Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction Albrecht Wellmer,

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1 Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction Albrecht Wellmer, Article information: To cite this document: Albrecht Wellmer, "Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction" In Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process. Published online: 10 Mar 2015; Permanent link to this document: Downloaded on: 11 April 2019, At: 17:36 (PT) References: this document contains references to 8 other documents. To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 1329 times since 2015* Users who downloaded this article also downloaded: (2016),"The Birth of the True, The Good, and The Beautiful: Toward an Investigation of the Structures of Social Thought", Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 35 pp <a href=" doi.org/ /s </a> (2015),"Developing sustainable societies a dialogical network perspective", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 42 Iss 6 pp <a href=" doi.org/ /ijse "> Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by All users group For Authors If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit for more information. About Emerald Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

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3 ADORNO, ADVOCATE OF THE NONIDENTICAL: AN INTRODUCTION $ Albrecht Wellmer Translated by Noah Soltau, Verena Erlenbusch, and Harry F. Dahms ABSTRACT Purpose Appreciating the continuing relevance and contribution of Theodor W. Adorno s work requires acknowledgement of the difficulty to grasp his philosophy in a way that is consistent with that which is to be understood, as the necessary first step to achieving concordant understanding. Design/methodology/approach To assay an understanding of Adorno s quest for the object beyond the concept, it is best to undertake a journey through the complexity of his thinking, beginning with the book he wrote with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. $ Translator s Note: This essay was a lecture given as part of the series Classics of Modernity at the University of Constance in the Summer semester of Original German publication: Albrecht Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach Adorno. Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp, pp We would like to thank the author for reviewing and improving our translation. Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 30, Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: /doi: /S (2012)

4 36 ALBRECHT WELLMER Findings The difficulty to capture the substance of philosophy in a manner that allows for representation arises from the inherently processual character of philosophy, which is always both unfinished and without secure summation of report at any step along the way. Indeed, the difficulty is all the greater with respect to Adorno, in light of his postulate that philosophy must strive, by means of the concept, to transcend the concept. Research limitations/implications Adorno s obsession to overcome the compulsion of identity made him perceptive and blind at the same time. To liberate his insights from their reconciliatory-philosophical shroud, one would have to expose the concept of rationality to the same obsessive gaze under which false generalities dissolve in Adorno s philosophy. Originality/value The inherently processual character of Adorno s philosophy makes his writings especially germane to present conditions of modern society, as they highlight the importance of efforts to develop theories that are sufficiently sensitive to the dynamic character of modern society, including its inconsistencies and its contradictions. Keywords: Adorno; critical theory; Dialectic of Enlightenment; contradictions; identity-thinking; instrumental rationality You are expecting an introduction to the philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno from me. Such an introduction has almost insurmountable difficulties set against it. Adorno himself emphasized persistently that philosophy, if it merits the designation, cannot be captured in theses and that it essentially does not allow itself to be presented systematically. What Adorno means, each of you can verify without trouble: open any history of philosophy text or any philosophical dictionary; if you are even only somewhat self-critical, you will ascertain that after reading a reference representation of a philosopher or a philosophical thesis, you are just as clever as you were before. That lies in the fact that results or theses in philosophy that is, that which can be presented are only as valuable as the movement of thought which crystallized in them; however, this movement of thought cannot be communicated in the common sense of the word and carried home as information. Rather, it is acquired in that one understands it. Accordingly, the word introduction would have to be understood exactingly when it concerns a philosophical introduction: not as an introduction in the sense of a transfer of elementary knowledge (since that would be without use, philosophically), but as an introduction to the thought of a philosophical

