DocumentInterpretation & Domination: Adorno & the Habermas-Lyotard Debate

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Interpretation & Domination: Adorno & the Habermas-Lyotard Debate Author(s): Shane Phelan Source: Polity, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1993), pp. 597-616Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3235124Accessed: 19-06-2015 00:21 UTC

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Interpretation & Domination: Adorno & the Habermas-Lyotard Debate* Shane Phelan University of New Mexico

This article explores Theodor Adorno's philosophical method and argues that it furthers resistance to domination. The author compares Adorno's position with those of Jurgen Habermas and Jean-FranCois Lyotard and finds that it includes important elements that these later thinkers have abandoned. Habermas moves away from Adorno's insistence on the limits of interpretation and the importance of the particular toward total systems, while Lyotard's attempt to do justice to "the event" leaves him without the purchase for critical theory that Adorno pursued.

Shane Phelan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Univer- sity of New Mexico. She is author of Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community and of articles in a number of scholarly journals.

Why return to Adorno? A glance at the recent flood of literature on critical theory, modernity, and post-structuralism reveals two avenues by which Theodor Adorno is bypassed, relegated to the realm of intellectual history. First, Habermasian critical theory takes Adorno to task for his "abandonment of reason," his retention of subject-centered epistemology, and the political quietism that seems to result from aporetic negative dialectics.1 Second, theorists hail Adorno as a precursor, but share the Habermasian critique of the philosophy of consciousness while claiming

*The author thanks Diana Robin and Dennis Fischman for their help in the preparation of this article.

1. See Jiirgen Habermas, The PhilosophicalDiscourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Albrecht Wellmer, "Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlighten- ment," in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 35-66.

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to have absorbed the best of him into post-structuralism.2 In this view, Adorno's focus on non-identity, the primacy of the object over the subject, and the "de-construction" of concepts of unity and identity are crucial steps in a direction that is travelled further by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

What these interpretations share is a failure to address the central paradox of Adorno's thought. Adorno manages to hold together the two impulses that later diverge into schools. His rejection of epistemology and of universalism foreshadows postmodernism, but his strong empha- sis on the material bases of domination and identitarian thought align him with Marxism in a way that Lyotard, for example, rejects. Adorno provides an opening into the increasingly important concept of specificity, rather than simple difference or deferral.

I will examine the place of specificity in his negative dialectics, with the hope that this examination will help us to articulate aims for political and social theory that have often been elusive within post-structuralist work. I will also argue that Adorno's constellative method can help us to think through the classic absolutist/relativist box that hovers over contemporary political theory and prevents non-totalizing theoretical defense of political action. Adorno provides a model of method that is neither "relativist" nor "totalitarian," but is faithfully dialectical and opposed to domination.

I. System and Interpretation

If there is a central idea to Adorno's method, it is the belief that "philosophy is not expoundable," that it is not a matter of deductive logic but of active interpretation of the world.3 Adorno states that the

2. See Rainer Nagele, "The Scene of the Other: Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialec- tics in the Context of Poststructuralism," in Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 91-111; Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1982).

3. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Actuality of Philosophy," Telos, 31 (1977): 74. There are several extensive treatments of Adorno's thought and life. The reader is urged to con- sult Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977); Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); and several books by Martin Jay: The Dialectical Imag- ination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept From Lukacs to Habermas (Berkeley: Univer-


Shane Phelan 599

"matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history" are those approached not by systems or sovereign subjects, but by interpretation: "nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity."4 This does not and can not mean the end of conceptual thought; interpretation works only through concepts. Interpretation, however, always leads us to its own edge, to a recognition of the inadequacy of any conceptual scheme. Johann P. Arnason describes Adorno's vision as one of a "less restrictive relationship between conceptualization and experience," though not a divorce; the aim is "a permanent self-critique of conceptual thought" rather than its elimination.5 The task for Adorno is to rethink the relation between concept and thing, subject and object, in such a way that neither the concept nor the thing is taken to be supreme over the other or, indeed, to be independent of the other.

Adorno's interpretation rejects the forcible positing in theory of unity and peace, "the use of concepts to neutralize the diversity of experience and the tendency to suppress the tension between the conceptual and the non-conceptual."6 He has two objections to such a maneuver. First, he argues that thought cannot be reconciled to or in the world; the nature of thought is not assimilation, but negation of that which appears as given. He states firmly that "thought as such, before all particular contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it."7 In his view, "that which is forced" before any content is immediacy. Immedi- acy blocks thought by eliminating the distance between subject and object that thinking traverses. This negation, however, is subverted by "positive" thought, which blocks the avenues of resistance and critique. "Positivity" is for Adorno the name of colonization, of passivity toward authority, of acceptance of the given as the best of all possible worlds.

