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Irving Wohlfarth

Presentation of Adorno

The following essay on the relation of sociology and psychology shouldserve as a long overdue introduction of the work of Theodor Adorno

to an English audience. While the English reader will be familiar withthe writings of Herbert Marcuse (cf. NLR 30 and 45), who, along withAdorno and Horkheimer, is a founder-member of what has come to beknown as the Frankfurt School, the only work of Adornos that wasuntil recently available in English-speaking countries is his contributionto The Authoritarian Personality. (An English translation of one of hismost important volumes, Prisms, has however now been published byNeville Spearman.) This essay has been chosen not merely for itsintrinsic merit and its critique of developments relevant to the Englishcontext, but also on account of the particular timeliness of its theme.

At least since the publication of the first volume of Sartres Critique de laRaison Dialectique, which in its methodological introduction focuses onthe problem of mediations, the inter-relations and complementaritiesof subjective and objective approaches, Marxism and existentialism,sociology and psychology, have been acknowledged as one of thecentral issues with which a developing Marxist theory will have tograpple. Adornos text represents the prolegomenon to an investigationof the relations between microcosmic and macrocosmic social dimen-sions sketched out at a recent congress by R. D. Laing. Precisely be-

cause of the need to do away with the monopolistic practices ofacademic guilds, however, the courses in inter-disciplinary studiespresently offered at the new universities should be all the more closelystudied for signs of the helplessness that Adorno (who can himselfhardly be accused of being a jealous specialist) claims to detect in recentinter-departmental fads.

In view of the range and complexity of their workAdorno alone haswritten over 20 books, on philosophy, sociology, music and literatureit is not possible in the space of a few paragraphs to give more than a

merely biographical and bibliographical account of the Frankfurtschool, and a simplistic sketch of some of the specific emphases whichrelate the following text to Adornos whole philosophy.

The Frankfurt school came into being in the early 1930s around MaxHorkheimer and his Institute for Social Research. Its early work can bestudied in its legendary, but relatively inaccessible journal, the Zeit-

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schrift fr Sozialforschung, in which Horkheimer developed his concept ofcritical theory in a series of remarkable essays (notably Traditionelleund kritische Theorie, Vol. 6, 1937). Marcuses essays from this periodhave been recently republished in two small volumes Kultur undGesellschaftby Suhrkamp, and provide a clear exposition of this position,as does Horkheimers own later book written in English, Eclipse of

Reason. With the rise of Nazism the institute was forced into exile, and

the journal continued to appear first in France and then in the early war-years in the United States (as Studies in Philosophy and Social Science).During their American exile Horkheimer and Adorno together wrote

Dialektik der Aufklrung, probably their major work, but, like thejournal, hard to come by. In the late forties they returned to Frankfurtas directors of the newly re-established Institut fur Sozialforschung.Apart from Adornos own books, the place of the old journal wastaken by the Frankfurter Beitrge zur Soziologie, a series of sociologicalmonographs which also include Alfred Schmidts book on Marxsconcept of nature. The most important collaborators to have emergedsince the war are the philosopher-sociologist Jrgen Habermas and thephilosopher Karl Heinz Haag (whose essay Das Unwiederholbare in

Philosophischer Idealismus constitutes the best short introduction to thephilosophy of the Frankfurt school; for these purposes, too, MarcusesEros and Civilization, especially Chapter 5, should be consulted). In thelast decade the Frankfurt school has begun to exert a wide influence inGerman philosophy, sociology and social and cultural criticism. It alsoacts as a rallying-point for socialist students, despite tensions betweenthem and their professors, who, when pressed on the relation of theory

and practice, argue that when real political practice is at an impasse,theory should not be blamed for its powerlessness or arrested in thename of practice. It should, on the contrary, confront and analyse theimpasse.

The Frankfurt school has consistently, but without regressions intosome pre-specialist feudalism, opposed the intellectual division of labour,while acknowledging its relative validity. Within the social sciencesthe practical upshot of this has been such works asStudies in Authority

and the Family (published in German in Paris in the late thirties) and The

Authoritarian Personality. The following essay draws the theoreticalconclusions from this long effort to think through the relation ofpsychology and sociology. Frankfurt sociology has, further, remainedas philosophical as its philosophy has always been social, and it is oneof the triumphs of Adornos style that it has developed a terminologywhich freely, yet rigorously, expresses the constant interplay of other-wise compartmentalized approaches. Given the tendency of thedominant positivist orthodoxy in England to dismiss the history ofphilosophy as so much verbal muddle, and the tendencies in theMarxist tradition to dismiss philosophy as so many merely interpreta-

tive ideologies, it will doubtless be the philosophical dimension of theFrankfurt school that will be most foreign to the English reader. If theunfamiliar phenomenon has at all costs to be catalogued, it may becalled a Hegelian materialism that is constantly redefining itself in both,close and polemical relation to Hegels idealist dialectics; neither un-critically immanent nor abruptly external, its determinate negation ofHegel neither stops at the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach nor falls behind

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it. The decisive link here for intellectual history is doubtless LukcssHistory and Class-Consciousness, since which it is the only significantphilosophical undertaking to have emerged within the materialisttradition in Germany.

