Goldmann vs Adorno

[Ralph Dumain]

Following our recent discussion I decided to re-read Lucien Goldmann's 
LUKACS AND HEIDEGGER: TOWARDS A NEW PHILOSOPHY (London: Routledge & Kegan 
Paul, 1979).  I may have more to say about the book as a whole later, but 
now I am concerned with a section towards the end where Goldmann criticizes 
Adorno (pp. 91-97).  Goldmann points out that young Lukacs and the 
Frankfurt School were allied in the latter's early years.  But Adorno has 
different ideas now:

quote:

Adorno revealed his new conceptions at a recent congress on the sociology 
of literature, as, moreover, had Agnes Heller (one of Lukacs's closest 
collaborators) on behalf of Lukacs. According to Adorno, the creator 
situates himself outside reality, not at this necessary distance from the 
group whose world vision he expresses, but outside of reality, and his 
attitude toward it is extremely critical: a minimal acceptance and a 
maximal rejection. That leads Adorno to the idea of a purely negative 
dialectic, to rejection, and to the requirement of the impoverishment of 
content, an impoverishment and rejection for which the ideal would be 
Beckett. In almost Heideggerian tones --whom he criticizes sharply, 
moreover-- Adorno now rejects everything which is popular, and any 
concession to the popular, and thus arrives, through criticism, at rather 
conservative positions.

He conceives of the work as a sort of objective reality, a nearly Platonic 
reality or form which the creator should attain. To defend the idea of this 
constraint by form, Adorno recalls that, however great a genius he may be, 
the creator could only produce everything he wants to at the risk of 
succumbing to mediocrity. This is incontestable at the psychological level 
of the individual, but in no way does it explain to us the existence of its 
objective realities, nor their origin. As we have seen, this objective 
reality -- in other words coherence, significant structure, aesthetic form, 
which goes beyond the subjective consciousness of the individual creator -- 
is not in the least a Platonic reality, but rather the possible 
consciousness of a plural object, its world vision. This objectivity, this 
form, exists for the individual who must attain it not as an evident 
reality, but as a non-conscious norm; it is here that the individual is 
differentiated from the collective subject, because, in the historical 
praxis of a plural subject, the forms are neither given nor are they 
preexistent. It is by starting from this collective praxis that the forms 
become intelligible and that their genesis can be grasped.

Moreover, Adorno is little interested in these significant structures. What 
makes a work important for him, what interests him, is what he calls its 
'truth content'. This truth content, according to his pronouncements on it 
at the congress, is difficult to define and always goes beyond the purely 
intellectual. Consequently, the work must not be approached in its totality 
and by following its genesis, but in relation to criticism, to the 
philosopher, who knows this truth content today. Literature no longer 
appears interesting or valid except to the extent that the critical 
philosopher speaks about it in order to extract certain elements from it 
which he judges in relation to something which is not the work itself. 
Thus, the truth content is beyond the work, in the consciousness of the 
critical philosopher who chooses this content in accordance with the 
critical consciousness, and the work is no longer considered except outside 
itself. This truth content, then, is situated outside history or in the 
history of philosophy. As a result, aesthetics is subordinated to 
philosophy, to truth, to the theoretically valid content. And, since this 
truth content is not a significant structure inherent to the work, it 
becomes a sort of evidence, of which the cultured man, the thinker, the 
philosopher may have a sort of intuitive knowledge. Their knowledge is 
shared by other cultured men, without the existence of any foundation other 
than culture for this community. With much finesse and subtlety Adorno 
comes back to this Neo-Kantian thought and to the dualism of the subject 
and the object which Lukacs and Heidegger had transcended, thus taking up 
the position of Bruno Bauer's and Max Stirner's Critical Consciousness.

end quote

I don't know what to make of this, but as we shall see, the argument hangs 
on Goldmann's conception of subject-object identity with a collective 
subject.  There is something fishy about this.

