A308/B365

^[99] CPR, Bxiv

^[100] CPR, A308/B365

^[101] CPR, A652/B680

^[102] CPR, A658/B686

^[103] CPR, A655/B683.

^[104] Ibid

^[105] CPR, Aviii.

^[106] CPR, A655/B683

^[107] CPR, A655/B683

^[108] Ibid

^[109] Ibid

[110] Cf. Kant, CPR, B358/A302: Kant chooses to introduce the interest of reason to ascend to the unconditional as analogous to “an ancient wish – who knows how long it will take until perhaps it is fulfilled – that in place of the endless manifold of civil laws, their principles may be sought out; for in this alone can consist the secret, as one says, of simplifying legislation.” Relevant here is what Adorno takes to be the truth of the bourgeois theory of history. See the references to Hobbes and Kant below.

^[111] CPR, Aix.

^[112] CPR, A658/B686

^[113] CPR, A658/B686.

^[114] CPR, A661/B689.

[115] Ibid

[116] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 196.

^[117] Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 186

[118] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 197

[119] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 258.

[120] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 4

[121] See “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer,’ in Notes to Literature Vol.2 pp. 58f. Quoted in Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 251n7

[122] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 65.

[123] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 125

[124] Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6: “Enlightenment has always taken the basic principal of myth to be anthropomorphism, the projection onto nature of the subject. In this view, the supernatural, spirits and demons, are mirror images of men who allow themselves to be frightened by natural phenomena.”

[125] Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7.

[126] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 58.

[127] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 58.

[128] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 126.

[129] Ibid

[130] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 197

[131] Stefan Muller-Doohm, Adorno: An Intellectual Biography, (London: Wiley, 2008): 220.

[132] Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, (London: MacMillan, 1978).

[133] Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, 14.

[134] Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, 26.

[135] Slavoj Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 17. Quoted in Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” 275.

[136] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 21.

[137] Ibid

[138] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 21-22.

[139] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146.

[140] Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” 281.

[141] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 197

[142] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11.

[143] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 148.

[144] Cf. Kant, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 158: “We must abandon the principle of an absolute first principle to which all knowledge can be reduced. This is turn implies the possibility of an ontology, an ontology of Being, both in its idealist version of the sort that thrives here in West Germany, and also the crudely materialist ontology to which dialectics have regressed in East Berlin. The question of determining the relation of these two poles to each other simply cannot be solved by reference to so-called origins.”

[145] Thomas Hobbes, Chapter XIV, “Of the First and Second Natural Laws, and of Contracts,” Leviathan, (London: Penguin Classics, 2017).

[146] Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, (London: Polity, 2008): 49-50

[147] See Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” in Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty & James Schmidt, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[148] Adorno, History and Freedom, 49-50.

[149] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 21

[150] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 22

[151] See Howard Caygill, The Kant Dictionary, (London: Blackwell, 1995): 304.

[152] Kant, CPR, B137.

[153] See Lectures 8,9, and 10 all titled ‘The Concept of the Thing’ in Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 93-115.

[154] CPR, B34/A20.

[155] Cf., History and Class Consciousness, 110. In the section titled “Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” Lukács identifies this Copernican Revolution as the source of the distinction between Modern and Ancient philosophical consciousness. It is of course the former that “springs from the reified structure of consciousness.”

[156] CPR, B44/A28

[157] CPR, B44/A28.

[158] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 138-139.

[159] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 223.

[160] Immanuel Kant, trans. Guyer & Matthew, Critique of the Power of Judgment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 20:203

[161] Habermas, Nachwort, 282. Quoted in Hullot-Kentor, 28. Cf. Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 26 (Spring-Summer 1982): 13-30.

[162] Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” 29.

[163] Ibid

[164] Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” 28.

[165] Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” 30.

[166] It seems that this pessimism is rarely read dialectically. One should be wary of drawing theoretical conclusions from biography, but it is interesting to note that, in light of the ubiquitous accusation of pessimism, and in contrast to Horkheimer’s own depressive tendencies, Adorno, until the end of his life, appears in most biographical accounts as a rather convivial—almost silly—figure. Other members of the institute were often puzzled by what they saw as a conflict between the seriousness of Adorno’s intellectual work and philosophical style and his personal manner, which could be at times silly and absurd. For a translation and transcript of a discussion between Horkheimer and Adorno that captures this dynamic see Robert Hullot Kentor, “Back to Adorno,” in Things Beyond Resemblance, 29.  Adorno is not so much unrelentingly pessimistic as he is unrelentingly negative, but the equivalence between pessimism and negativity is our own—it is a reflection of the positivity that is equated with the Good that Adorno criticizes himself. Cf. Adorno’s discussion in Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 18.