5 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 37 author. Such an introduction, however, in contrast to the introduction which merely relays elementary knowledge, is one of the most difficult tasks that one can put to a philosopher. In the case of Adorno, this difficulty is all the more acute, because Adorno drew radical consequences from his insight that philosophy cannot be presented systematically, not least with respect to the form of his own philosophizing. Not unlike his contemporaries Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Adorno was of the opinion that the great philosophy of European tradition had for long stretches oriented itself toward a false ideal: the ideal of systematic, secure knowledge built on firm foundations. To be sure, the thesis that philosophy cannot be presented systematically is also valid for the great philosophy of the past, but time and again, the latter oriented itself toward the ideal of a methodologically secured progress of knowledge all the way to Husserl and to the logical positivism and constructivism of the Erlangen School. In this orientation is hidden, so one could say, the secret or open wish of philosophers to finally lead philosophy out of the nonbinding dispute of opinions among the schools, and to elevate it to the rank of a true science. Were such a philosophical science possible, there would also be secure and systematically presentable philosophical knowledge. There would be textbooks of philosophy such as those in physics or biology, and one would at best read the writings of Plato, Kant, or Adorno out of historical interest as today, the historians of science, but not the physicists, read the writings of Newton. Adorno was not the first who recognized that a philosophical science in this sense was not possible, or that it would mean the end of philosophy, were it to be seriously realized. It is not this insight that represents the unmistakable aspect of Adorno s philosophy, but the manner in which he formulated it, justified it, and drew consequences from it. As I already have indicated, these consequences concern not least the form of his philosophizing. Adorno s texts are extraordinarily dense, but in a different way than some of those of Kant, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein. Kant s major philosophical works certainly are difficult to understand, and often obscure, but they do have a clear architectonics: if one is familiar with the blue print, one knows for the most part where one is located, and how the pieces of the building are positioned to one another. Heidegger in any event the late Heidegger is difficult to understand because he philosophically alienates everyday words until they become incomprehensible; thereby, the trusted rules of syntax and semantics that usually lead us even in philosophical texts from one sentence to another, are being suspended. Finally, the texts of the late Wittgenstein are dense in an utterly inconspicuous way: one must have already read them thoroughly in order to notice that behind the

6 38 ALBRECHT WELLMER seemingly casual remarks, there is an utmost intellectual energy. Set against those examples, Adorno s texts are dense, like complex and in every nuance carefully composed musical pieces: thinking with the ears was one of Adorno s mottos. His texts are densely composed and based on the idea that thoughts are only worth as much as the linguistic form in which they are expressed. This idea underlies Adorno s deep mistrust of everyday as well as scientific forms of linguistic communication. This mistrust, or rather, the language criticism as which he formulated it, is in a certain sense the core of Adorno s philosophy. For this reason, my reference to the difficulties of an Adorno lecture was no mere coquetry; rather, it leads us directly into the center of his philosophy: the critique of identity thinking, of the significative language, of the general concept. You might say: but it is a paradox when a philosopher mistrusts thinking in general terms, because how else than with the help of general concepts should we philosophize? Later you will see that, in reality, this obvious objection marks the central philosophical problem that Adorno s thinking worked on. Accordingly, in Negative Dialectics (1973 [1966]), his principal philosophical work, Adorno (1973 [1966], p. 15) postulated for philosophy: It must strive, by means of the concept, to transcend the concept. And now you will perhaps better understand the difficulty of which I have spoken above: For how can an introductory lecture do justice, in understandable words, to a philosophy that tries to say something that resists its conceptual representation? I leave the question open, by initially avoiding that difficulty. And indeed, I will try to approach the center of Adorno s philosophy the critique of identifying thinking in a circuitous manner. The most productive detour seems to me to be a walk through Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1947]), the book which Adorno wrote along with his friend Max Horkheimer in the war years , while in American exile. This book contains a kind of history or perhaps one should say: a meta-history of thought; it tells the history of the glamour and gloom of the Enlightenment. The book is the founding document of the later, so-called Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose most important representatives in Germany were to be Horkheimer and Adorno, after their return from exile in America. For an understanding of this book and the story it tells, an understanding of the historical context in which it came about is important. Adorno and Horkheimer belonged along with Leo Lo wenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and others to a circle of Jewish intellectuals centered on the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research who were banished from Germany by the Nazis. Horkheimer had become the director of the Institute in 1930; he succeeded in saving the Institute from the grasp of the Nazis and

