Tim Black
posted 20 June 2007

Late Marxism: Adorno or the persistence of the dialectic – it’s a title that simmers with the radical gesture. In 1990, the year of its publication, Marxism, outside academe at least, couldn’t have been more out of season. The ‘late capitalism’ to which the title alludes had seen off all comers - there really was no alternative now.

Despite its refraction through the lexicon of Critical Theory, its author, Fredric Jameson, captures well the particular sense of defeat: ‘late capitalism has all but succeeded in eliminating the final loopholes of nature and the Unconscious, of subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike, and, with a final fillip, in eliminating any memory trace of what thereby no longer existed in the henceforth postmodern landscape.’ (p5 LM) All in all, pretty grim for those reared on Anti-Oedipus and the Situationist International.

His riposte to what, in effect, is posed as the absolute triumph of capitalism, an implacable totality in which there is nothing that is not mediated by its dead hand, is to revive the thinker who began postulating just such an ‘iron cage of rationality’ some forty years earlier. In his late work, Negative Dialectics, Adorno asserted: ‘The subjective consciousness of men is socially too enfeebled to burst the invariants it is imprisoned in. Instead, it adapts itself to them while mourning their absence. The reified consciousness is a moment in the totality of the reified world.’ (p95 ND) Not that Jameson is unaware of the unrelenting melancholy of the author of Minima Moralia: Reflections from a damaged life, the thinker with whom he has now chosen to battle capitalism when seemingly at its strongest. Indeed, he admits Adorno was unsuitable in the 1960s when ‘tout est possible.’ And the 1970s weren’t much more suitable, with Adorno’s Hegelian ballast preventing his ascent to the high peaks of French theory where it was all ‘jouissance’ and ‘ideological state apparatuses’. But as the 1980s drew to a close, taking, finally, any actually existing alternative with it, Adorno’s prophecies of a total system finally seemed vindicated, and conversely, his critique, such as it was, gained in apparent utility:

Adorno was a doubtful ally when there were still powerful and oppositional political currents from which his temperamental and cantankerous quietism could distract the uncommitted reader. Now that for the moment those currents are themselves quiescent, his bile is a joyous counter-poison and a corrosive solvent to apply to the surface of “what is.” (p249 LM)

But using Adorno in this way, for all its ascerbic balm is, as we shall see, fatal for any grander social critique.

That Jameson wishes to do so, however, is understandable. Adorno’s frequent nods to the ‘economic standardisation of the world’ (p21 LM), its reduction of the qualitative – be it humans or nature – to the abstract quantities of exchange-value, seems to promise a critique of capitalism when at its most universal, its most ideologically entrenched. Adorno’s negative dialectics offer not reconciliation with what is, but the perpetual unfurling of what is not. Indeed, Jameson reckons on it as a tool, a lever to prise apart the identity of capitalist rationale and existence. What appears as natural, as ‘just the way things are,’ can then be re-cast precisely in terms of its non-identity with nature, human or otherwise. Adorno promises, in short, to rediscover the future that capitalism had reduced to an interminable present.

This is achieved, argues Jameson, through the reinstatement of the category of totality (p27 LM). What this means is that rather than grasping the significance or meaning of particulars as isolated facts, they are to be apprehended instead in terms of the social totality in which they have that meaning. To the positivism of the particular, Adorno opposes the mediation of the universal. There is no thing, no thought, be it marriage, A la recherche du temps perdu, or even love, that is not thoroughly mediated by the social, historical process. All this, it goes with out saying, goes on behind the backs of its subjects:

A candid look at the predominance of the universal does all but unbearable psychological harm to the narcissism of all individuals in a democratically organised society. To see through selfhood as non-existent, as an illusion, would easily turn men’s objective despair into a subjective one. (ND 391)

The problem with using Adorno to reveal the alienating praxes at work within capitalist social relations, is that it’s not really capitalism that’s the problem for Adorno. Yes, he does reference the ‘exchange relation’ or, indeed, the ‘economic standardisation’ of life. And no doubt Part 1 of Marx's Capital proved illustrative for Adorno. But it does so within the force field of Adorno’s own thought. The conceptual abstraction, indeed, the ‘reification’ discerned under capitalism – the commodification of social life – is ultimately absorbed back into what Adorno perceives as a far longer history of reification per se.

