Adorno's "Against Epistemology"

[Dennis R Redmond]

In re Adorno's closet masterpiece, I have to disagree with the previous
postings which write off Gegen Erkenntnistheorie as a superficial critique
of Husserl. This just ain't so. Adorno wrote G.E. in the late
Thirties, then revised it extensively and came up with one of the most
powerful ideological critiques of the Erhard era imaginable (it was
published in 1954, during the first years of the Wirtschaftswunder).  

Husserl was, above all, the theoretician of logical absolutism: kind of a
Weimar-era Kantianism, which had its political expression in the failed
national liberal parties of the era. He was, however, more dynamic and
interesting than his erstwhile discipline Heidegger, whom instaurated the
Fascist seize of power from within the concepts themselves, as it were
(the infamous phrase is, die Destruktion der Philosophie -- literally, the
destruction of philosophy: fascist thought liquidates its prehistory
like the Nazis liduidated the Jews). This wasn't due to greater 
imagination, but due to Husserl's conservativism, which had
no truck with the phony hoopla of Fascism, and indeed would survive WW II
as what later became the progressive pro-business ideology of the German
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), currently coalitioning with Kohl's CDU in
the German Parliament.

G.E. does rehearse many of the themes found in Negative Dialectics, and
certainly the notion of a "negative" or transnational dialectics was still
under development (if not indeed underdeveloped). But mostly G.E. is right
on target: think of the sections which deal with the calculating machine
(Rechner was the then-current German term) and with technocratic ideology
in general. Much of the great science fiction of the Fifties would come up
with the same critique: that an administered utopia is no utopia at all
(William S. Burroughs' magnificent early Sixties trilogy, and especially
Nova Express, is probably the most powerful aesthetic denunciation of such
cybernetic ideologies).

Adorno also has interesting things to say about logical
absolutism's failure to generate a real aesthetic theory: Husserl's
apperceptions are clearly Kantian absolutes, i.e. ahistorical snapshots or
ideal types abstracted from the work of art -- very much like the filmic
strategy of German Expressionism (photographic shots and chiaroscuro
serving to conceal the fundamental underdevelopment of Central European
mass-culture vis-a-vis the Hollywood hegemon). For my money, G.E. remains
one of the great Marxist texts of the 1950s, and probably the equivalent
of Sartre's work on Genet or the latter's essays on the pitfalls of
Eurocommunism.

-- Dennis