7 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 39 reestablishing it in New York later on. In the early 1930s, the heyday of the Institute in Frankfurt, its program was the development of a Marxistoriented, interdisciplinary theory of society. Horkheimer and his friends were no orthodox Marxists, but they were oriented toward Marx critique of political economy, and they hoped for a proletarian revolution even if they no longer held any illusions about the Bolshevik Revolution. The collapse of the German labor movement and the experiences of fascist and Stalinist terror compelled them to try for a new theoretical orientation whose most important document became Dialectic of Enlightenment. As legacies of bourgeois Enlightenment, fascism and Stalinism were no longer conceivable in Marxist categories; in order to understand the transformation of both bourgeois and socialist enlightenment into naked terror, a concealed element of terror had to be identified in the historical movement of enlightenment itself, in which the possibility of such a transformation was presaged. While the theoretical orientation of the Frankfurt Institute still can be understood as a direct continuation of a tradition that leads from Hegel and Marx to the beginning of Western Marxism in the early Luka cs, Dialectic of Enlightenment constitutes the attempt to integrate into a Marxistoriented theory of enlightenment the conservatives anti-enlightenment critique of civilization, which up until then had been despised by Marxists as merely an expression of bourgeois decadence and which especially in the Weimar Republic had produced evil excrescences. The matter could also be rendered in such a manner that Adorno and Horkheimer tried again, as it had already been attempted by the young Hegel, to put to the service of a critical theory of society that is to say a radicalized enlightenment a tradition of critiquing the enlightenment which indeed had respectable roots in the early Hegel and German Romanticism, all the way through to Nietzsche, and which also continued to have an effect on the young Marx. It is in this context, I believe, that the philosophical background and the intellectual biography of Adorno were of crucial importance: though Dialectic of Enlightenment signifies in some respects a break with the theoretical orientation of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, it does not really signify a break with the philosophical work of the early Adorno. With regard to Adorno, it is rather the continuity of his thought from the early Frankfurt writings on philosophy and sociology of music, to the later works, Negative Dialectics (1973 [1966]) and Aesthetic Theory (1997 [1970]), which is astounding. At the time of his inaugural Frankfurt address in 1931, on The Actuality of Philosophy, that is, at 28 years old, Adorno already appears to be a complete philosopher, in the sense that all of the decisive motifs of his thought, its basic constellations so to speak, were already

8 40 ALBRECHT WELLMER developed. His later and surprisingly rich production is the unfolding of these basic constellations. This extraordinary case of philosophical precociousness is all the more noteworthy, as Adorno, in addition to his philosophical education, also completed a musical one; after successfully defending his dissertation in Frankfurt, he studied composition for a few years with Alban Berg in Vienna, and was at the same time a contributor and later an editor of the magazine Anbruch. Philosophy and sociology of music remained central areas of work for Adorno until his death; a serious philosophy of modern music did not exist before Adorno. If he had written nothing other than Philosophy of New Music (2006 [1946]) and his small works in philosophy and sociology of music, his importance as a philosopher would still be extraordinary, or perhaps one should say, with Habermas, his importance as a philosophizing intellectual, because such was Adorno in marked contrast to academic philosophy, of which he once remarked angrily that the motto of its ordained representatives is Sum, ergo cogito. The remark originates from Minima Moralia (2006 [1951]), a collection of aphorisms written during his exile in America, which, among Adorno s works, perhaps comes closest to his idea of philosophy. These Reflections from Damaged Life, as the subtitle of Minima Moralia reads, contain, as in mirror writing, Adorno s teaching of the good life (p. 15); at the same time there appears in them the idea of a philosophical masterwork ironically transformed into its opposite: the Minima Moralia are Adorno s anti-summa. But let me come back to Dialectic of Enlightenment. Its first sentence reads, Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity (Hokheimer & Adorno, 2002 [1947], p. 1). Dialectic of Enlightenment is the attempt to grasp the disparity between the goals and the consequences of enlightenment. For the Marxist intellectuals Adorno and Horkheimer, this had to be equivalent to the attempt to modify the schema of the history of civilization drafted by Marx and Engels so as to make understandable why bourgeois society did not bring about a classless society, but rather a civilized form of barbarism. Already Marx and Engels had seen in the transition from the archaic prehistoric societies to the class state to state-organized society not only the beginning of civilization, but at the same time a catastrophe, namely, the beginning of the organized exploitation of man by man. Already in Marx and Engels, the process of civilization appears dialectical in the sense that, as a process of the self-constitution of the human species, as a process of objectification and of the formation of humanity s essential powers, it is a process of increasing degradation

