Adorno, theory & praxis & the FBI

[Ralph Dumain]

One of the panels in the recent Socialist Scholars Conference in New York 
was "Rethinking Adorno."  I shall have more to say about the panel later 
on, but now I just want to focus on the second speaker Andrew Rubin 
(Georgetown University), whose talk is of some relevance to the current, 
rather fruitless discussion of Adorno.

Rubin began by reciting a familiar litany of criticisms of Adorno's 
limitations, his disagreement with student activism (as pure actionism), 
his political resignation, etc., and everybody's peeves with him: 
feminists, Edward Said, Terry Eagleton, et al.  One wonders whether Adorno 
is relevant today.  He was insistent on maintaining his intellectual 
independence.  Unfortunately, my notes are so sketchy here that I don't 
have any proffered answer to the big question, but I did scribble something 
about the dialectical method ("not just resistance"), modern music, 
negativity, Beethoven's last works in which he abandons the bourgeoisie and 
embraces a mature negativity in the face of mortality.

This is not very helpful, I know, but what matters here is the middle part 
of the talk, based on FBI files on Adorno obtained via the Freedom of 
Information Act.  All members of the Institute for Social Research and 
associates of Adorno such as Eisler were all spied on by the FBI, from 1935 
on.  The FBI made a note of everything, from the car he drove, to the 
contents of his correspondence they opened and read.  FBI surveillance 
affected the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, inducing a rewrite of DIALECTIC 
OF ENLIGHTENMENT to conceal its Marxism.  The word "capitalism" for example 
was changed to "existing conditions".  Apparently, they were successful, 
because the FBI could never pin them down as Marxists regardless of their 
suspicions.  Government paranoia was also coupled with ignorance and 
stupidity.  Hoover thought reference to Nietzsche in Adorno's 
correspondence was some kind of secret code or language.

I have not attempted to verify Rubin's statements, and I would have to read 
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT carefully to judge it accurately myself.  The 
implication I see here is that the work might have become much more 
abstract due to the marxophobia of American conditions.  Hence it seems to 
me there could have been no question of A & H being too soft on Marxism if 
they had harbored strong anti-Marxist sentiments; the pressure would have 
been entirely in the opposite direction.  I couldn't tell you offhand how 
seriously this work might have been compromised. However, I find the 
quotations from this work recently adduced to be extremely noxious and 
objectionable:

>Formal logic was the major school of unified science. It provided the 
>Enlightenment thinkers with the schema of the calculability of the world. 
>The mythologizing equation of Ideas with numbers in Platos last writings 
>expresses the longing of all demythologization: number became the canon of 
>the Enlightenment. (1995: 7)
>
>To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and 
>ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off 
>as literature. Unity is the slogan from Parmenides to Russell. The 
>destruction of gods and qualities alike is insisted upon. (1995: 7-8)
>
>Man imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything 
>unknown. That determines the course of demythologization, of 
>enlightenment, which compounds the animate with the inanimate just as myth 
>compounds the inanimate with the animate. Enlightenment is mythic fear 
>turned radical. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is 
>no more than a so to speak universal taboo. Nothing at all may remain 
>outside, because the main idea of outsideness is the very source of fear. 
>(1995: 16)

Not only does such rubbish reduce real history to metaphysical 
abstractions, it betrays an elementary ignorance of what logic, 
mathematics, and science are all about, as well as the varied motives of 
individual scientists.  This repeats the worst and most ignorant cliches 
about science conflating it with "positivism", ignorant of its real 
history.   Worse, it smacks of the fascist lebensphilosophie of miscreants 
like Heidegger whom Adorno himself detested.  It is all the old right-wing, 
Catholic, "reign of quantity" crapola all over again.  What is wrong with 
the whole conception of "instrumental reason" is that it explains a 
mythological construct in mythological terms.

Curiously, CRITICAL MODELS shows Adorno functioning on a much higher 
plane.  In the face of the reactionary tendencies of the German ideological 
environment, Adorno takes great pains to defend the things he supposedly 
hates--America, science, even positivism--against the illiberal, 
obscurantist, irrationalist and reactionary tendencies of German 
lebensphilosophie.  Note also that Adorno demonstrates a mature 
understanding of the interplay between these two poles of bourgeois philosophy:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adornostill.html

Adorno was in Germany when he delivered these lectures.  Perhaps his 1949 
obsession with positivism as villain has something to do with the American 
conditions in which he was immersed in the 1940s, which he reacted against?

Finally, perhaps those interested in some intellectual substance as an 
alternative to the self-indulgent drivel that populates the Frankfurt 
School list may want to study up on the relationship between positivism and 
lebensphilosophie (or scientism and romanticism)  that forms the 
philosophical dynamic of modern societies--capitalist and Stalinist.  To 
that end I offer my study guide:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/guidlebn.html