His second objection has to do with the consequences of the attempt at harmony. Adorno does not criticize the desire for reconciliation, but he does object to the belief that such desire is, has been, or can be met by

sity of California Press, 1984). Most recent is Fredric Jameson's Adorno: Late Marxism, or The Return of the Dialectic (New York and London: Verso, 1990). Critical reading of these texts is required; they do not agree in their assessments of Adorno, though they share a general sense of his aims.

4. Adorno, "Actuality of Philosophy," p. 8. 5. Johann P. Arnason, "Cultural Critique and Cultural Presuppositions: The Her-

meneutical Undercurrent in Critical Theory," Philosophy and Social Criticism, 15 (1989): 132.

6. Ibid. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Con-

tinuum, 1973), p. 19.



reality. Such beliefs participate in the maintenance of capitalism through "the neutralization, by confirming the existent order, of every emancipatory step."8 Thus, not only is a premature theoretical positing of a unified, peaceful world a turn away from critical thought, it is complici- tous in the perpetuation of a fragmented, agonistic actuality. As Michel Foucault will later put it, "to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system."9

For Adorno, such reconciliatory thought takes the form of systematic philosophy. In his view, the Enlightenment's conceptual presentation of the imperative of capitalism for the elimination of barriers to the market insisted upon unification and ordering in thought as well as in politics and economics. As Rainer Nagele has described it, "universal history does not become problematic for Adorno because it contradicts empirical history, but, to the contrary, because it uncannily becomes more and more reified reality."'10 For this reason, system is one of the prime targets of his critique. Producing a new system "would be merely positing another downright 'first'-not absolute identity, this time, not the concept, not Being, but nonidentity, facticity, entity."'l Rather, his project is to "pursue the inadequacy of thought and thing," to resist the drive to identity and unity.12

This pursuit and this resistance do not entail the classic maneuver of positing an individuality that transcends history and social structures. It involves seeing how our subjectivity, our experience of ourselves as individuals, is socially constituted. His project, he says, is "to use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity."'3 The fallacy in question is the belief that our concepts ade- quately describe and, even more, construct the world in which we live. Such a belief keeps us blind to the actual forms of domination around and within us. "No elevation of the concept of Man has any power in the face of his actual degradation into a bundle of functions"; in fact, the philosophical focus on the free individual acts as ideology when the actual social conditions are those of unfreedom.14

8. Ibid., p. 21. 9. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Inter-

views, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 230. 10. Nagele, "The Scene of the Other," p. 96. 11. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 136. 12. Ibid., p. 153. 13. Ibid., p. xx. 14. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and

Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 68.


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Challenging this transcendental constitutive subject does not require the denial or destruction of any subject whatever. That is precisely what gives force to the notion of using the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity. What Adorno seeks is a reformulation of the terrain and nature of the subject. This involves using reason, intellect, and intuition to challenge given conceptions of reason, intellect, and intuition. Simply denying these would be to remain on the terrain given by the dominant social and epistemological order; one either is or is not rational, supports or does not support the subject, etc.

It is accordingly very easy to look on the subject as nothing-as was not so very far from Hegel's mind-and on the object as absolute. Yet this is another transcendental illusion. A subject is reduced to nothing by its hypostasis, by making a thing out of what is not a thing. It is discredited because it cannot meet the naively realist innermost criterion of existence.... The subject is the more the less it is, and it is the less the more it credits itself with objective being. 15

Adorno seeks to shift the field on which these concepts have been con- structed. Using the strength of the subject, the currently experienced self, he hopes to challenge the hypostatized subject that is blind to its domination.

Adorno challenges the idea of the self-constituting, sovereign subject possessing the ability to reflect transparently upon itself, but also the more harmonious hermeneutical projects that acknowledge social and linguistic constitution while overlooking contradiction or fragmenta- tion.16 His blistering attacks on Heideggerian philosophy extend to her- meneuticists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, who are comfortable with horizons of meaning, with non-transcendental subjects, but who view life within these horizons as full and rich, not cause for anxiety and pain.

15. Theodor W. Adorno, "Subject and Object," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen, 1978), p. 509.

16. This contest of course has many recent instances: The Habermas-Gadamer debates are one notable front, but so in different ways are the arguments inspired by Foucault; see Michael Shapiro's review of Charles Taylor's Philosophical Papers, Vols. 1 and 2 in Political Theory, 14 (1986): 311-24; William Connolly, "Taylor, Foucault, and Other- ness," Political Theory, 13 (1985): 365-76. Brian Fay recapitulates this struggle in his distinction between interpretive and critical social science, though his critical social science is less indebted to Adorno than to Habermas; see Brian Fay, Social Theory and Political Practice (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975). For another discussion of this distinction, see William E. Connolly, Politics andAmbiguity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).



The position of the subject is crucial for the project of philosophy and resistance to proceed, but that position is never free of internal strife and ambiguity. "The human mind is both true and a mirage"; it has access to and has indeed mastered the world, but it is not as clear, as orderly, or as free as it thinks.17 Adorno tells us that he seeks the restoration of the object, but that restoration does not involve placing the object on "the orphaned royal throne" of the subject; rather, "the purpose of critical thought is to abolish the hierarchy."18 Thinking is inevitably mediated by, structured by, and filtered through objective social structures, but this does not eliminate the reality of thinking. Thought is not free of the world, but neither is it simply epiphenomenal.