9 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 41 of human beings, of increasing domination and exploitation of man by man. But Marx and Engels had also seen in the historical constellation brought forth by modern capitalism, the potential of a nascent emancipated society free from domination. By contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer try to show that there was no natural escape from the historical dialectic of progress and repression, because the arena of this dialectic is human subjectivity itself; the process of subjectification of humanity already contains, in a dialectically bewitched manner, the elimination of the humanity of men. Therefore, in the historical moment in which the stage of the forces of production would make possible freedom and abundance for all, there are no emancipated subjects who could appropriate the wealth of society. The dialectic of enlightenment is, for Adorno and Horkheimer, the dialectic of the history of reason. The history of reason is dialectical, because since its beginnings in the prehistory of civilization, reason is infected with domination and the will to self-preservation. Adorno and Horkheimer explicate this unity of reason and domination by way of trying to read Marx simultaneously through the eyes of Kant and Nietzsche, that is, via a critique of knowledge, and to read Kant through the eyes of Marx and Freud, that is, in a materialist manner. Adorno s and Horkheimer s critical epistemological reading of Marx is best elucidated through their analysis of the forms of rationality of modern industrialized society. The latter is characterized, as already in Max Weber and the early Luka cs, by a coalescence of formal and instrumental rationality. Formal rationality evinces itself as the impulse to establish systematically unified and noncontradictory correlations of knowledge, explanations, and actions. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the power of reason to produce unity and consistency, which the concept of formal rationality refers to, emerges from the basic conditions of conceptual thought: to the extent that thinking, the use of language, is tied to the principle of noncontradiction as the core of rationality, so to speak, which must be effective in all cultures as forms of symbolically mediated interaction the compulsion to consistency and to the production of systematic order in knowledge and action is built into the linguistically mediated cognitive faculties and modes of action of human beings from the outset. Reason, tied to the principle of noncontradiction, as it were, is always already on the path to formal rationalization and the systematization of knowledge and action. Thinking, as understood by the Enlightenment, is the process of establishing a unified, scientific order and of deriving factual knowledge from principles, whether these principles are interpreted as arbitrarily posited axioms, innate ideas, or the highest abstractions. The laws of logic establish the most universal relationships within the order

10 42 ALBRECHT WELLMER and define them. Unity lies in self-consistency. The principle of contradiction is the system in nuce. y Reason contributes nothing but the idea of systematic unity, the formal elements of fixed conceptual relationships. (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002 [1947], pp ) Now, Adorno s and Horkheimer s truly difficult thesis is that formal rationality ultimately is synonymous with instrumental rationality, that is to say, a reifying rationality, which tends toward the control and manipulation of natural and social processes. Following the analyses of Max Weber, Luka cs had already characterized the form of rationality of capitalist society as a coalescence of formal and instrumental rationality; yet, he explained this coalescence of formal and instrumental rationality from the structure of commodity exchange, that is, as a manifestation of commodity fetishism. Adorno and Horkheimer try to ground their analysis at a deeper level. While they, too, regard the exchange rationality of capitalist society as the dynamic center of modern processes of rationalization in the areas of administration, in justice, and in the economy, this agreement with Luka cs is rather deceiving: for Adorno and Horkheimer, the exchange rationality of capitalist society is itself only the extreme case of the unity of formal and instrumental rationality that they try to trace back all the way to the prehistory of reason, of conceptual thought. To begin with, I would like to explicate the central thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer, the thesis of the unity of formal and instrumental rationality in conceptual thought. I draw on a statement in which, with a surprising twist, Adorno and Horkheimer classify Kant s critique of pure reason within the history of the instrumentalization of reason. The statement reads: The mastery of nature draws the circle in which the critique of pure reason holds thought spellbound (ibid., p. 19). I would like to explain the point of this statement in two steps. Step 1: In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant establishes the natural-scientific form of knowledge as the measure of what can be called knowledge: reality as the sum total of possible objects of experience, as it is constituted according to Kant through the forms of intuition space and time and the categories of the understanding (especially substantiality and causality), is a reality of phenomena which are nomologically connected with each other, that is, reality as an object of possible natural-scientific knowledge. What this means has been formulated once again by American philosopher Wilfred Sellars within the framework of modern analytical philosophy of science, when he states: yin the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and what is not that it is not (Sellars, 1963, p. 173). Whatever does not conform to

