Theodor W. Adorno: Exposing capitalism’s blind domination

Lambert Zuidervaart explores Adorno’s radical positions on philosophy, art and society

LAMBERT ZUIDERVAART

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Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor W. Adorno’s book of aphorisms, bears the telling subtitle Reflections from damaged life.

And yet Adorno grew up in comfort and privilege. He was born on September 11, 1903, in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Oscar Wiesengrund, an assimilated Jewish merchant, and Maria Calvelli-Adorno, a devout Catholic of Corsican descent. Baptized Catholic as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund and later confirmed as a Protestant, he was raised in a sheltered and cultured middle-class home. Maria’s sister Agathe Calvelli-Adorno lived with his parents and was like a second mother to him. The two sisters were accomplished musicians, Maria a singer and Agathe a singer and pianist. Teddie, as his family and friends called him, learned his passion for music from them. His attachment to them shows up in the hyphenated name he used as a young adult: Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. Later, during the Nazi era, he shortened his Jewish patronym to the initial “W”.

Still in his mid-teens when the First World War ended, Adorno avoided direct experience of the conflict. Even as a schoolboy, however, he rejected the rampant nationalism and war propaganda that flooded German culture. Soon he would be caught up in the revolutionary fervour spreading across post-war Europe and articulated in the early 1920s by the Western Marxist philosophers Ernst Bloch, Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács. From these years stem the conviction, which Adorno never lost, that society as a whole needed to be transformed. Or, as Minima Moralia puts this negatively, parodying Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “The whole is the false”.

Admitted in 1921 to the recently founded Frankfurt University, the precocious twenty-one-year-old obtained his philosophy doctorate in 1924. By then he had met the older men who would mentor and collaborate with him in later years, including the writer and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, the essayist and cultural critic Walter Benjamin and the philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer. A year later Adorno moved to Vienna, his “second home”, to pursue his musical passions in the Second Viennese School surrounding Arnold Schoenberg. There he studied composition with Alban Berg and piano with Eduard Steuermann. He also befriended Hanns Eisler, one of Schoenberg’s most accomplished students and a musical collaborator of Bertolt Brecht. In later years, after most of these Jewish intellectuals had fled Nazi Germany to the United States, Adorno co-wrote a book with Eisler on movie music titled Composing for the Films (1947). It was through a circle of radically left-wing artists in Berlin including Benjamin, Brecht and Eisler that he met Gretel Karplus. They married in 1937, shortly before they emigrated to the United States.

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Adorno was not yet thirty when he completed his second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) and became an instructor (Privatdozent) at Frankfurt University. He wrote it on Søren Kierkegaard, under the supervision of the philosophical theologian Paul Tillich. Two years later the dissertation appeared in book form as Kierkegaard: Construction of the aesthetic, on the day that Adolf Hitler came to power. Soon afterwards the Nazi regime forced all Jewish faculty members and many left-wing intellectuals out of their university positions across Germany.

Their ranks included the members of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, collectively known as the Frankfurt School. Founded in 1923 as an independent centre for interdisciplinary Marxist scholarship and led after 1930 by its director Max Horkheimer, the Institute included the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, literary sociologist Leo Löwenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm, and other scholars in economics and political theory. In the 1930s they developed an interdisciplinary research programme called critical theory. Adorno gave his controversial Benjamin-inspired inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy”, at the Institute in 1931. It argued that only a radical change in philosophical approach, one neither imitating the social sciences nor aiming at systematic completeness, would suffice for a critical understanding of contemporary society.

Adorno and Benjamin did not become members of the Institute until it had moved to New York City in 1935. Their famous field-shaping debate on the political potential of mass-mediated culture took place in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), the Institute’s journal of record. Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) and Adorno’s rejoinder “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938) have become classics in cultural studies and related fields. Whereas Benjamin suggested that film as a mass medium has democratic and emancipatory potential, Adorno argued that, for the most part, the entertainment industry simply secures the capitalist status quo.

Adorno expanded and deepened this argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the groundbreaking book he co-wrote with Horkheimer during the Second World War, by which time both had moved from New York to southern California. In it, they set out to explain why a world with so much potential for good had become so unrelentingly bad, why the dawn of enlightenment had become the nightmare of fascism, why the social promise of happiness had been broken. Interweaving philosophy, literary commentary and social critique, they tried to show that reason, the purported agency of enlightenment, had become irrational. Whereas the purpose of reason was to liberate people, it had instead served to trap them in patterns of blind domination. By not serving its own purpose, and instead serving as a tool for  domination, reason had become irrational. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, blind domination occurs in three tightly interlinked forms: human subjugation of nature, psychological repression and social exploitation. What drives all three forms in contemporary society is an ever-expanding capitalist economy, wedded to massive state power, and fed by the latest science and technology. Moreover, the contemporary tendency towards such domination has ancient roots.