I. Constellations

Interpretation is structured for Adorno by the metaphor of the constellation. The constellation enables us to see the totality of a society, never as something essentially given or stable in its identity, but as the product of myriad social and historical forces. As the product of interpretation, constellations are not verifiable in the terms of positivist science, but Adorno argues that they have an empirical reality as images of the relationship between the social structure as a whole and particular persons, things, or institutions.

To illustrate this point, Adorno gives us the example of the riddle. The riddle, he explains, has no "being which lies beyond it, a being mirrored in the riddle." Solving the riddle does not expose a hidden reality. Instead, riddles are compact clusters of elements; solving one "lights it up suddenly and momentarily."19 A simple example is the following: "what's black and white and re(a)d all over?" we ask one another in ele- mentary school. The delighted answer: "A newspaper!" The delight comes from the shifting organization of conceptual elements that makes sudden sense out of an apparent conundrum.

Just as important as the delight in this conceptual Gestalt is the fact that this solution does not "reveal" some deep truth about the newspaper; the newspaper, indeed, stands as a newspaper, after as before the riddle's solution. For Adorno, the task of philosophy is similar.

The task of philosophy is not to search for concealed and manifest intentions of reality, but to interpret unintentional reality, in that,

17. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 186. 18. Ibid., p. 181. 19. Adorno, "Actuality of Philosophy," p. 127.


Shane Phelan 603

by the power of constructing figures, or images (Bilder), out of the isolated elements of reality, it negates (aufhebt) questions, the exact articulation of which is the task of science.20

There is no "more" to be done once the riddle is solved; no "why is the newspaper black and white and read?," no "why do humans progress and regress?"; these just are. Still, they are not meaningless. As constellations, ideas are brought together in a way that illuminates reality, not by means of grand generalizations, but through attention to the small, ordinary details of life.

In describing the task of philosophy as "negation," Adorno does not mean simply that philosophy is "opposed" to science. Indeed, he argues that "philosophy will be able to understand the material content and concretion of problems only within the present standing of the separate sciences."21 The difference between the two projects is that philosophy does not rest with the findings of science, "at least their final and deepest findings," as fixed, but rather as "a sign that needs unriddling." Its "negation" is the continual interpretation of, the challenge to, the questions and answers of scientific research. This is the heart of critical theory's attempt to speak between science and philosophy.

The constellation is a compact and powerful way of expressing two points concerning the relation of the knower to the object of study in the process of interpretation. First, "constellation" expresses activity; like "construction," with which Adorno places it, constellation is a noun that embodies action on the part of the subject. Constellations are not simply "there"; they "are" explicitly as the product of the knower who arranges the elements. Thus, the idea of a constellation expresses Adorno's belief that all knowledge is active construction, and more specifically that the proper mode of philosophy is interpretation.

The second point embedded in the idea of constellation is that the world conceived by the mind should be taken not simply as an ordered totality, but rather as a stable but shifting complex of elements. That is to say, a philosophy oriented toward totality does not understand the fragmented and concrete nature of thought. Ideas do not "penetrate" to the essence of things, but illuminate them in their relation to other things; they are thus dependent upon particular historical forms of relations, as well as the internal constitution of such ideas. Philosophy goes astray when it tries to make of these relations something eternal, beyond the material world. Returning to the subject again, a constellative mode

20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 126.



will acknowledge the existence and relative stability and density of subjects while linking them to historical circumstances, which is to say, to accidents. Both the constellation as something perceived "outside of" the subject and the constellation as the product of the subject's activity are historical constructions. The world, including the interpreter, is such a construction.

The constellation thus provides order without system. Without order, without patterns, riddles could not be solved, for there would be no meaningful juxtapositions of elements. Systems, however, imply and express not simply juxtaposition but laws, causality, hierarchies of Being; in this, Adorno argues, they impose an inadequate schema on the world. Systems are antithetical to the "irreducible," the "concrete particulars" that are lost in non-dialectical abstraction.

The idea of the constellation, the method involving it, and the perspective from which Adorno values it originate with Walter Benjamin. Ben- jamin developed the idea of the constellation as a description of the relation between ideas and phenomena. Benjamin states that "ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars," and explains that ideas have an existence completely independent of objects, that they "do not con- tribute to the knowledge of phenomena, and in no way can the latter be criteria with which to judge the existence of ideas."22 This Platonism is rejected by Adorno, but the metaphor proves powerful nonetheless. As Fredric Jameson notes, in Adorno the constellation ceases to be timeless, and instead becomes synchronic.23 The constellation does not grasp eternal truths, as for Benjamin, but rather illuminates a particular historical configuration of elements.