11 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 43 the standards of natural-scientific description and explanation cannot be called real. It is easy to see how closely associated this form of scientism is with enlightenment as disenchantment of the world, on the one hand, and on the other with the dominance of empiricist, positivist, or behaviorist modes of thought in the social sciences and psychology. Descartes, too, in his way, is a representative of this scientism: whatever aspects of human and social reality cannot be grasped through scientific concepts, to him as to Kant contracts to the world-less point of the I think ; a ghost in the machine, as the English philosopher of language Gilbert Ryle called it, which was to be eliminated from the scientific image of man as expendable fiction by the more consistent empiricists. If, then, one understands, as Adorno and Horkheimer do with good reason, the enforcement of scientific modes of thought in conjunction with the transformation of societal relations and structures in modernity, it becomes clear that the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Sellars reflects (and legitimizes) a historical transformation of social relationships in modernity: [T]he relationships of human beings, including the relationships of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them. Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002 [1947], p. 21). The connection between what Luka cs called reification and the proliferation of natural-scientific modes of thought already becomes clear at this point: as human beings, alongside living nature and the life-processes of society, become the object of natural-scientifically (quantifying causal functional) oriented descriptions and explanations, they are assimilated to things, that is, to the objects of physics, in their self-understanding as well as in their social relationships. Since the real ideal of modern natural science is mathematical physics, one can also say, to paraphrase Sellars, that mathematical physics becomes the measure of what is real and what is not. It is precisely in this sense that Adorno and Horkheimer observe: Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems (ibid., p. 18). Step 2: Next, it is necessary to explicate the thesis of the instrumentalist character of the natural-scientific mode of thinking. Knowledge in the sense of mathematical physics, which objectifies reality into a network of functional (causal or statistical), experimentally explorable, quantitatively subsumable nomological relations, according to its logical grammar, is instrumental knowledge; that is, knowledge which is technologically

12 44 ALBRECHT WELLMER usable and suitable for the calculation of the results of purposively rational action. Knowledge of this kind means power, as Bacon rightly recognized, that is, the expansion of the scope of technical control or manipulation. The connection between the natural sciences and technology, between theoretical knowledge and the technical application of this knowledge to objectified processes, thus is grounded in the logical grammar of natural-scientific theories, that is, in the forms of thought, description, and explanation of natural science. To the extent that natural-scientific modes of thinking assert themselves with the development and proliferation of bourgeois society, an instrumentalist understanding of knowledge and praxis spreads across all areas of social life not least through the rationalization of economic and bureaucratic systems of action that Weber described, as well as, linked to it, in the social sciences, economics, and psychology. Thus, at least in modernity, an objectification of natural and societal reality oriented on technical control and manipulation becomes the central content of formal processes of rationalization. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them (ibid., p. 6). Let us return to the sentence about Kant we took as our starting point: The mastery of nature draws the circle in which the critique of pure reason holds thought spellbound. I have endeavored to convey in two steps the meaning of this sentence: (1) already in Kant, physically describable reality becomes the measure of that which can be claimed to be real that is, cognizable; (2) the physical form of the objectification of reality proceeds according to an instrumental a priori: knowledge is power. Thus, for Adorno and Horkheimer, two things form an inextricable pair: (1) dead nature becomes the paradigm of reality in general; this means that the social, spiritual, and psychic reality of human beings will also be conceived in terms of this paradigm: the reductionism of modern empirical science corresponds to the reification of spiritual nature or of the natural spirituality of human beings. (2) calculating, quantifying rationality and technically usable and applicable knowledge become society s dominant forms of rationality and thought. The more reason is reduced to functions of self-preservation, the more strongly an assimilation of human nature and social reality to inorganic nature must occur. Human life becomes a chemical process, the human body becomes an object, and this transformation into dead matter, which resulted from the

13 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 45 transformation of nature into stuff, material (ibid., p. 194), means, under the aegis of an instrumental reason which has become total, not only a methodological prejudice of certain sciences but also a real change in human and social reality: society becomes a functional reference frame, human beings become manipulable things. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape (ibid., p. 20). For Adorno and Horkheimer, enlightenment, progressing under the banner of scientific objectification, is mythological because scientific as well as mythological thought treats any given present as a mere instance of the ever-same: either as repetition of continually occurring archetypal processes as in myth, or as an event determined by general regularities, as in science. The subsumption of the actual, whether under mythical prehistory or under mathematical formalism, the symbolic relating of the present to the mythical event in the rite or to the abstract category in science, makes the new appear as something predetermined which therefore is really the old. It is not existence that is without hope, but knowledge which appropriates and perpetuates existence as a schema in the pictorial or mathematical symbol (ibid., p. 21). Before as after the triumph over myth, so one could paraphrase these statements, human beings are confined to a self-constructed prison; only for this reason they do not succeed at shaking off the spell of the actual as being necessary and ever-same. Just as myth was already in part enlightenment explanatory and systematizing knowledge so enlightenment is still mythical. The progressing disenchantment of the world through enlightenment is at the same time its progressing enchantment. Adorno and Horkheimer tried time and again to apprehend this entwinement of disenchantment and enchantment of the world through enlightenment in new expressions. Demystification that was the overcoming of animistic and anthropomorphic interpretations of nature in terms of an increasing objectification and mastery of nature. But this demystification of nature means simultaneously an assimilation of living and spiritual nature to dead nature: Mimesis to dead matter. The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death. The subjective mind which disintegrates the spiritualization of nature masters spiritless nature only by imitating its own rigidity, disintegrating itself as animistic. Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings (ibid., pp ). Adorno and Horkheimer definitely understand mimesis to dead matter, in accordance with Luka cs analysis of reified consciousness, as a real societal process to which human consciousness and self-understanding is