Goldmann continues:

quote:

This Critical Consciousness found an explanation in the young Marx and the 
young Lukacs on the basis of its historical genesis, and this can also 
clarify Adorno's new position. Following Marx's directions, Lukacs was the 
first to overturn the old customary scheme of the development of 
Neo-Hegelian philosophy. He discusses the Neo-Hegelians in History and 
Class Consciousness and in articles on Lassalle and Moses Hess of the same 
period. These ideas of Lukacs continued by A. Cornu in his books on M. Hess 
and Marx, are now very widespread and - as in the case of other Lukacsian 
ideas - their origin has been forgotten. The earlier history of 
Neo-Hegelianism was different. It constituted a chain which went from Hegel 
to the Neo-Hegelians, to those of the right, the centre, and the left, to 
reach Marx, as the most radical among the Hegelians of the left, who 
developed dialectical materialism. But Lukacs has shown that those who are 
called 'Hegelians of the Left' are in fact closer to Fichte -- as the 
Neo-Kantians were later on -- than to Hegel. They had moved away from the 
Hegelian position, according to Lukacs because they had abandoned the 
fundamental categories of totality and the identity of the subject and the 
object, in order to return to the subject-object opposition in the form of 
the opposition between 'critical consciousness' and the world.

In The Holy Family and The German Ideology Marx had already accused the 
Hegelians of the left -- Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner, etc., -- of having 
retained Hegel's language and his categories, but also for having returned 
to this side of Hegel, who tried to imagine himself in the world. in fact, 
the Hegelians of the left thought they were situated above the world and 
spoke from outside it, whereas according to Marx and he ardently insists 
upon it in The German Ideology when someone speaks, he should ask who is 
speaking and from where. The Hegelians of the left are in opposition to the 
reality of ideas which have no real basis: Bauer with his critical 
self-consciousness and Stirner with his egoistic individual which, Marx has 
shown, is not real and, in short, comes from a philosophical construction, 
just like Bauer's 'critical consciousness'. To know what one is speaking 
about, Marx very justifiably requires that one know who is speaking and 
from where: it is necessary to know that one always speaks from within a 
world from which comes the structure of consciousness of the one who is 
speaking and who, in order to know what he is saying, must know this world 
and this structuration at the risk of otherwise remaining within an ideology.

end quote

I understand the argument against the Left Hegelians, but there is 
something not quote kosher here.  The problem begins with subject-object 
identity.  I don't think this is a quite accurate characterization of the 
deficiencies of the Left Hegelians.

I'll skip the next paragraph for the time being and move on:

quote:

According to Lukacs the Hegelians of the left are the expression of a 
small, radical group oriented since the beginning of the 1840s toward the 
revolution of 1848, without being sufficiently strong to succeed in the 
revolution, or capable of thinking about itself and the situation clearly. 
Moreover, after the failure of the revolution of 1848, the group altered 
and its thinkers (who had been very well-known) lost all importance. 
Beforehand, in the struggle against the Prussian State, which created all 
sorts of difficulties for them, the Hegelians of the left could not 
continue Hegel's compromise, nor find in Germany a real force which they 
could have relied on. And so they criticized the world as bad and negative 
without knowing where, in what place, and in what perspective or praxis, to 
situate their criticism. They placed it in an imaginary entity, a 'critical 
consciousness', or in the egoistic individual, Stirner's 'Unique Man'  who 
is another version of this  who opposes the world and judges it.

end quote

True, but the problem is that their criticism lacks concreteness in its 
treatment of the objective world and their relation to it.  Hence their 
judgement becomes abstract.  There is something Stalinist about the 
"collective subject", and Goldmann's sympathy here for the notions of the 
YOUNG Lukacs as well as a limited sympathy for Heidegger, and this 
obsession with situatedness that doesn't smell right.  Who farted?

quote:

