In the Hotel Abyss: An Hegelian-Marxist Critique of Adorno

229 Pages·2013·0.87 MB·English

by  Robert Lanning

In the Hotel Abyss
Studies in Critical
Social Sciences
Series Editor
David Fasenfest
Wayne State University
Editorial Board
Chris Chase-Dunn, University of California-Riverside
G. William Domhofff, University of California-Santa Cruz
Colette Fagan, Manchester University
Martha Gimenez, University of Colorado, Boulder
Heidi Gottfried, Wayne State University
Karin Gottschall, University of Bremen
Bob Jessop, Lancaster University
Rhonda Levine, Colgate University
Jacqueline O’Reilly, University of Brighton
Mary Romero, Arizona State University
Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo
VOLUME 60
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss
In the Hotel Abyss
An Hegelian-Marxist Critique of Adorno
By
Robert Lanning
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2014
Cover illustration: “Sun Streaks” by Eric Lanning.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lanning, Robert,d1948-
 In the hotel abyss : an Hegelian-Marxist critique of Adorno / By Robert Lanning.
  pages cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences ; volume 60)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-24898-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. 2. Methodology.
3. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. 4. Dialectic. 5. Critical theory. 6. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831.
I. Title.
 B3199.A34L36 2013
 193--dc23
2013034168
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters
covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the
humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 1573-4234
ISBN 978-90-04-24898-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-24899-1 (e-book)
Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV
provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center,
222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
<UN> <UN>
CONTENTS
1 Introduction ...........................................................................................................1
Background and Context ....................................................................................9
The Orientation of the Present Study ..........................................................15
Adorno’s Form of Presentation ......................................................................17
Theory and Practice ..........................................................................................22
The Management of Politics and Personal Relations ..............................25
The Socio-Historical Context ..........................................................................27
2 Hegel, Marx, Dialectics .....................................................................................30
The Individual.....................................................................................................34
Being and Self-consciousness .........................................................................37
Becoming .............................................................................................................42
Contradiction ......................................................................................................44
Hegel’s Positivity, Critical Theory’s Positivism ...........................................46
A Note on Dialectical Logic .............................................................................50
Mediation .............................................................................................................51
3 Aspects of Adorno’s Method: Constellations and Images ......................61
Adorno’s Bilderverbot and the Negation of Messianism .........................77
4 Jazz, Radio and the Masses..............................................................................83
The Masses and the Culture Industries ........................................................86
The Jazz Essays ....................................................................................................89
Marx, Music and Relative Autonomy..........................................................101
Black Influence and Historical Materialist Analysis ...............................105
Radio ....................................................................................................................111
5 The Masses and Pro-fascist Propaganda....................................................120
Pro-Fascism and the Masses .........................................................................124
Irrationalism as the Basis of Analysis ........................................................127
Lowenthal’s Anti-Fascist Writings ..............................................................130
Adorno’s Study of Martin Luther Thomas ................................................132
The Approach of Others to Antifascism ...................................................143
<UN> <<UUNN>>
vi contents
6 Mediation ...........................................................................................................151
Hegelian Mediation .........................................................................................162
Adorno’s Mediation .........................................................................................165
7 Negative Dialectic, Identity and Exchange ...............................................172
Negative Thought .............................................................................................172
The Positive Moment in Dialectics .............................................................176
Identity and Identity Thinking .....................................................................184
Concept and Identity ......................................................................................193
Exchange ............................................................................................................195
8 Conclusion .........................................................................................................207
References ...............................................................................................................211
Index .........................................................................................................................219
<<<UUUNNN>>> <UN>
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Of the major points of Marx’s work, the most pertinent was that his
method could expose the contradictions of capitalism and contribute to
the organization of an alternative to it. In other words, it is possible to get
from the initiation of critique to socialism. With much of Adorno’s work,
that is not the case, neither in the method nor the expectation. The argu-
ment in this book is directed at the difference.