14 46 ALBRECHT WELLMER subjugated as much as their social relationships. Instrumental rationality assumes the form of the social system in which human subjectivity becomes just another disruptive element: But the more heavily the process of selfpreservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul (ibid., p. 23). Where human subjectivity carries weight only as a source of disturbance to technologized and bureaucratized systems, it is not far to organized mass murder and to those strategic war games, which today already contemplate the continuation of atomic war after the end of human life by robots. Dialectic of Enlightenment is in large part a phenomenology of those processes of reification, which first made possible such apocalyptic perspectives alongside the conditions of totalitarian rule to begin with. Even in inconspicuous, seemingly progressive changes in the history of bourgeois society, Adorno and Horkheimer detect elements of a burgeoning form of totalitarian rule. In this sense, they anticipate Foucault s analyses, when they set the humanization of the penal system in bourgeois society in relation to the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. In the bourgeois penal system, the body is no longer directly attacked, but rather the soul is slowly tortured to death; prison and mad house become indistinguishable. Just as, according to Tocqueville, bourgeois republics, unlike monarchies, do not violate the body but set to work directly on the soul, punishments of this kind attack the spirit. Those they torture no longer die broken on the wheel over long days and nights but perish mentally, as silent, invisible examples in the great prison buildings, which differ from lunatic asylums almost only in name (ibid., p. 189). So much for the phenomenology of a reifying rationality, as Adorno and Horkheimer described it. The question still remains to be answered, what the reification of reality has to do with the conditions of conceptual thought. For only this question allows us to approach the central thesis concerning the critique of knowledge of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Adorno then developed in his late work, above all in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. The thesis itself derives from Nietzsche, in whose unpublished writings [Nachlass] we find the following: Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. That is: the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is assumed y (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 277). Nietzsche s paradoxical thesis is that what we refer to as truth is based on a falsification of reality: the truth claim of discursive thought is itself only an appearance. Logic, Nietzsche continues, does

15 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 47 not spring from the will to truth (ibid.). What looks like a will to truth is, in reality, a will to the usurpation of reality, is will to power: One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ( a world of identical cases ) as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible: we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us (ibid., p. 282). In a similar way, Adorno will speak in Negative Dialectics of the preparatory and concluding character of general concepts and, likewise, of the illusory character of conceptual knowledge: the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend (Adorno, 1973 [1966], p. 5). But already what is said in Dialectic of Enlightenment about the instrumental character of concepts sounds like a repetition of Nietzsche: Of course, mental representation is only an instrument. In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered. Like the material tool which, as a thing, is held fast as that thing in different situations and thereby separates the world, as something chaotic, multiple, and disparate, from that which is known, single, and identical, so the concept is the idea-tool which fits into things at the very point from which one can take hold of them (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002 [1947], p. 31). Through this adoption of a Nietzschean idea, which anchors the unity of formal and instrumental reason in the nature of discursive thought, Adorno s and Horkheimer s reading of Marx obtains that radical critical epistemological twist that irrevocably separates it from all previous Marx interpretations: like Marx, they proceed on the assumption that the development of forms of knowledge is embedded in the process of subjugating nature through human labor; but unlike Marx, they no longer see in the subjugation of nature a proof of the truth of objectifying thought, but only proof of its illusoriness and violent character. At the same time, however, and against Nietzsche, they hold on to a Marxian interpretation of this finding: the illusoriness of identity thinking indicates for them the ideological character of instrumental rationality; the concept of ideology, however, that is, of socially necessary illusion, presupposes the concept of truth. Together with the utopian perspective of Marxian theory, Adorno and Horkheimer hold onto an emphatic concept of truth which, however, must be thought of as exterritorial to the world of identity thinking, to the context of delusion of instrumental rationality. What appears in Nietzsche as a mischievous play on the word truth becomes deadly serious in Dialectic of Enlightenment; hence, Adorno s