In History and Class Consciousness, where Lukacs offers this explanation 
concerning the Hegelianism of the left, there is another important 
observation - likewise derived from Marx - on Hegel's philosophical limits 
and his proximity to Kant and Fichte.  It is these limits of Hegel which 
have permitted the Hegelians of the left, and the Neo-Hegelians in general, 
to use him as their authority and to continue to use his language in order 
to uphold a Fichtean outlook. Lukacs recalls that Hegel rejects any 
possibility of judgment coming from the outside because he develops a 
philosophy of immanence and totality. Yet, according to the Hegelian 
conception, history is the work of the Absolute Spirit which, although 
intervening through its agents, remains outside reality and has a dualist 
relationship with it. Thus, despite the monism of a system which denies 
dualism, a dualism of the subject and the object virtually exists in Hegel 
between the Absolute Spirit and concrete history, according to 
Lukacs.  This opposition of the subject and the object was able to be 
accentuated and placed at the centre of their preoccupations by the 
Hegelians of the left, for whom the Absolute Spirit simply became the 
subjective consciousness of the critique, the 'subject' of history.

According to Lukacs it is not because the young Marx had been the most 
radical of the Hegelians of the left, i.e. in reality a Fichtean, that he 
developed dialectical materialism. Quite the contrary, it was because he 
was the only consistent Hegelian among them that he eliminated all of the 
Fichtean and Kantian residues from the thought of Hegel and that he turned 
toward rigorously monist thought. And he only attained this thought, and 
was only able to elaborate it completely, after his exile in France and his 
discovery of the proletariat as the new social force and as the basis of 
identical theory and praxis.

end quote

I understand the logic of the argument, but I don't believe it.

quote:

Since Marx's time, and even since History and Class Consciousness, the 
development of the forces of production and economic relations has again 
rendered problematic the relation between thought and reality. Even Lukacs 
abandoned the identity of the subject of praxis and the subject of the 
work, and no longer relates the work to the group, but to the relation of 
its creator to global history. Thus, the old theory of the revolutionary 
proletariat as the historical basis, by its action, of dialectical thought 
must be modified and can no longer be maintained or asserted as before. The 
Frankfurt School, which no longer admits this old conception, has the 
impression that the ground has been pulled away from under its feet. But 
this disappearance of the collective subject has not led it to join the 
structuralists who, on the basis of the technocratic structures of 
organizational capitalism, deny the existence of the subject. The Frankfurt 
School has kept its critical positions; nevertheless, it finds itself in 
the situation of the Hegelians of the left in the Germany of the 1840s. It 
has come back to the dualism between the subject and the object, and 
criticizes the world on the basis of ideas which it is far from being able 
to justify. Bauer came from Hegel. Today, Adorno comes from an earlier 
Adorno, close to the positions of History and Class Consciousness, who 
would not easily have accepted this radical rejection and this 'critical 
consciousness' which he upholds today, while continuing, on other points, 
his refined and intelligent dialectical analyses. The need to know worldly 
reality, the collective subject on the basis of which one thinks, obviously 
only exists for the dialectical thinker. Descartes - to take the famous 
example of a non-dialectical thinker - does not have such a problem and 
almost ignores its possibilities. The relation between the dialectical 
thinker and the worldly reality from which he begins, is a dialectical, 
circular, relation. The collective subject produces the mental structures 
which the thinker expresses and elaborates, and he must be able to account 
for their real origin in his thought.

end quote

I get it, but I don't believe in any collective subject even as a 
concept.  Smacks of objective idealism.

Finally:

quote:

If one does not accept Adorno's 'critical consciousness', which judges and 
scans reality from on high, or the individual relation to global history as 
Lukacs currently conceives it, if one wishes to maintain, no longer the 
idea of the revolutionary proletariat, but the requirements of Marx's 
dialectical thought (which always demands that one know who is speaking and 
from where), of the subject-object totality, then the basic question arises 
of knowing who is, now, the subject of speech and action. It is necessary 
to know in the name of what and from where we are speaking today, if we 
believe that there are only valid works and actions to the extent that they 
are placed within a universe created by men and are attached to specific 
groups.

There are situations in which one cannot give an answer because the group, 
from which speech and action comes, is not yet manifest. In these 
situations, on the basis of a modified tradition, individuals speak by 
formulating perspectives and positions for which the group, the true 
subject, if it is not yet there, is in gestation or waiting to be 
elaborated. And very probably, these positions will be modified when the 
group becomes manifest.

end quote

I find this inadequate.  This cannot be as banal as it looks, can it?