Benjamin's role in the notion of the constellation opens us to the larger question of Judaism. Martin Jay has argued convincingly that an understanding of Adorno requires appreciation of the role of Judaism in his thought, and this point is nowhere better taken than in consideration of the constellation.24 Benjamin's Platonism is always filtered or blocked by resistances to Greek notions of representation and truth, and these resistances reappear in Adorno's work.

As one possible source of these resistances, we can look at the differences between Greek and Hebrew thought and language. While tracing these differences, Thorlief Boman discusses the importance for the

22. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 34.

23. Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 60. 24. Jay, Dialectical Imagination, Adorno.


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Hebrews of the "configuration."25 The configuration is here opposed to the form or the outline of an object; Boman finds no words in Hebrew to express the latter concept. Similarly, he finds no concept of "boundary," such an important idea for Greco-Christian thought, in Hebrew. The two absences go together, for they both rely on an abstraction from the actual world that is missing in Hebrew language and thought. What is present instead is a consistent unification of, or, more strongly, an inabil- ity to separate form or shape on the one hand and content on the other. The distinction between these two is only possible through abstraction from the concrete, from a disregard for actual perception in favor of "mental" perception in the Platonic manner. This is not a distinction between prelinguistic vs. linguistic perception, but is one of different kinds of languages and, therefore, of different sorts of perception.

Consistent with this refusal to separate form and content is another feature of Hebrew thought that clashes with the Greek. Boman argues that while for the Greeks, "the one who seeks to know is not attempting to alter something or other in his environment, but he is only trying to observe how it really is," there is not in Hebrew even a word that we can simply translate as "thing."26 Instead, there are words that involve usage by humans-tools, instruments-and a word, dabhar, that can be trans- lated as "matter," but whose only relation to determine objects is through language; dabhar is " 'the word in spoken form,' hence 'effi- cacious fact.' "27 Dabhar means "matter," but also "thing" and "word."28 We cannot separate the thing being discussed from the discussion itself; reality is created in and through language. Note that this does not mean that reality is created through labels, that there is no material reality; this would be a Greek conclusion. Rather, it means that language and matter are inseparable.

These points surface in Adorno's metaphor. The constellation is not simply "there," but is the product of human cognition. It has no eternal stability; it has no reality beyond the idea of the thinker. This does not mean, however, that it does not "really exist," or that social structures vanish if we think about them differently. That would be a Greek conclusion. It means that they exist only in and through human activity, and that reality is not fixed independently of human knowledge, but exists in

25. Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), p. 156.

26. Ibid., p. 185. 27. Ibid., p. 184. 28. Dennis Fischman, Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx and the Jewish Question

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 44.



interaction with it. There is no implication that our activity is "free" in any radical sense; structures are human activity, but they in turn shape activity, restricting and fostering in particular ways. There is no "outside" of the structure for us to be at, to choose whether to be affected by it or not.29 This again is why we must use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of the constitutive subject; we subjects have no other avenue.

The "shape" of the constellation resounds with the Hebrew notion of configuration, as well. The constellation is not formed by, cannot be described by, its outline or shape, its boundaries, but by its contents, by its elements and their relations. This helps us to understand the distrust of analytic thinking that is common to Adorno and many poststructural- ists. Analytic thinking rests on the belief in things, with boundaries that can be marked in abstract thought. Without that premise, a whole logic becomes impossible. Is A = A? It depends on what A is, what is happen- ing to it, what it is doing. This is why Adorno insists on the dialectic as the model of thought; no thought that draws lines as though these were "real" beyond human praxis can be adequate to reality. Rather, he argues, "the clarification of particular concepts, as their complete defini- tion, can be accomplished only through the totality of the fully developed system and not through the analysis of the isolated particular concept."30

HI. Totality and Domination

Providing Adorno's constellative practice with a context thus helps us to see why "equivalence" is such a threat for him. When he charges that bourgeois society "makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract qualities," he is repeating the charge of the Hebrew against the Greek.31 There can be no equivalence that does justice to the uniqueness of things. This uniqueness is not outside of history, but is instead the

29. On the fallacy of inside/outside, see William Corlett, Community Without Unity: A Politics of Derridian Extravagance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), Part III.

30. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4.

31. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 7. Arnason notes that Dialectic of Enlighten- ment radically decontextualizes both Greek and Hebrew thought, but not symmetrically; this decontextualization shortchanges any possible emancipatory elements in Greek society and thought while "the utopian promises of Judaism are valued more highly" (p. 138). Indeed, at some points Adorno's rejection of system itself borders on the paranoid.