This diagnosis became definitive for first-generation critical theory. It also became the target of criticisms from second-generation critical theorists, led by Adorno’s former assistant Jürgen Habermas. Contrary to some interpretations, the diagnosis in Dialectic of Enlightenment does not mean the authors give up on rationality and have no hope for social transformation. Their attempt at a comprehensive critical diagnosis is an exercise of dialectical reason. It aims to recall and project the origin and goal of thought itself, namely, freedom – not blind domination, but thoughtful reconciliation, not the subjugation of nature, the repression of needs and desires, and the exploitation of disadvantaged people but rather their liberation. And, within Dialectic of Enlightenment itself, their diagnosis yields powerful insights into both the culture industry as “mass deception” and the psychosocial roots of anti-Semitism in false projection.

Adorno incorporated such insights into his Philosophy of New Music (1949). He also expressed them in Minima Moralia, originally presented to Horkheimer as a fiftieth birthday gift in 1945 and then published after they had returned to Frankfurt. Meanwhile Adorno also co-authored The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a landmark American study in qualitative social psychology. It identifies anti-democratic tendencies and personality traits among those who incline toward fascism, a project that regains relevance today with the rise of authoritarian populism.

With the exception of Minima Moralia, most of Adorno’s works were little-known in post-war Germany. Dialectic of Enlightenment, originally published by a Dutch press in 1947, did not receive wide circulation until it was re-issued in 1969, the year Adorno died. Yet Adorno himself quickly gained prominence in the 1950s and 60s, as a university professor and public intellectual.

Perhaps Adorno’s greatest legacy for philosophers lies in the two books that most absorbed his scholarly attention in the 1960s and overlapped with the courses he was teaching: Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory, published posthumously in 1970. Together with a volume he had planned on moral philosophy but did not live to write, these are the books Adorno himself wanted to have “weighed in the balance”. Both are complex and uncompromising summations of Adorno’s philosophy; the first focused on questions about experience, knowledge, history and metaphysics, and the second addressing aesthetics, beauty, art and society.

The two books also work out the implications of Horkheimer and Adorno’s wartime social critique for the radical change in philosophical approach already envisioned in Adorno’s inaugural lecture of 1931. If, according to Dialectic of Enlightenment, the key to contemporary societal regression lies in advanced capitalism’s three-fold nexus of blind domination, then the challenge for Adorno’s philosophy is to expose such domination and point to an alternative. In Negative Dialectics he does this by insisting on non-identity, dialectics and the priority of the object. In Aesthetic Theory he emphasizes aesthetic modernity, social antithesis and artistic truth. In each case, what Adorno emphasizes serves not only to uncover the subjugation, repression and exploitation that pervade advanced capitalist society but also to gesture toward the possibility of a world free from this domination.

To understand Adorno’s philosophy, it helps to know how it stems from his readings of Kant, Hegel and Marx. Briefly, Adorno agrees with Kant that human knowers constitute the objects of their knowledge. We can know things, according to Kant, only insofar as our fundamental concepts and perceptions make this possible. But according to Adorno, how we know them is governed by deep-seated patterns and trends in society as a whole, such that our knowledge simultaneously does violence to its objects. Adorno’s emphasis on society as a whole comes, in turn, from Hegel, with a twist, as we have seen: the totality Hegel claimed to comprehend in truth has become the whole that is untrue. Adorno’s understanding of such global falsity comes from Marx’s critique of capital, with the proviso that the patterns of exploitation Marx found deep within the economy have, according to Adorno, become the dominant principle in society as a whole. Adorno calls this the exchange principle (Tauschprinzip); a society dominated by it is an “exchange society” (Tauschgesellschaft).

According to Adorno, the principle of exchange is both highly abstract and all-pervasive in advanced capitalist society. The principle comes down to the imperative that nothing has value except insofar as it can be exchanged for something else and, in this exchange, generates a profit for those who control the conditions under which exchange occurs. Moreover, exchange is how the three-fold nexus of blind domination works. In an advanced capitalist society, people subjugate nature, repress their needs and desires, and exploit one another by following the principle of exchange. This explains why a society with the potential to mitigate so much suffering continually destroys nature, perpetuates repression and generates vast disparities and disadvantages in wealth and power.

That is how Adorno turns a Hegelian Marxist theory of reification, proposed by Georg Lukács in the early 1920s, into the radically social-critical philosophy he calls “negative dialectics”. Lukács had argued that capitalist commodification has spread to all of life. Although Adorno agrees, he claims that commodification expresses an even deeper tendency toward domination that works through exchange. To help expose and resist an all-pervasive domination in exchange, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics sets out to break the grip of identity thinking in modern philosophy, to challenge the project of pinning down the identity of things in concepts. It is through conceptually pinning down identity that philosophy supports and fosters the societal tendency to treat everything and everyone as exchangeable. According to Adorno, identity thinking fails to honour the ways in which things are not identical with their concepts. Instead, in trying to impose identity, one ignores the diversity and particularity of things. Such identity thinking goes hand in hand with a society whose exchange principle demands the equivalence of all nonequivalents, a society where, for example, even one’s most unique qualities can be digitized, stored in databases and exploited for commercial or political purposes. Adorno persistently criticizes false conceptual identifications in other philosophies. And he tries, using expressive language, to lend a voice to that which is not identical, to what he calls the nonidentical (das Nichtidentische).