16 48 ALBRECHT WELLMER demand that philosophy must strive to think the unthinkable, to speak the unspeakable, indeed, to transcend the concept in the medium of the concept. This is at the same time the starting constellation of thought in Adorno s Negative Dialectic. While I have up to this point explained Adorno s and Horkheimer s reading of Marx through the lens of critical epistemology, I would now like to explain their materialist reading of Kant. The point of departure is the thought of the correlativity of object and subject, of the synthesis of thinking something and the unity of the I think. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Kant s transcendental subject is the world-less [welt-lose] shadow that actual people cast on a philosophy, which is no longer capable to think them as real subjects of flesh and blood. Real subjects are part of nature, originating from [t]he splitting of life into the mind and its object (ibid., p. 195). Adorno and Horkheimer understand the unity of the I think in Freudian terms: as the formation of an ego that is thought of as the agency of reflective foresight and overview (p. 68). The dictates of consistency of conceptual thought presuppose a consistent, that is, a unified, ego; but just as conceptual thought is explained via functions of self-preservation, so too is the formation of the ego construed as a function of self-preservation: the development of a unified ego occurs in the service of the preservation of that which is the natural substrate of this self, human life. Thus, paradoxically speaking, the self becomes a function of selfpreservation. The development of the self in the service of self-preservation is, however, at the same time a self-sacrifice: The identical, enduring self (p. 42) is a sacrifice of the self (ibid., p. 41), because the unity of the self is inevitably paid for by the repression and regimentation of inner nature that is, of all those impulses, emotions, and desires that, in any present instant, urge toward gratification and tend toward happiness and pleasure. If the living substance of human life is decided in the anarchic impulses of the body, the development of a unified self signifies this is the drivedynamic side of subject formation a sacrifice of this living substance. The human being s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained, because the substance which is mastered, suppressed, and disintegrated by self-preservation is nothing other than the living entity, of which the achievements of self-preservation can only be defined as functions in other words, self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved (ibid., p. 43). The history of civilization is the history of renunciation (ibid., p. 73): The I owes itself to the sacrifice of the present moment to the future (ibid., p. 40), The dictate of

17 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 49 consistency of conceptual thought, developed in the service of selfpreservation, turns back as a dictate of consistency on the self of thought: Domination over external nature is possible only at the expense of the repression of inner nature. Yet repressed inner nature, as it were, pushes against the rigid boundaries of the ego: From this follows that the fear of self-loss that cannot be separated from the motive of self-preservation and which expresses itself in the civilized taboo against all forms of anarchic sensuality is bound to the lure of self-loss in intoxication, in ecstasy, or in madness. Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self the identical, purposedirected, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood. The effort to hold itself together attends the ego at all its stages, and the temptation to be rid of the ego has always gone hand-in-hand with the blind determination to preserve it. Narcotic intoxication, in which the euphoric suspension of the self is expiated by deathlike sleep, is one of the oldest social transactions mediating between self-preservation and self-annihilation, an attempt by the self to survive itself. The fear of losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment. The way of civilization has been that of obedience and labor, over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power. (ibid., p. 26) The splitting of life into mind and its object leads to the development of the unified self as a piece of disciplined, spiritualized nature. The mind [Geist] issues from the self-diremption of nature with itself, but it does not know itself as nature: brought to life by functions of the self-preservation of the living, the mind is, so to speak, self-forgotten from the outset. The tendency toward reification that resides in it and that as we have seen culminates in the mathematical-scientific form of thought of modernity, tendentially also means that living mind disappears from the universe of what conceptual thought can grasp; it must in the end spell itself out in the categories of dead nature it becomes a mimesis to dead matter. The selfforgetfulness of the mind is the forgetting of its own naturalness [Naturhaftigkeit] nature understood, in this instance, in the sense of living nature it is the denial of nature in the subject. However, with the denial of the naturalness of the mind, with the denial of nature in the subject, enlightenment at the same time loses sight of its own goal; the mind becomes blind, rationality irrational. This very denial [that is, of nature in the human being; A.W.], the core of all civilizing rationality, is the germ-cell of proliferating mythical irrationality: with the denial of nature in human beings, not only the telos of the external mastery of nature, but also the