Shane Phelan 607

embodiment of it. This understanding is the basis for his charge that Soren Kierkegaard abandons history even as he speaks of it:

Precisely what constitutes authentic history, the irreversible and irreducible uniqueness of the historical fact, is emphatically rejected by Kierkegaard. According to his doctrine, this is simply because this uniqueness itself excludes the fact-on account of its uniqueness-from history.32

He adds, furthermore, that "Kierkegaard attempts to rescue the content of real historical uniqueness," but does so through categories that appear as non-historical.33 Thus, Kierkegaard continues the tradition of Plato- nism that can understand and locate things and ideas by their participation in the general or the abstract. This is in direct contradiction with Adorno's sense that the unique is the historical, or rather that the historical is the unique, the real, the concrete, the singular. History is not the summary of great events, the "ahistorical, general determination of the race," but is only real in the particulars that embody it.34 The opposi- tions of the particular and the general, the unique and the historical, rest on a misunderstanding about the nature of reality. The particular is not the isolated, but is the unique, which exists always and only in a social historical context. This contextuality, however, does not make the particular simply an instantiation of a generality; "it could not be identified by placing it within a general category, for its significance lay in its contin- gency rather than its universality."3s

Thus, while "universal history must be construed and denied," we need not deny historical unities. There is a "unity that cements the dis- continuities, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history-the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men's inner nature."36 As this passage makes clear, however, that unity is not "natural" or pre-ordained and is certainly not the united history of the progress of reason; the particular form that unity has taken in the modern West is that of domination. Adorno does not "collapse" the idea of totality, as Martin Jay has claimed, so much as he has redescribed it.37 For Adorno, the threat of modernity is precisely that the world is becoming more and more "total," i.e., the room for individ-

32. Adorno, Kierkegaard, p. 33. 33. Ibid., p. 34. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 320. 37. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, ch. 8.



uality is shrinking as the world is increasingly organized and rationalized. The dream of totality is seen by him as part of the problem, rather than part of a subversive solution.

While many commentators have seen in his famous statement that "no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atom bomb" the signs of a totaliz- ingly bleak picture of history, I would argue that what is manifest here is instead a resistance to what Lyotard will call "metanarratives of emanci- pation," the stories that make sense of history and legitimate current societies by reference to the progress of humanity.38 As such, his message is a crucial one, both for his age and for ours. Further, his statement is empirically strong: while the events of the twentieth century leave us questioning the possibility or benign face of humanism, the consistent "progress" and use of weaponry is beyond dispute.

Even as the world is increasingly totalized and dominated, however, Adorno insists that this process can never be total. Foreshadowing deconstruction, Adorno turns to language itself to make this point. "Totality," he argues, "is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself-of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept."39 The condition of non-identity is embedded in our language, which is always inadequate to express reality completely. It is in this non-identity that Adorno places his hope for the future. The reading of Adorno as a "hopeless" thinker who leaves us no way out of his own theoretical totality of domination fails to see the importance of this fundamental concept. The capacity for thought, which is also that of resistance, finds fruition not in system, not in identity, but beyond them, in affinity. We will never reach a reconciliation involving the identity of subject and object or of subjects with one another, nor should we hope for one:

The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one's own.40

His hope lies, not in a new system or general theory, but in the possibility of "a togetherness of diversity."41 The proximity of which he speaks is

38. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 320. 39. Ibid., p. 147. 40. Ibid., p. 191. 41. Ibid., p. 150.


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that situation Derrida describes as "intimate distance," in which both the intimacy (rather than immediacy) and the distance of heterogeneity are crucial. Such proximity amounts to living cheek-by-jowl with that or those whom one can only begin to understand, and finding this living to be enough. Seeking neither to incorporate the "alien" into one's scheme of things nor to eliminate it, Adorno's ideal approximates what Gloria Anzalduia and William Connolly have each referred to as a "tolerance for ambiguity."42 While this may be disappointing to those who expect theory to provide blueprints of utopia, his criticisms of systematic theory should lead us to question our expectations rather than condemn his failure to produce.

Adorno is relying heavily here on a conception of reason that allows for intuition. That reliance, however, does not translate into a rejection of the dialogical, as Albrecht Wellmer charges in reference to Adorno's view of art.43 Intuition is the form of reason that is not yet fully articulate, that may never be such. It requires proximity because it cannot be annexed; however, that does not make intuition simply "internal" to a subject rather than intersubjective or communicative. Philosophical descriptions of it as internal, and personal experience of it as such, betray not a truth about intuition but the continuing subject-centered and logo- centric interpretation of mental processes in modernity.

In his critique of Henri Bergson, Adorno argues that Bergson shares with scientism the strict division between reason and intuition. While intuition is "sudden" and "ego-alien," Adorno argues that "whatever is at work in rational cognition also enters into inspirations-sedimented and newly remembered . .. [d]iscontinuity in intuition does honour to continuity falsified by organization."44 Thus, "intuition is not a simple antithesis to logic"; rather, it is that which reminds reason of its limits while participating in reason itself. Intuition is crucial to Adorno's project of using the subject to break down the subject; experience of intuition as "subjective" and "internal" is a social realtiy, not an epistemological one. He points out the connection between exchange relations and the experience of oneself as a transcendental subject rather than embedded, changing individual:

42. Gloria Anzaldia, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Connolly, Politics of Ambiguity.

43. Wellmer, "Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment," p. 49. 44. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 46.