But if Frankfurt philosophy resists bald definition and bureaucraticclassification, this is not because it makes a virtue of elusiveness. It is

true that as a critic of the deductive, reductive idealism of philosophicalsystems Adorno writes mostly essays, of a mutually allusive andreciprocally explanatory character which often presuppose somefamiliarity with the philosophical, sociological, psychological andaesthetic traditions he is working in and against. His recently published

Negative Dialektik (1966) was partly written to justify and develop insustained philosophical argument the premises and implications of hispast work. When, however, Adorno writes in that book that philo-sophy cannot be summarized, he is not arguing in the name of somephilosophical poetry it would be heretical to paraphrase. He neitherdenies nor hypostatizes the distinction between art and philosophy andindeed accuses Heidegger, the centre of the opposite school in con-temporary German philosophy, of blurring it. What he advocates is anegative dialectics which opposes the quasi-imperialist reductionismthat Western philosophy, including Hegels positive dialectics, hashitherto committed in justification of Western social practice. Thisinextricability of reason and violence, philosophy and domination, isthe central theme of Dialektik der Aufklrung, which argues thatWestern reason has never liberated itself from myth (itself already a

form of rationality) and has in recent history rapidly, but immanently,reverted to it: the dialectic is a largely Freudian one and it is, as always,with a vengeance that the repressed returns. It is because, on thisargument, the constitution of human (or at least Western) identity, thecontrol of nature and the domination of man by man have hithertointeracted as the inseparable moments of one long fatal syndrome, thatsuch central categories of the Frankfurt school as identity and non-identity, and the domination of the latter by the former, refer simul-taneously to the relation between society and individual, man andnature, ego and id, male and female, concepts and their objects. If this in

turn sounds reductive, it is the reductiveness of history itself, whichphilosophy, the logic of domination, has helped codify. WalterBenjamin, the philosopher and aesthetician who was closely associatedwith the Institute until the most murderous system of our time caughtup with him,1 once wrote that whereas historians traditionally identifywith the victors the historical materialist must write history against thegrain (Schriften, Vol. 1, p. 498). Frankfurt philosophy, likewise, is apermanent critique of the theory and practice of Identittsphilosophie,and its aim is the rescue of the non-identical. But justice can be done to

the non-identical only in, through and against identity itself, theabstractnegation of which would be literally tantamount to complete

1 It was against Nazism that the Dialektik der Aufklrung, which attempts to under-stand it, was written. Since Adornos alleged fear of the masses and flight fromFascism have been recently made responsible for his views on popular music (cf.NLR 39), it should be asked what else there was to do but fear and flee, and ponderedwhether fear and flight are necessarily synonymous with blindness.

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regression. Negative dialectics, however, refuses to make a virtue ofnecessity, to hypostatize identity, which should serve as the medium ofnon-identity. The critical theory analyses the totality, for, as Hegelshowed, the whole is the truth. But since, in Adornos variation ofthat phrase, the whole is also the untruth, a big lie, it simultaneouslyfocuses on the insulted and the injured, the last that shall be first, thevictims of totalitarian practice and its philosophical correlative, all-

devouring systems and grasping, domineering concepts, the long,conceptualized arm of law and order. Its complementary themes are asocial reality that comes increasingly to resemble an idealist system and,against the charisma of the universal, the aura of the particular.2

It is within the context of this very schematically presented conceptionthat the following essay takes its place. The critique of reductionism isthe invisible thread that links what might initially appear to beaphoristic asides. It is behind the serious pun that Freuds drive towardsthe totalization of concepts is totalitarian (not only, needless to say) andbehind the analysis of psychoanalytic reductionism as analagous tohomosexual indifference towards women. Lack of differentiation isassociated with hostility, abstractness with brutality, and, conversely,love and humanity, as synonyms for openness to the non-identicaland the capacity to differentiate, are rescued from their ideologicalmisuse. The passage on the impact of big ideas exemplifies the character-istic interplay of usually dissociated dimensions mentioned above. Theclaim that the subconscious foots the bill of progress and the section onrationality and sacrifice refer back to central motifs from Dialektik der

Aufklrung. The notion of the Utopian relativity of rationality itselfpoints forward to the argument inNegative Dialektik that dialectics, byturning formal logic against itself, remains bound to it and wouldideally wither away along with the state.

2 There seem to be two close parallels to these emphases in recent English studies onthe left, neither of them, significantly, directly philosophical. E. P. Thompsons The

Making of the English Working Class is a marvellous model of history written frombelow. The psychoanalytic and philosophical approaches of R. D. Laing and Adornoto the problem of identity, despite all differences, overlap. Laings claim in The

Divided Self that Freud used his theory as a Medusas head and an instrument ofdefence can be instructively compared with Adornos observations on Freud inthe following essay.

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