Marx employed dialectics as the method of his orientation to political
economy (1967: 30), to be able to reason through the experience of capital-
ism. For Hegel, dialectics was essentially the connection of elements of
experience: “this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on
itself and which effects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what
is called experience” (1977: 55). Adorno rejected Hegel’s view of dialectics
and experience as simply part of the “idealist machinery” (1973: 7). He did
not consider dialectics a method, a “pure method” (1973: 144), but acknowl-
edged the necessity of beginning with matter rather than thought, “unrec-
onciled,” contradictory matter. Unreconciled, contradictory reality resists
“unanimous interpretation;” contradiction existing in reality is “a contra-
diction against reality” (1973: 144–145). The notion of contradiction being
located in reality and, therefore, against it certainly holds. But while it
may be a contradiction against the whole of reality, as in the reality of
capi talism – the social process as a whole, as we will see later – it is, most
often, against a part of reality, a moment, with the complex of internal
relations connecting all other parts to the whole clearly in mind. If not,
how do we treat the contradictions of reality that are sublated by the
partial and momentary resolution of the original contradiction? Adorno’s
position is that no meaningful change in society is possible until the entire
structure, ideology and existing culture industries of capitalism have been
completely overcome. He embeds his theoretical orientation in a categor-
ical approach, seeing contradiction as finality rather than an expression of
both the process of thought and the process of a changeable reality. Thus,
the contradiction in question is against the whole of reality taken categor-
ically and absolutely. The philosophical orientation is on thinking and
interpretation devoid of a structure for thinking through actual political
<UN> <<UUNN>>
2 chapter one
change. The contradiction, rather, should be searched to its source, as the
basis of developing adequate knowledge of process, development and
change. But a perspective on actual politically-driven change is absent in
Adorno’s work; his dialectics are dialectics of collapse, dissolution, and
despair.
Acknowledging that dialectics is thinking in contradictions, and on the
basis of his concern to repudiate all forms of identity, Adorno asserts that
his dialectics cannot be reconciled with Hegel’s which, by implication,
“tend[s] to the identity in the difference between each object and its con-
cept” (1973: 145). In relation to this, he begins Negative Dialectics placing
the core principle of dialectics, non-identity in his view, against logic’s
“principle of the excluded middle,” that “whatever differs in quality, comes
to be designated as contradiction.” Dialectics, on the other hand, at its
inception is “the consistent sense of non-identity” (Adorno 1973: 5).
Contradiction, barred from the structure of formal logic, finds its home in
dialectics.
Adorno is correct about the difference between formal logic and dialec-
tics. But herein lies the essential twofold problem in his recognition of the
absence of the excluded middle in formal logic: first, the limits that any
contradiction possesses for developing its relations with the reality in
which it arose and in which it remains in sublation, albeit residually; sec-
ondly, the contradiction, in itself and in the process of sublation, consti-
tutes the excluded middle, the de-legitimizing of formal logic, the progress
of materialist dialectics. The core of Adorno’s dialectics is non-identity;
non-identity, as he conceives it, is categorical and, as such, does not bridge
the two moments of this process. In the excluded middle we see the
moments of the process of change that leads to the sublation – aufhebung,
transcendence and preservation. From such processes of transformation a
space is opened further to witness and to reason, to see political reality
meet its limits and its master, the historical subject carried forward by its
own consciousness.
Bertell Ollman argues that dialectics is a form of thought and analysis,
“it proves nothing, predicts nothing and causes nothing to happen” (1993:
10). In that sense, Adorno rightly states that dialectics “does not begin by
taking a standpoint.” But as philosophy it only operates as a human prod-
uct and cannot be isolated from the human context; thought requires a
thinker, the thinker thinks in and about particular times, places, events
and conditions, however much he or she may wish to be insulated from
the context and its obligations. Dialectics, logic, in themselves, are prior to
any partisan, politically-driven viewpoint. It is the exposure to ideas,
<<<UUUNNN>>> <UN>
introduction 3
determinations, empirical evidence that produces choices precisely
because of the method underlying the analysis. In this sense, Adorno is
correct to say, “Experience lives by consuming the standpoint” (1973: 30).
It is a higher level than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason is centered on
“thinking about thinking”. Hegel also began his Science of Logic by noting
that dialectics did not begin from a “standpoint” but not in quite the same
way as Adorno. Hegel’s dialectics produced a standpoint internal to the
method when his indeterminate Being and Nothing were given only a
moment’s distinction before vanishing into Becoming (Hegel 1969: 92).