If the exchange form is the standard social structure, its rationality constitutes people; what they are for themselves, what they seem to be to themselves, is secondary. They are deformed beforehand by the mechanism that has been philosophically transfigured as transcendental. The supposedly most evident of things, the empirical subject, would really have to be viewed as not yet in existence; in this perspective, the transcendental subject is "constitutive."45

In such a world, intuition can only be experienced as unreliable even while seeming certain; thus the poles of rationalism and irrationalism. But Adorno's practice of looking for the cracks in the edifice of social and self-constitution leads to the awareness of "actual, live individuals" where philosophy and theory posit transcendental subjects.46

The practice of negative dialectics reminds us that a focus on the specific does not eliminate the ability to see history or social structure. Rather, it shows us the particular forces at work in the unities that we so misleadingly label "history" and "society." Intellectuals are called upon by Adorno to call attention to particular operations of power rather than to build a new grand edifice of unified theory.

IV. Specificity: Between System & Event

What exactly can specificity and constellations provide that later theories cannot do just as well-or better? Adorno's concern for totalization in social theory has been expanded upon by Lyotard and Foucault, among others, while his insistence on dialectics and theory capable of addressing social totalities, most specifically modern capitalism, has been retained by Jiirgen Habermas. Both Lyotard and Habermas have written of Adorno as trapped in earlier paradigms and aporias that they have escaped, but they have avoided these problems more than transcended them. Their failure to provide a method that enables political practice leads us to reconsider the difficulties they have fled.

Habermas's critique of Adorno is by now better known than Adoro's work itself. Habermas finds Adorno trapped within the philosophy of consciousness, a trap he claims to have avoided. Further, he reads Adorno as an irrationalist, as one who rejected reason altogether. Haber- mas's defense of reason against those he takes as its opponents has been perhaps his least compelling work. His attack on the Dialectic of Enlight- enment portrays Adorno as a simple Nietzschean (if there could be such a

45. Adorno, "Subject and Object," p. 501. 46. Ibid., p. 500.


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thing).47 He accuses Adorno of performative contradiction in using reason to demonstrate reason's limits.4 While he mentions paradox in this same passage, the force of the contrast between contradiction and paradox escapes him. He reads Adorno as a "pessimist" who had given up on modernity.

Habermas, however, simply fails to come to grips with Adorno's thought. This is due to an overriding constitutional difference between the two thinkers: if Adorno is a prophet crying in the wilderness, Haber- mas aspires to be a legislator. Whatever their shared substantive concerns or even their shared relation to critical theory, they are fundamentally opposed at the levels of methodology and ontology. To the legislator, the prophet appears only as the isolated, ineffective, negative voice; when the prophet cries for justice and reconciliation, the legislator demands the program. If perhaps Adorno's charges of paranoia are excessive, Habermas's charges of irrationalism and pessimism certainly are.

While Adorno has been charged by Habermas with a neglect of the intersubjective world, in fact in practice he relies more completely upon such a world than does Habermas. Adorno's intersubjective realm is not an abstraction, an object of discussion, but is the field within which his work makes any sense at all. While Habermas writes of communication within an intersubjective realm, his insistence on and belief in the possibility of consensus betrays the monological nature of his thought.49 Habermas represents the return of a reason ignorant of its own location and limitation.

The dispute between these two illuminates one aspect of specificity as a methodological principle. While Habermas would endorse "specifying" the location and role of institutions and actors, his allegiance to systems theory precludes any real appreciation of the singularity of those actors and institutions. In his quest for a robust intersubjectivity, Habermas can give no weight (or only negative weight) to elements that disrupt or exceed integration.50 Further, Habermas cannot finally rest with

47. In Habermas's reading, the Dialectic of Enlightenment was (1) Horkheimer's work when it was good-i.e. the first chapter; (2) otherwise Adorno's, reflecting the "weak- nesses" that ran throughout his work. For a discussion and refutation, see Robert Hullot- Kentor, "Back to Adorno," Telos, 81 (1989): 5-29.

48. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 119. 49. For a more extensive discussion of this point, see David Rasmussen, Reading Haber-

mas (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), esp. ch. 3. 50. See Nancy Fraser, "What's Critical About Critical Theory: The Case of Habermas

and Gender," in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).