The alternative to identity thinking lies in negative dialectical thought. Dialectics, as Adorno understands it, is the continual effort to think through the contradictions in thought in order to uncover the tensions and antagonisms in culture and society: class conflicts, economic anomalies and ecological disasters, to name a few. The point of this, however, is not simply negative. The point is also to gesture towards the possibility of a transformed society, one not fundamentally antagonistic, not pervaded by domination, and not driven by the principle of exchange, a society where thought would shed the compulsion to dominate through conceptual identification. In other words, negative dialectics gestures, however obliquely, towards the possibility of reconciliation.

That is why, in opposition to a philosophical commitment from Kant onwards to constitutive subjectivity, Adorno insists on what he calls the “priority of the object” (Vorrang des Objekts). A protean phrase, this refers to the dimensions of experience and existence that resist subjugation, repression and exploitation, the ways in which things are not identical with their concepts, and the worth of matters beyond their exchange value. By insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno wishes to remind us that thought itself is societally constituted, that identity thinking cannot fully grasp what it tries to know, and that, despite the societal pressure to impose conceptual identity on objects, the true goal of thought is to honour objects in their nonidentity. To do this, thought must open itself to the preconceptual layers of experience to which expressive language lends a voice, a mandate Adorno tries to meet in his own writing.

Working on Aesthetic Theory in the late 1960s, Adorno became convinced that non-identity, dialectics and the priority of the object required a dramatically new mode of textual presentation. Given his subject matter, he could not proceed in a linear fashion, arguing step by step to a final conclusion. Rather, he would need to adopt a paratactical mode of presentation. The resulting text, as edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno, largely dispenses with explicit co-ordination among sentences, paragraphs and passages. Each main section (not really a chapter in the traditional sense) has its own ever-shifting constellation of concepts. This constellation intersects with those in other sections, such that they all shed light on one another and on the book as a whole. Of Adorno’s many books, Aesthetic Theory comes closest to the ideal of atonal music that he inherited from Schoenberg and the early Second Viennese School: every tone should lie equally close to the centre. However, the fact that Adorno did not live to complete this project complicates any attempt to interpret it. Let me simply introduce its emphasis on aesthetic modernity, social antithesis and artistic truth.

Adorno aimed to write a book in which neither philosophy nor art are missing. More specifically, he set out to reconstruct the modern art movement in light of philosophical aesthetics and to reconstruct the tradition of philosophical aesthetics – especially that of Kant and Hegel – from the perspective of modern art. He focuses on modern art for both historical and social-critical reasons. Historically, he thinks the issues and achievements of modern art illuminate all art heretofore, and they raise unavoidable questions about how philosophers in the past have interpreted art. Social-critically, he regards modern art as a unique arena within advanced capitalist society that challenges the dominance of exchange, giving expression to the nonidentical.

Art, especially modern art, is, he claims, the “social antithesis of society”. It holds a mirror up to society even as it points towards a different possibility. In fact, the opposition between art and society is so severe that Aesthetic Theory begins and ends with updated Hegelian concerns about the possible death of art: can art even survive in an advanced capitalist society? Yet Adorno also emphasizes that, within its opposition, art owes its existence and character to the larger society to which it antithetically belongs. Even art’s autonomy – the relative independence that allows it to resist – is made possible by the economic and political tendencies art challenges. And that raises updated Marxian questions about whether and how art can help transform society as a whole.

The key to any contribution art can make to social transformation lies in what Adorno calls artistic truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt). Autonomous modern works of art are like monads of society as a whole, he claims. The unavoidable tensions within them between content and form give articulation to underlying antagonisms in society as a whole, antagonisms that the culture industry covers up. The tensions in Schoenberg’s early music, for example, between unhampered atonal expression and coherent compositional construction might call attention to a larger conflict in society between the pursuit of individual freedom and the imposition of social constraints. At the same time, however, because authentic artworks deploy form to accommodate rather than dominate their content, they also suggest ways in which societal antagonisms can be resolved and how blind domination can end. This, however, they can only suggest: actual reconciliation would require economic and political transformations that art as such is powerless to bring about.

Adorno’s aesthetics is naturally richer in detail and insight than a brief summary can indicate. Together with Negative Dialectics, which it supplements and assumes, Aesthetic Theory marks the culmination of a singular body of work: Adorno’s radically critical reflections from damaged life.

Lambert Zuidervaart is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies and the University of Toronto, and a Visiting Scholar at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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