Theodor Adorno : Key Concepts

Cook provides a lucid introduction. Weaving together a narrative of his life with an exposition of central texts, she shows how even the more daunting of Adorno's concepts have social-critical inspiration and import. His concepts serve to challenge a society where an exploitative economy has primacy, and they also point toward radical emancipation. Cook's second chapter traces Adorno's key concepts back to Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud. Adorno's emphasis on the "non-identity" between "concept and object, mind and matter, the individual and society" (p. 23) stems from his complex reading of Kantian problematics concerning the thing-in-itself. This emphasis turns Adorno's appropriation of Hegel in the direction of a "negative dialectic." Adorno absorbs from Hegel both a reliance on determinate negation as the path to truth and a recognition of the interconnected character of society as a whole (albeit as a false totality, for Adorno). Adorno's dialectic is materialist, however, in a double sense: Ã la Marx, Adorno insists on the pervasive and constitutive character of capitalist production; Ã la Freud, he calls attention to the role of corporeal instincts and needs, and of their repression, in the formation of the self and civilization. Adorno's concept of "natural history" is a critical appropriation of both Marx and Freud.

Whereas Adorno employs his concepts to highlight "catastrophic tendencies in Western societies," subsequent critical theorists, led by JÃrgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, have adopted a "more conciliatory view" (p. 33). Yet they retain much from Adorno's diagnosis of life under late capitalist conditions. The scope of his impact goes beyond Critical Theory, however. Cook mentions the flood of empirical research unleashed by The Authoritarian Personality, for example, as well as his influence on communications, literary studies, and musicology. What is lacking so far, she concludes, is an audience that could turn "his theoretical insights into emancipatory social practice" (p. 35). Cook does not consider whether this lack might indicate limitations to Adorno's insights.

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This pattern returns when Negative Dialectics foregrounds the "primacy of the object" over thought and the "non-identity" between concept and object. Adorno claims that modern philosophy has privileged thought and its concepts. As a result, philosophy has not done justice to that in the object which does not fit under concepts -- the unique side of every thing "by virtue of which things are identical neither to the kinds they embody nor to other instances of those kinds" (p. 54). Such "identity thinking" ignores or suppresses "the non-identical." It thereby takes part in the domination of nature that characterizes the dialectic of enlightenment. To counter identity thinking it would not suffice to propose "singularity," Ã la Hegel, as a universal category to cover everything non-identical. Nor, however, does Adorno want to ignore Hegel's critique of "sense-certainty" for supposing that we have immediate and nonconceptual experience of objects. Instead "Adorno sees the concept of the non-identical as a limit-concept" (p. 56). It lets us recognize the limitations to conceptual understanding, the dependence of our concepts upon objects, and the irreducibility of objects to our concepts. In such recognition, says Stone, would lie the path to Adornian reconciliation.

Yet Adorno agrees with Hegel that the recognition of conceptual limits necessarily leads to conceptual attempts to overcome them. What keeps Adorno from reverting to Hegel's idealism of the concept is a two-sided idea of "constellations." On the conceptual side, we can construct interlinked ranges of concepts that illuminate the uniqueness of an object without pretending to gain exhaustive insight into it. On the object side, each unique thing is a constellation of its historical relations with other things. Hence a constellation of concepts can "'gather around' the unique history of the object where this history makes the object the unique thing that it is" (p. 59). Although Stone mentions objections to Adorno's idea of constellations, she considers his contribution to (dialectical) logic "surprisingly fruitful" (p. 61).

Adorno does not abandon the metaphysical quest for transcendence, however. Following Walter Benjamin, he points toward metaphysical experience that promises "a transcendence from within" whatever is "transient and fragmentary" (p. 67). For Adorno such experience is not optional: without it we could not truly confront and resist the radical societal evil that Auschwitz exposed. As Hammer rightly suggests, this gives Adorno's mediations on metaphysics a strongly ethical and political inflection, unlike the "postmetaphysical" turn taken by both Habermas and postmodern thought. Adorno's emphatic concepts of truth, transcendence, and meaning may seem anachronistic. Yet if they are "implicit in a larger project with which even contemporary humanity can identify," Hammer concludes, then Adorno's reflections on metaphysics remain "relevant for both ethical orientation and political struggle" (p. 75).

Combined with the normative gap in Adorno's ethics, the virtual absence of collective agency spells trouble for Adorno's social and cultural theories. Yet the four chapters on these topics skate lightly around the trouble. Pauline Johnston indicates the relevance of Adorno's social philosophy for feminism but sticks to common themes in Frankfurt School thought. Marianne Tettlebaum's chapter on political philosophy summarizes Adorno's reflections on class, democracy, and education but does not take up his subsuming relations among economy, state, and civil society under an all-pervasive logic of domination. Ross Wilson correctly describes Adorno's aesthetics as overcoming "the opposition of Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics" (p. 153) to address the "paradoxical nature of autonomous art in contemporary society" (p. 157) but does not explicate distinctive Adornian concepts such as technique and truth content. Robert Witkin construes Adorno's philosophy of culture as playing out an opposition between reified pseudo-culture (Halbbildung) and (true) Culture, which, Witkin claims, would dynamically express subjective spirit. His construal forgets that Adorno sees reification as intrinsic to authentic art and not simply as a curse visited upon mass culture.

Adorno continues to have an impact on disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, musicology and literary theory. An uncompromising critic, even as Adorno contests many of the premises of the philosophical tradition, he also reinvigorates that tradition in his concerted attempt to stem or to reverse potentially catastrophic tendencies in the West. This book serves as a guide through the intricate labyrinth of Adorno's work. Expert contributors make Adorno accessible to a new generation of readers without simplifying his thought. They provide readers with the key concepts needed to decipher Adorno's often daunting books and essays.

Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not.[citation needed] Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to criticise arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go into the former without remainder. This gap, this non-identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material life and conceptual reflection.[citation needed]

As Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he also believed that the language the sociologist uses, like the language of the ordinary person, is a political construct in large measure that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts installed by dominant classes and social structures (such as our notion of "deviance" which includes both genuinely deviant individuals and "hustlers" operating below social norms because they lack the capital to operate above: for an analysis of this phenomenon, cf. Pierre Bourdieu's book The Weight of the World). He felt that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered ... including revising theories that were found to be false. For example, in an essay published in Germany on Adorno's return from the US, and reprinted in the Critical Models essays collection (.mw-parser-output cite.citationfont-style:inherit;word-wrap:break-word.mw-parser-output .citation qquotes:"\"""\"""'""'".mw-parser-output .citation:targetbackground-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133).mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Lock-green.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon abackground:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg")right 0.1em center/12px no-repeat.mw-parser-output .cs1-codecolor:inherit;background:inherit;border:none;padding:inherit.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-errordisplay:none;color:#d33.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-errorcolor:#d33.mw-parser-output .cs1-maintdisplay:none;color:#3a3;margin-left:0.3em.mw-parser-output .cs1-formatfont-size:95%.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-leftpadding-left:0.2em.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-rightpadding-right:0.2em.mw-parser-output .citation .mw-selflinkfont-weight:inheritISBN 0-231-07635-5), Adorno praised the egalitarianism and openness of US society based on his sojourn in New York and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955: "Characteristic for the life in America [...]is a moment of peacefulness, kindness and generosity". ("Dem amerikanischen Leben eignet [...] ein Moment von Friedlichkeit, Gutartigkeit und GroÃŸzÃgigkeit".)[93]

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