Adorno's belief that critical theories are always addressed to a particular group of agents; as Raymond Geuss has observed, the later Habermas feels compelled to eliminate the specificity of critical theory and provide it with quasi-transcendental foundations, thus substituting grammatical structure for intersubjectivity.51

Lyotard shares with Habermas the view of Adorno's pessimism and of his subject-centeredness. He characterizes Adorno as the proponent of a negative theology, a theology appropriate to the carnage of World War II, but argues that that moment is past: in language reminiscent of Fried- rich Nietzsche, he asserts that "we have the advantage over Adorno of living in a capitalism that is more energetic, more cynical, less tragic."52 In this new capitalism, "the tragic gives way to the parodic" as representation is collapsed upon itself (or the social is placed entirely within representation). Lyotard has no patience with Adorno the prophet. If Habermas is the social theorist as legislator, then Lyotard is the philosopher as jester. Neither has any patience with the prophet. If Habermas wants Adorno to buck up and get to work, Lyotard wants him to stop worrying and have some fun.

Lyotard argues that Adorno's resistance to capitalism remains en- snared within capitalist rules of representation and equivalence, and he moves instead toward revealing "another libidinal apparatus" that moves in a way "incommensurable with that of kapital."53 Lyotard heigntens the epigrammatic, the singular, seeking to free objects from determination within systems of representation. He moves past Adorno's care for the specificity of elements within a constellation to an effort to detach elements from any field whatever.

In many ways, Lyotard provides a refuge from Habermas's legislative compulsion, but he moves beyond specificity to decontextualized singularity. The "eventhood of the event" is an important corrective to mag- isterial theory, but in Lyotard's hands it threatens to go beyond micro- politics to no politics. As Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson describe it, Lyotard "throws out the baby of large historical narrative with the bathwater of philosophical metanarrative and the baby of social-theoretical analysis of large-scale inequalities with the bathwater of reductive Marx- ian class theory."54

51. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 64.

52. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Adorno as the Devil," Telos, 19 (1974): 128. 53. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Derive a partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: Union Generale

D'Editions 10/18, 1973), p. 17. 54. Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson, "Social Theory Without Philosophy: An

Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 25.


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To the extent that Lyotard avoids this problem, he does so through the same mechanism that Adorno endorses. Lyotard states that "this thing that I call here the differend bears in the Marxist 'tradition' a 'well- known' name"; "it is that of practice or 'praxis.' "55 Lyotard backs off from the strong statement that there is no universality and no resolution, and instead argues that "universality cannot be expressed in words, unless it be unilaterally";56 "the differend cannot be resolved by specula- tion or in ethics; it must be resolved in 'practice,' in what Marx called critical practice."57 This is precisely Adorno's point. The "practice" invoked here is not simply "action" as that is so often understood, but is the practice of interpretation of constellations. Adorno neither agrees with the later Habermasian transcendental "resolution," in which he would see "the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of every thought," nor with the strongest Lyotardian formulation, in which discourse inevitably does injustice to the event.58 Adorno's constellations allow for events to shine forth without abandoning theory altogether. Specificity is not particularity or singularity, not isolated eventhood, but traces patterns without grand systems.

None of this is meant to suggest that Adorno had nothing to learn from anyone else, or that we should read Adorno instead of Habermas, Lyotard, or anyone else. It simply means that Adorno is not dead, sub- sumed within or surpassed by later thinkers. As the prophet of late capitalism, Adorno has a unique place amid the legislators and the jesters. Adorno's practice was theoretical and isolated, but he never abandoned the hope of political action and change. When the prophet cries "We are lost!," the aim is not resignation but action. Failure to recognize this is due perhaps to society's rejection of the prophet rather than deficiencies in the prophet's message.

The nature of the change desired is much too vague for orthodox Marxists, even for Habermasian critical theorists, but Adorno provides a real indication of his aims.

A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory

55. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 61.

56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., p. 62. 58. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Unwin

Brothers Ltd., 1978), p. 80.



as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum-bodily, because it is not the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that morality survives.59

This thought, which had been developing in Adorno before Auschwitz as well as after, tells us much of the reasons for, as well as the limitations of, interpretive practice.

To fully understand it, we must ask, what happened at Auschwitz? We know of the torture and extermination, the attempts to annihilate human personality as well as races and peoples. But even before the event Adorno understood this attempt as part of identitarianism run wild, as paranoia. Such paranoia can only understand reconciliation as annexat tion, as imperialism. Preventing Auschwitz requires that we head off such paranoia, in its theoretical forms as well as political ones, for the! two are never really separate. To this extent, interpretation itself is a political practice, is political action. Crying out for the pain of the world is political action.

The crying that Adorno urges here is perhaps surprising. The focus on the pain of bodies appears here as the last refuge of morality because every other form of domination has become too mundane, too everyday, and too embedded in societies to form the basis for judgment. Bodies, in| their singularity and specficity, are here the "objects" that can bring down the transcendental, paranoid subject. It is for this reason that Adorno argues against the law's rule of equivalence. Law "is a preserva- tive of terror" because it provides statutory authority for terror over "its" citizens, thus blinding us to the evidence of bodies, and also because it cloaks inequalities beneath a veneer of equality.60 Thus, the political action he might endorse is not simply parliamentary, seeking to change laws and enact better ones. Rather, his "reconciled condition" requires a rethinking of law itself, of its implication in domination. He casts the whole class of legislators under suspicion.

