ADORNO ONE LAST TIME

[Richard A. Lee]

One of the things I like most about Adorno and even Benjamin is precisely
their concern about a philosophical attempt to "smash the system."  I had
always thought that one thing that makes Adorno's dialectic negative was his
insistence that "philosophy lives on because the moment to realize it was
missed."  If resistence is possible, it is certainly not so from within
philosophy.  But this is not mere defeatism.  For philosophy can become
critical.  In Horkheimer's sense, this means that theory would reflect on
its own (social, economic, political) conditions.  If one is looking for a
theory of action, Adorno is not your man.  Does that mean he thought that
any positive, alternative action was impossible?  I think that reading his
aesthetic theory provides ample examples (whether you like them or not) of
action which cuts accross the grain of modern capitalism.  If I were to
speak loosely, I have always understood Adorno to maintain that positive
action, positive solutions, happen all the time.  Philosophy's task is not
to provide them, but to critique them.

I have also understood Adorno to maintain, throughout "Negative Dialectics"
that Hegel's logic is the logic of capital, of the commodity form.  In that
sense, Adorno's thought is determined by the logic which he finds already
operative in the socio-economic sphere.

I take it that "defeatism," of which he is often accused, means that there
are no possibilities for making things otherwise.  I find this accusation
strange in that I find Adorno constantly challenging philosophies which try
to determine possibilities in advance.  Benjamin's theory of history is
similar in this regard.

I recognize that this is not entirely scholarly, and one can look at
specific texts to see if this is borne out.

Rick Lee