Such movement might satisfy the apparent neutrality suggested by
Ollman, but it also indicates the reality that dialectics is imputed a stand-
point in the process of its development and is in a position to lend its
potential to a practical program without inherently privileging any parti-
sanship. One can accept the idea that dialectics does not initially take a
position, but it is more difficult, in fact not possible to consider the thinker,
the agent of dialectical thinking, the person deeper into modernity than
Hegel who employs dialectics, being without a standpoint, a partisan posi-
tion on existing conditions, their history and contradictions, and being
partial, at least, to a conceptual effort of the kind Bloch identified as for-
ward thinking. Dialectics as a way of thinking can only be sustained
momentarily without recognizing the social ground of its cogitation. In
the pluralism of ideas and methods of reasoning and resolving, dialectics
itself may not possess a standpoint inherent in its name, but the choice of
dialectics by the thinking subject is a position taken.
Beginning without an obvious standpoint may be a narrative device
that holds the reader’s partisan interests at bay while the philosopher
forms the argument; this is indicated by Adorno’s statement that dialec-
tics in its materialist form has “degenerated into a dogma” (1973: 7). But, in
fact, it is not widely evident in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere that he
holds his particular interests at a distance; rather, from the outset his posi-
tion is emphatic, especially his writing on culture, the condition of ‘the
masses,’ and popular music. The style is one that rarely allows the reader
full insight into why he holds the categorical positions he does. Thus, he
continues in Negative Dialectics: “My thought is driven by its own inevita-
ble insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking” (1973: 5), evidence of
the retention of the priority of thought/thinking in the abstract, from
Kant. Cognizance of the insufficiency of one’s thinking should be a motive
for its development and clarity. If dialectics is a search for knowledge,
Adorno warns that it should not be for the comfort provided by the iden-
tity of contradictory elements found in the investigation of the social
<UN> <<<UUUNNN>>>
4 chapter one
world. “Identity and contradiction of thought are welded together” [anein-
andergeschweißt], he writes (1973: 6), although the weld suggests a more
permanent relation than is necessary philosophically or evident histori-
cally. But the obvious question concerns the structure or structuring of
consciousness, how it becomes structured under the conditions of its
experience, thought, and analysis, how the demand for resolution of
opposing phenomena and relations comes about rather than simply being
there as an historical fait accompli that Adorno often imputes to the
moment he fumes against.
The position throughout Negative Dialectics and elsewhere is that iden-
tity is total, that totality is totally identical, formed by identity-thinking.
Identity must be purged from consciousness, Adorno argues, as quickly as
it is sensed or the being who identifies will succumb to the existing social
order of identity-thinking. And he assumes this concerns the majority of
beings. This position, a standpoint, assumes that all forms and instances
of identity or unity are barriers to achieving a different social order and
these must be completely transcended before new social structural
arrangements, a new consciousness can be realized. For Adorno, unity in
dialectics implies a non-contradiction theoretically unattainable and he
continually pushes his readers toward a comprehension of this sense of
identity, its inadequacy and danger. His ‘identity’ is categorical and inclu-
sive of too much that is characterized by the dynamism that can be
searched out and developed in reality; ‘identity’ is a concept, and he, quite
correctly, sees the concept as claiming to cover reality but cannot pre-
cisely because of its movement, and yet he treats the concept of identity as
if it is able to do so. Unity and identity are denounced along with the
notion that there is a positive moment in the dialectic that possesses any
intellectual, social or political value, and it is insisted here that the posi-
tive moment, however tendential and brief, is sublation. Adorno’s criti-
cism of the “strive for unity” as a goal of consciousness, a matter of “the
structure of our consciousness” (1973: 5), is a problem, it seems, for all but
a minority of intellectuals, for there is no theoretico-practical relation in
political and social thought for him that has resulted in a dialectical over-
coming of existing conditions and the sublation of philosophical and
practical problems.
However, the striving for, or preoccupation with identity, is contingent
on specific social, economic and historical relations, and thus, on con-
sciousness, more or less developed. Contingency implies a set of condi-
tions in which a specific complex of relations has arisen and developed,
and which are surmountable under specifically different, negatively
<<UUNN>> <UN>