What, then? Is this a call to social or cultural change without attention to the juridical sphere? Adorno is almost opaque at this point, but I sus- pect his answer would be, "no." For all their dangers, laws can also operate to ban the bodily assaults that are one of the overwhelming lega-

59. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365. 60. Ibid., p. 309.


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cies of Auschwitz. He insists, however, that laws are always dangerous, that in modernity they deform the right.

At this point, two arguments seem plausible. In the first, familiar scenario, Adorno "gives up" on the world, whether in his enormous guilt of survival or in his basically mandarin instincts. Indeed, were it not for his new categorical imperative, that is a plausible view. Let me suggest another. Perhaps Adorno is remaining faithful to his conviction that legislation is an inappropriate model for philosophy, and that the specific actions and thoughts required will be found, only to be chal- lenged again, in processes of dialogue rather than monological state- ments. Rather than revealing exhaustion, Adorno's silence on what actions to take (he is more vocal on which to avoid) is consonant with his desire to find "proximity" to the alien within and without our selves. He is akin to Lyotard in this, but he does not move, as Lyotard often seems to, toward valorizing the existing world for lack of another. Adorno's silence is always the silence of negation, of the demand for happiness that will not, can not accommodate itself to less.

V. Conclusion

Recognition of constellations requires the ability to accept introspection and implication in a system that is not of one's own making, or that perhaps is not fully endorsable, and yet within which one inescapably lives one's life. It is to see domination within oneself as well as without, or, to use less bifurcated language, to recognize one's position as a node in the network of meaning and power that is made visible by constellative work. The paranoid personality is precisely that one closest to its own destabilization without the resources or ability to tolerate that instability, resulting in a flight from internal probing toward external threat- perception.

Adorno's critique of reason leads us not to nihilism, but to the recov- ery of forms of reason that enable us to resist domination and foster reciprocity. As an enterprise involving actual others, theory must be local and specific, thereby providing the possibility of actual democratic deci- sion making rather than submissive endorsement of a "consensual" order. This specificity, however, must not sacrifice all generalizations; without generalizations conceptualization and argument are impossible. Indeed, the opposition between general and particular is seen by Adorno to be illusory at some point; generality without specificity is meaningless



in its abstraction, just as specificity without generalization is unintel- ligible.61

Politics is always a limited enterprise, alternately ironic and tragic. It is limited by language, by the limits of possibility embodied in particular discourses, by material resources. It is simply not the case that common action will resolve all choices so that the best becomes the only important good, or that we will all agree. The systematic philosopher cannot really acknowledge this. Adorno's strength is his refusal to abandon either side of the tension. This abandonment has occurred, however, in the genera- tion following his. The dispute between critical theorists and post- moderns is at least partly a battle between universality and particularity, with both sides resisting tragedy. Both camps try to fall to one side or another of the Adornian aporia: Habermas seeks the end of domination in reason and speech that come to agreement, while Lyotard seeks guerilla resistance to univocality. Adorno stands in the middle, aware that his words always say more than he means but never abandoning reason as Habermas suggests.

Thus, we may learn from his attempts at non-universal history and philosophy. He provides us with models and warnings for developing historically specific arguments against oppression and domination. An insistence on specificity reminds us that we do exist in particular times and places, that these places/times have particular power formations that may not have existed earlier and may not last forever, and it encour- ages us to develop forms of reason and action that address our needs and problems rather than those of another place/time. Surely this is "reason" enough to reconsider Adorno's place in political theory.

61. Ibid., p. 146.


Article Contentsp. [597]p. 598p. 599p. 600p. 601p. 602p. 603p. 604p. 605p. 606p. 607p. 608p. 609p. 610p. 611p. 612p. 613p. 614p. 615p. 616

Issue Table of ContentsPolity, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1993), pp. 497-655Front MatterThe Commercial Republic & the Pluralist Critique of Marxism: An Analysis of Martin Diamond's Interpretation of "Federalist" 10 [pp. 497-528]Martin Diamond's Interpretation of "Federalist" 10: A Response to Alan Gibson [pp. 529-536]A Reply to Jeffrey Leigh Sedgwick [pp. 537-545]Retrospective & Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates: The Environment & the 1988 Election [pp. 547-563]Liberalism in Context [pp. 565-582]Compassion & Voting Behavior in Presidential Elections [pp. 583-595]Interpretation & Domination: Adorno & the Habermas-Lyotard Debate [pp. 597-616]"Dumpbusting": Symbolic or Situational Politics? [pp. 617-631]Research NoteDwarfing the Political Capacity of the People? The Relationship between Judicial Activism & Voter Turnout, 1840-1988 [pp. 633-646]

Review EssayReview: Aristotle & Modern Liberalism [pp. 647-655]

Back Matter

Documents

DocumentInterpretation & Domination: Adorno & the Habermas-Lyotard Debate