ADORNO ONE LAST TIME

[Ralph Dumain]

Thanks for your response, Rick.  It is, however, not entirely convincing.
You locate resistance in two dimensions: (1) theoretical resistance against
bourgeois ideology, which we alreay know about, (2) acts of mass
resistance, which Aodnro acknowledges to be happening, even though it is
not philosophy's task to provide ideas on action.  #2 is what is really of
releavnce here, and while I don't object to a division of labor between the
philsopher and the everyday world business of action, I am not entirely
convinced that Adorno reocnogzes any such thing except as a future abstract
possibility.  I can't think of one example he has ever adduced to the
effect that anyone outside the ranks of the avant-garde intellectual has
ever escaped brainwashing and cooptation by the capitalist machine.
Further, I find a certain evasiveness and vagueness in the response to my
questions, which further fuels my doubts.

I've brought up this issue before.  Here is what I posted to this list on
17 April 1998:

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Re: ADORNO: REFUGE FOR CONCRETE INDIVIDUALITY?

I can't remember exactly what reading prompted these thoughts a couple
months ago, could have been NEGATIVE DIALECTICS or MINIMA MORALIA.
Following up on Adorno's claim that "the whole is the false", I can see how
Adorno attacks any systematic phenomenon in society as being corrupted by
the falsity of the system.  But this in theory still leaves the
possibility, unexplored by Adorno himself, that there may be remnants of
concrete individuality among the population, which not only do not fall
under identity thinking as a means of apprehension, but themselves may have
escaped the homogenizing force of crushing totalization.  Adorno looks at
the worked from the point of view of what the system has done to people,
not from the perspective of what people themselves may have done to resist
this systematization.  Is there any room in Adorno's world view for the
acknowledgement not only of non-identity thinking but also of non-identity
being?  I was first inclined to think there could be a space for this even
for Adorno, though it is an area he evidently did not bother to explore
himself.  However, other things I have read suggest a negative answer, such
as the idea that there is no authentic subjectivity prior to or outside of
the distorted social reality in which we live, so individuality is actually
an impossibility and so to seek it out is a misbegotten task.
----------------------------------------

To this post I received a few responses of a similarly vague and
unconvincing nature.  It would be an interesting adventure to pursue the
possibilities of negative dialectic, but it doesn't seem that anyone who
has ever taken up Adorno has any real perspective or interest that goes
beyond that of a narrow elite.

At 05:12 PM 02/12/2000 -0500, Richard A. Lee wrote:
>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