As it turns out, this history of reification, of identifying things with their conceptual abstraction, is, for Adorno, nothing less than human history as a whole: even in its most primitive forms, human society has always inscribed things with particular meaning, always mediated itself and nature in its own particular terms. It is this narrative that is formulated in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). There, Adorno and his co-author, Max Horkheimer, take Mana, the ancient moving spirit, as a starting point. This primititive animism, they argue, emerged as a response to the brutal caprice of nature, the fear of the unknown. Its shared linguistic form – indissociable from the founding social moment – indicates the first and, as it turns out, fatal identification of men’s thoughts with externality.

Each passing stage of civilisation, then, regardless of differing social forms, proceeds to identify its view of the world with what is, and to live among its concepts as though they were living in truth. And just as each social form (of life) believes itself to be in truth, so it consigns all preceding worldviews to myth. This is the dialectic of enlightenment as riff: ‘Just as the myths already realise enlightenment, so enlightenment with every step becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology.’ (pp11-12 DofE) With each historical stage, then, the incommensurable multiplicity of what is, is subject both to greater mediation by the universal, that is, the social totality, and to greater levels of abstraction. The result is desperate. All individuality and particularity is made commensurable and categorisable, ripe for calculation and manipulation. ‘Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them.’ (p13 DofE) As that last clause connotes, Weber’s notion of rationalisation, of the progressive disenchantment of the world, finds its coda in the Holocaust.

Despite the frequent recourse to Capital, this is closer to Heidegger than it is to Marx. And there’s a fair bit of Nietzsche in there too. Hence, as Adorno presents it, the history of conceptual abstraction contains an index of actual domination: knowledge as a product of the will to power. Admittedly, there’s no valorisation of wild Ayran beasts, but it’s no less bestial: ‘The (philosophical) system is the belly turned mind…’ (p23 ND)

Adorno’s critique of capitalism as the commodification of social life is, then, a mere moment in his critique of reification, a process that seems to have almost anthropological underpinnings. The central flaw in all this can be grasped via the thinker who deployed the term ‘reification’ most explosively – Georg Lukács. In History and Class Consciousness (1922), Lukács used it to refer to the process whereby men’s consciousness itself, that is, the terms in which they think of themselves and the world, is reified. Reflecting the process of alienation at work under conditions of private property, they come to think of themselves as things under the sway of an alien power. This is mirrored theoretically, in that philosophy – e.g. Kant’s noumena/phenomena distinction – tends to conceive of the world contemplatively, as an object with laws independent of, and impervious to subject’s action. As monumental as Lukács’ effort was, at points, particularly in the implied notion of the proletariat as the subject-object of history, he seemed to be advocating an idealist solution to the problem of alienation. All alienated objectivity was simply to be reappropriated by Geist as proletarian subject.

As Lukács was to realise, especially after the publication of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in 1932, his use of reification contained a strain of Hegelian idealism. In effect, this involved the conflation of objectification with alienation. Where the former designates the process whereby man produces some object in the world, the latter refers to the production not just of the object, but capital also, as part of the process of capitalist exploitation. Alienation is simultaneously objectification and its loss. Approaching the problem from the perspective of idealism, which assumes everything to be the creation of Geist, Hegel’s attempt to overcome alienation, to apprehend the laws at work in the world as those of subjectivity itself, involved the overcoming of objectification too – cue absolute spirit.

In Adorno there seems to be a similar conflation at work. His history of the rationalisation of existence, so to speak, grasps all objectification as alienation: each and every social form creates modes of thought that reproduce the domination of the particular by the social whole. But whereas Hegel was on the side of the social whole as the universal, Adorno is the obverse; he steadfastly refuses to reconcile the alienated particular with the universal, or as Marx put it, to ‘make man at home in his other being as such’. What Hegel saw as alienated subjectivity which must be reappropriated by the subject, Adorno sees as subjectivity that must be expropriated from its alienating objectification. From Adorno’s perspective, any social form in which alienation might be absent is inconceivable.

The ultimate problem with Jameson’s adoption of Adorno as the theorist of the present is that his contemporary resonance is a mirage. What seems like a formulation of a globalised system of capitalism before the fact, was really a criticism of social mediation after the fact. Or as Adorno puts it, ‘society precedes the subject’ (p120 ND). To expect more from Adorno than a revelation of the baleful effects of the universal mediation of individual lives is to look to the patient for the cure.