AAS 2016 — Adorno's Double Presentation (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
This paper examines the concept of society in the work of Theodor Adorno through the framework of Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality. The article argues that understanding Adorno’s concept of society requires a double presentation. The first presentation involves making explicit the ideologically veiled social objectivity of existing society. This unrecognized objectivity, like a “ghost” or “spectre,” is present but unrecognized, therefore absent from existing theories of society. The second presentation focuses on what is absent from society, not because it doesn’t exist but because it can only be expressed by envisioning a transformation of society. This absence represents the potential for a different future, aligned with Adorno's concept of the “non-identical.” The paper examines two spectral entities discussed by Derrida: Hamlet's father and the spectre of communism that are read as example of Adorno’s societal presentation.
Adorno's critique of late capitalism: negative, explanatory, and practical
Adorno seems to set out to do the impossible. He criticises the whole of the modern social world, including its forms of rationality and thinking, but he does not seem to have an identifiable addressee for his theory, someone or some group who could be the agent for change. Famously, he and Horkheimer described their own work as a „message in a bottle‟. Moreover, it is neither clear what Adorno‟s standards of critique are, nor how he could underwrite them. Hence, his critical project seems to undermine itself: by subjecting everything to critique, he seems to leave himself without a vantage point from which his critique could be justified or acted upon. In this chapter, I will argue that the bulk of these objections can be met.
Adorno's "The Idea of Natural History": Sources and Perspectives
2024
Description of the seminar Adorno's 1932 essay The Idea of Natural History is as convoluted as it is central to Adorno's Critical Theory. The concept of Natural History (Naturgeschichte) it develops will act as a continuous leitmotif of Adorno's works. Natural History connects his criticism of phenomenology and ontology on the one hand, and his philosophy of history and of interpretation (Deutung) on the other. It is the guiding concept for his scrutiny of social processes and totality. The essay's exposition is, however, difficult to reconstruct for two reasons. First, its internal structure defies any linear reconstruction and the preliminary definitions that inaugurate each section of the text have to be developed instead of being taken as conclusive descriptions-a recurrent mistake of secondary literature on the essay. Second, Adorno's understanding of Natural History evolves between the 1932 essay and Negative Dialectics, which was published in 1966. In this later version, the sources of the early essay (Benjamin and Lukács) are replaced by an appeal to Hegel and Marx. The aim of this seminar is to develop a genealogy and an interpretation of the constellation surrounding Adorno's Idea of Natural History. In order to do so, the seminar will work with the sources of Adorno's essay (Benjamin, Lukács) and expose its central ideas as well as its composition. The seminar also underlines the relevance of Natural History for Adorno's work as well as recent reappraisals of the text in approaches that, inter alia, try to discern natural history in Sociology or develop a critical analysis of the relation of social structures and normativity. We will also take a look at the debates about Critical Naturalism that inform recent trends of the interplay of social research and philosophy.
The Guilt of Reification: Adorno’s Critique of Sociological Categories
Peter Osborne (ed.), Futurethoughts: Critical Histories of Philosophy, 2024
This essay advances a reading of Theodor W. Adorno's mature interventions into sociology as a 'critique of sociological categories'. It maintains that his unorthodox commitment to sociology was simultaneously a dialectical commitment to the critical value of its fundamental untenability – at least, in its dominant bourgeois variant. From this sketch, the essay attempts to examine one instance of this critique, centred on the category of reification and one of its most proximate sociological cognates, Émile Durkheim’s concept of the social fact. The first section reconstructs Adorno’s concept of reification as outlined in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere. With recourse to Marx’s extended mature project and pace the interpretation offered by Gillian Rose, it argues that reification in Adorno underscores not the discrepancy between use-value and exchange-value as well as the exchange of false equivalents but holds to issues pertaining to the social and relational form of value that objectively arise from the exchange process. The second section then recounts Durkheim’s concept and theory of the social fact as advanced in his early plea for the sociological discipline, The Rules of Sociological Method. Drawing on Adorno’s essays, interventions, lectures, and, albeit cautiously, seminar protocols, the concept of reification is taken as a leitmotif with which to reconstruct his mature encounter with Durkheim. Doing so demonstrates that Adorno finds in the concept of the social fact a correct but deficient notion of reification, a recognition, to paraphrase Marx, that social relations between individuals assume the phantasmagoric form of relations between things, though with the intonation inversed. The final section shows how this framework is redeployed as part of Adorno’s confrontation with Karl Popper and others as part of the now-infamous Positivism Dispute. It argues that some of the stakes involved in this dispute might be better understood if Adorno’s criticisms are viewed as offering a particular reading of internal developments within sociological positivism itself. For, whilst Adorno characterises both Durkheim and Popper as positivists, much to the chagrin of their defenders, the charges levelled against them are not equivalent. Comparing the critiques levelled against them brings to the forefront how sociological positivism over the course of the twentieth century was to undergo a theoretical impoverishment. In this, Durkheim is mobilised because his sociological theory sketched a ‘more serious’ alternative approach to those sociologists who lacked even the faintest hint of, to use Adorno’s phraseology, the ‘guilt of reification’.
"A False Classless Society": Adorno's social theory revisited
Philosophy and Social Criticism
Adorno's social theory is enjoying renewed attention, as is the debate to what extent is it Marxist. A central issue remains Adorno's concept of social totality: capitalism as a fully integrated society in which every difference is levelled. One problem this raises is why is he still committed to the Marxist concept of class. And second, how to understand his critique of the idea of proletarian class-consciousness, which seems to leave his critical theory without an addressee. The article suggests that, for Adorno, capitalist society exhibits what is termed here "differential integration." It is predicated both on the labor/ capital distinction and, at the same time, on sufficient homology between the two, such that the qualitative class divide is experienced as mere quantitative variance. This efficacious gap between social structure and social experience is at the center of his concept of ideology. Ideology-critique for Adorno is mainly the critique of symptomatic misconceptions of how ideology functions, due to lack of attention to how the class structure is in fact not experienced as such. Adorno's alternative to proletarian class consciousness is "differential solidarity": consciousness of social domination that is on the one hand found across class divides yet is experienced differentially between them.
Historical Materialism, 2018
This introduction outlines the importance that Hans-Georg Backhaus’s transcript of Adorno’s 1962 seminar on ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory’ has for shedding light on the relationship between Adorno’s critical theory and the critique of political economy. Part I signals the importance of the seminar by assaying the Anglophone scholarship on Adorno. Part II contextualises the seminar in the development of his thought. Parts III and IV focus on what the transcript tells us about Adorno’s interpretation of Marx and the importance this interpretation held for Adorno’s critical social theory. Part V points to the influence this interpretation of the critique of political economy had on the formation of the New German Reading of Marx.