[167] Cf. Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi: “The accompanying critique of Enlightenment is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of Enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination.”

[168] Habermas, “Nachwort,” 289. Quoted in Hullot-Kentor, 31.

[169] See Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 85-89.

[170] Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 40.

[171] Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4.

[172] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 81-82

[173] Cf. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 6: “In Kant, the idea that a world is divided into subject and object, the world in which as prisoners of our own constitution, we are involved only with phenomena, is not the ultimate world, already forms the secret source of energy.”

[174] Kant, Critique of Judgment, xxi – xxiv.

[175] Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:211.

[176] Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:217.

[177] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013): 295

[178] 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."

[179] 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.

[180] Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5: 206.

[181] Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, (London: Polity, 2013).

[182] Adorno, Metacritique of Epistemology, 75.

[183] See Edmund Husserl, trans. JN Findlay, Logical Investigations, (New York: Humanities, 1970): 207. Quoted in Adorno, Against Epistemology, 75.

[184] Adorno, Against Epistemology, 75.

[185] 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.

[186] Adorno, Metacritique of Epistemology, 75.

[187] Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 20 (1977): 120-133.

[188] The relevant line is the opening line, where Adorno rejects the “power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real.” See Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” 120.

[189] Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” 128

[190] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 155.

[191] Hullot-Kentor, “Introduction: Origin is the Goal,” in Things Beyond Resemblance, 4.

[192] Adorno, Construction of the Aesthetic, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 6.

[193] Cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 4-6.

[194] Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 99.

[195] Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 42. Cf. Georg Lukács, Destruction of Reason, (London: Humanities Press International, 1998).

[196] Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 211.

[197] Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975).

[198] See Manfred Huhr, “George Lukács and the Bourgeois Mind,” in Lukács Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy, (Lancaster: Reidel Publishing Co., 1988): 33.

[199] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.

[200] Cf, Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 20: “The principle of equivalence of social labour makes society in its modern bourgeois sense both something abstract and the most real thing of all, just what Hegel says about the emphatic notion of the concept.”

[201] Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 23.

[202] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 158.

[203] Cf. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 27: “The philosophical anticipation of reconciliation is a trespass against real reconciliation; it ascribes anything that contradicts it to ‘foul’ existence as unworthy of philosophy.”

[204] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 15.

[205] Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 68-69.

[206] Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 69.

[207] Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 68ft.

[208] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 25.

[209] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 65.

[210] Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 23.

[211] Karl Marx, “Critique of Gotha Program,” in Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972): 382-383. Quoted in Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 23-24.

[212] Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 24.

[213] Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 25.

[214] Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 11.

[215] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, (London: Verso, 2005): 50

[216] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, xx.

[217] Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, 70.

[218] Ibid

[219] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 214. Cf. Adorno, Introduction to Metaphysics, 45:  “On the one hand, synthetic judgments are supposed to be timelessly valid a priori, yet, on the other, are constituted by the spontaneous activity of consciousness, and thus, finally, by the work of the mind; so that something supposedly timeless has a temporal moment as its condition of possibility.”

[220] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 101-102

[221] In a subsequent course of Lectures Adorno says about the ‘Kantian concept of apprehension’ that according to it ‘a kind of synthesis takes place directly even before the indirect functions of reproduction and recognition intervene.’ CF. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung [Philosophical Terminology. An Introduction], vol. 2, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, 5^th edn, Frankfurth am Main, 1989, p. 143. Quoted in Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 255n15: “We might almost say that there is…something like a passive synthesis and it would not take much to persuade us that what is incidentally the very difficult Kantian concept of apprehension in intuition actually intends something of the sort. By this I mean that this ‘my’…that is to be found in what falls into ‘my’ consciousness…is a nexus of qualities, and that a direct conception already exists prior to all indirect connections based on concepts such as recognition and memory.”

[222] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 102

[223] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 104

[224] Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxiv.

[225] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 183.

[226] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.

[227] Helmut Reichelt, “Some Notes on Jacques Bidet’s Structuralist Interpretation of Marx’s Capital,” Common Sense, 13 (1993): 68-76.