18 50 ALBRECHT WELLMER telos of one s own life becomes confused and opaque. At the moment when human beings are cut off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all the purposes for which they keep themselves alive social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed, consciousness itself become void, in the enthronement of the means as the end, which in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness, is already detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity. (ibid., pp ) I am breaking off here. With my representation of central motives and thoughts of Dialectic of Enlightenment, I wanted to convey to you something of the basic conceptual constellation which Adorno s late work takes as its starting point. The question that Dialectic of Enlightenment leaves behind is: How can a liberated and humane society, how can truth, freedom, and justice continued to be thought at all, if the context of delusion of instrumental rationality, if reification and the forgottenness of nature are themselves grounded in the conditions of conceptual thought? Adorno and Horkheimer are not irrationalists; in good Marxist and at the same time Hegelian manner, they rather hold on to the notion that the process of civilization is, in spite of everything, a process of enlightenment; only as its result can freedom or reconciliation be thought. Reconciliation can only be thought as Aufhebung of the self-diremption of nature, attainable only in the passage through the self-constitution of the human species within a history of labor, sacrifice, and renunciation. From that also follows that the process of enlightenment can surpass and complete itself only in its own medium that of the spirit which dominates nature. The enlightening of enlightenment about itself, the remembrance of nature in the subject, is only possible in the medium of the concept, but that also means that conceptual thought, that language is not only a medium of reification, but that a utopian perspective, a perspective of reconciliation is secretly inscribed in it. To be sure, the dominant manifestation of spirit is that of a forced unity, that of the system in which the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century presage themselves. But the unity of the system indeed contains, in encoded form, the idea of a different sort of unity: a nonviolent unity of multiplicity, an unforced nexus of the living. [U]nity and unanimity, Adorno says in Negative Dialectics (1973 [1966], p. 24) in allusion to the philosophical systems of the past, are also an oblique projection of a pacified condition that is no longer antagonistic, upon the coordinates of supremacist, oppressive thinking. This explains at the same time something of Adorno s relationship to the philosophical systems of German Idealism and to the philosophical tradition on the whole. He relates to them like a treasure hunter who, from the fallen buildings of metaphysics,

19 Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction 51 tries to rescue and bring out into the open fragments of truth. Negative Dialectics is a single dialog with Kant and Hegel. Just as Adorno thought of social emancipation as a self-transgression of the reifying spirit, he saw the possibility of philosophical truth in a selftransgression of conceptual thought. This relates to the demand that philosophy go beyond the concept by means of the concept. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno tried to characterize this self-surpassing of the concept by means of the concept as the introduction of a mimetic moment in conceptual thought. Rationality and mimesis must coalesce in order to release rationality from its irrationality. Mimesis is the designation for the sensually receptive, expressive, and communicative modes of behavior of the living. The place where mimetic modes of behavior preserved themselves in the process of civilization as spiritual is art. Art is mimesis spiritualized, transformed through rationality, and objectified. From this it becomes clear that for Adorno, art and philosophy refer to the two spheres of the spirit in which, through an intertwining of the rational with a mimetic moment, it breaks through the crust of reification. To be sure, the intertwining happens in both cases from the respectively opposite pole: in art, the mimetic becomes spiritual; in philosophy, the rational spirit softens into the mimetic reconciliatory. Spirit as reconciliatory is the medium common to art and philosophy; it is also, however, the epitome of their mutual relationship to truth, their common vanishing point, their utopia. Just as the concept of the instrumental spirit indicates not only a cognitive relation but a structural principle of relations between human beings and between man and nature, so the concept of the reconciliatory spirit stands not only for the nonviolent synthesis of the dispersed in the beauty of art and in philosophical thought but simultaneously for the unforced unity of the multiple in a reconciled nexus of all the living. In the forms of knowledge of art and philosophy, this reconciled nexus of the living is prefigured as the nonviolent bridging of the gap between intuition and concept, between the particular and the general, and between part and whole. And only this form of the spirit, which prefigures the reconciled state, can attain knowledge at all; it is in this sense that the closing aphorism from Minima Moralia has to be understood, which contains in nuce what Adorno will develop in his philosophical masterworks, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as