[228] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, 255.

[229] Karl Marx, Capital Vol II, 185.

[230] Cf., Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, 46. Sohn-Rethel for example describes mathematical reasoning as emerging at the “historical stage at which commodity exchange becomes the agent of social synthesis, a point in time marked by the introduction and circulation of coined money.” 

[231] Capital is neither money nor commodity taken by itself but the movement of appreciation through its various circuits. The ‘General Formula for Capital’ is for good reason M—C—M’; i.e., money is used to purchase a commodity which is then sold for more money. Cf. Marx, Volume I, 241-257.

[232] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 214.

[233] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 146.

[234] Karl Marx, Volume I, 255.

[235] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 146.

[236] 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.”

[237] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 136.

[238] Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Metaphysics, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000): 9.

[239] Adorno, “Commitment,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003): 247.

[240] Adorno, History and Freedom, 170.

[241] 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.”

[242] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 374-375.

[243] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 73.

[244] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.

[245] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 85.

[246] Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 3. Cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 216. “The identity of the self and its alienation are companions from the beginning; this is why the concept of self-alienation is poorly romanticist.” Cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 278: “By the concept of the self we should properly mean their potential, and this potential stands in polemical opposition to the reality of the self. This is the main reason why the talk of ‘self-alienation’ is untenable.”

[247] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 246.

[248] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 245.

[249] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 214

[250] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 123

[251] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 123

[252] GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §66.

[253] Cf., Kant, CPR, 411-415.

[254] Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983): 283.

[255] Throughout the secondary literature Kant is accused of fundamentally misrepresenting Descartes’s position. Balibar argues “he attributes to Descartes a normalization of the statement “cogito” or “I think” in order to make it into the name of an auto-referential operation by which thought takes itself for its own object…he designates as ‘subject’…the ‘something’ or the ‘being’ that exists simultaneously as that which is aiming and aimed at by thought…From a Cartesian point of view, these two operations are contradictory, which will be clear if one rereads the Meditations.” See Balibar “The Subject,” trans. Roland Végső, in Umbr(a): Ignorance of the Law, No. 1 (2003): 13. Allison agrees with Balibar when he writes, “Kant’s critique of the Cartesian project, however, is based entirely upon his own account of apperception” (203).

[256] The further and further inferences made by reason are reflected in the ascending and descending of the regulative principle of reason. Cf. p. 27-28.

[257] Kant arranges the claim of rational psychology in the following syllogism. (Major premise) What cannot be thought otherwise than as subject does not exist otherwise than as subject, and is therefore substance. (Minor premise) Now a thing being, considered merely as such, cannot be thought otherwise than as subject. (Conclusion) Therefore it also exists only as such a thing. Cf., CPR, B411.

[258] CPR, A397

[259] CPR, A384

[260] CPR, B406. Quoted in Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 195

[261] CPR, B132

[262] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 194.

[263] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 196.

[264] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 197

[265] Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 199. Cf. Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 247: “the abstract concept of the transcendental subject, that is, the forms of thought, their unity, and the originary production of consciousness, presupposes precisely what it promises to establish: actual, living individuals.”

[266] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12. “Dissatisfaction with their own conceptuality is part of their meaning, although the inclusion of nonconceptuality in their meaning makes it tendentially their equal and thus keeps them trapped within themselves. The substance of concepts is to them both immanent, as far as the mind is concerned, and transcendent as far as being is concerned. To be aware of this is to be able to get rid of conceptual fetishism. Philosophical reflection makes sure of the non-conceptual in the concept. It would be empty otherwise, according to Kant’s dictum; in the end, having ceased to be a concept of anything at all, it would be nothing. A philosophy that lets us know this, that extinguishes the autarky of the concept, strips the blindfold from our eyes.”

[267] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190.

[268] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 249.

[269] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 254

^[270] Adorno, “Philosophy and Teachers,” Critical Models, 25.

^[271] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, (London: Verso, 2005): 197

^[272] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 101

[273] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models,

[274] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 25.

[275] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 252.

[276] Adorno, “Subject and Object,” Critical Models, 257.

[277] Ibid

[278] Adorno, History and Freedom, 9

[279] Adorno, History and Freedom, 18

[280] Adorno, Lectures on Metaphysics, 142

[281] Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, 23.

[282] Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 213.