Undialectical Conclusions: Adorno, his Habermasian Critics/ Non-Identity and the Culture Industry

372 Pages·2012·3.16 MB·English

Undialectical Conclusions: Adorno, his Habermasian Critics/
Non-Identity and the Culture Industry
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Ben Morgan/ St Hugh's College D.Phil/ Trinity 1994
The thesis defends Adorno's self-consciously contradictory
method against the criticisms of Jurgen Habermas, whilst at the
same time reading Habermas's critique of negative dialectics as
an. exemplary expression of postmodern experience. It starts by
comparing the figures of thought to be found in Adorno and
Horkheimer's Dialektik der Aufklarung with those of Habermas's
theory of communicative action. Habermas's position turns out
to be no less paradoxical than the negative dialectics, whose
aporias he denounces as self-undermining. How are we to
understand this shift from a method which consciously embraces
contradiction to a theory that, though it throws up no fewer
ambiguities, views paradoxical arguments as little more than
logical inconsistencies? To explain the shift, I turn to the
concept of non-identity as it is formulated by Adorno, but also
as it appears - under different names - in the work of Karl
Heinz Bohrer. Though Bohrer devotedly pursues heterogeneity, he
seems constitutively unable to conceptualize the desired
specificity. The theoretical cause of this inability is an
unwillingness to mediate contradictions, an unwillingness he
shares with Habermas. But this unwillingness is more than a
theoretical failing. As a reading of Adorno's 'Der Essay als
Form 1 discovers, it is the symptom of a subjectivity that can
no longer trace the larger concatenations in which non-identity
consists. If Habermas and Bohrer cannot mediate conceptually,
this is because social mediation has itself vanished from view.
A discussion of Adorno's texts on pop culture helps explain
this changed subjectivity, exploring the mechanisms by which
the culture industry hollows out contradiction and weakens
mediation. More importantly, the discussion shows that Adorno's
own texts are marked by the logic they criticize. Adorno's
philosophy reproduces the structures of the pop culture it
excoriates. This unexpected complicity leaves its mark on
Adorno's method. His emphatic oppositions - such as that
between Schonberg and Stravinsky insisted on by Philosophie der
neuen Musik - fold in on themselves. It is tempting to assume
that we therefore could replace Adorno's controversial choices
- high art not pop culture, Schonberg not Stravinsky - with
more paradoxical arguments in which all cultural artefacts
appear radically ambivalent. But which subject could
meaningfully articulate the conflicting impulses of the
resulting aporias? A reading of Adorno's essay on Beckett's
Endgame discovers that, though Adorno himself explicitly
contemplates dialectics freezing into irresolvable ambiguity,
he seems at the same time to lose the ability to think even
paradoxically. What emerges instead are undialectical figures
of thought that prefigure the unmediated arguments of the
succeeding generation. Adorno has become like his successors.
SUMMARY - 1 -
Undialectical Conclusions: Adorno, his Habermasian Critics,
Non-Identity and the Culture Industry
Ben Morgan, St Hugh's
My thesis is a critique of Adorno's method that stays true
to the dialectical spirit of his philosophy precisely by
calling it in question. It opens, in Part I, with an account of
Habermasian objections to negative dialectics. Habermas is
concerned that Adorno's assault on rationality is so all-
embracing that it undermines the very standards it requires
rationally to legitimate its critique. Adorno consciously
embraces this self-undermining position. But Habermas believes
its aporias, however self-conscious, to be misguided because a
less paradoxical standard was close to hand. Language itself
could have supplied negative dialectics with the norms it
needed to criticize the abuses of instrumental reason. If
Adorno is not logically forced to adopt an aporetic position,
the question arises why a philosopher so gifted should
manoeuvre himself into a theoretical dead-end. Habermas's
answer to this, in the essay on Dialektik der Aufklarung
included in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, is that
Adorno illicitly privileges one of the three distinct logics of
modernity, inappropriately judging cognitive and moral
discourses by aesthetic criteria. When compared to the
subject's awe-struck contemplation of a work of art, any more
practical intervention in the world is bound to appear crude
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and instrumental.
Habermas's account of negative dialectics misrecognizes
its object, attributing to Adorno an undialectical model of
critique to which he does not subscribe. In Dialektik der
Aufklarung, Adorno and Horkheimer explicitly abandon the quest
for sure-fire, external norms, to which Habermas remains
committed. The book instead portrays reason as at once
instrumentally oblivious to, and anxiously respectful of,
heterogeneity, hoping to turn the more Utopian side of
rationality against its manipulative counterpart. Having, in a
brief reading of Dialektik der Aufklarung presented this more
ambiguous rationality, my thesis aims to explain why Habermas
should misrecognize negative dialectics. To answer this
question, I turn first to an analysis of the figures of thought
behind Habermas's own position. Though Habermas disapproves of
Adorno's contradictions, his own theory is no less paradoxical.
The rationality of the lifeworld is said to spawn the system
out of its inner logic, whilst simultaneously remaining
qualitatively distinct - remaining, in theory at least,
uncontaminated by the distortions and abuses it at another
level engenders. Habermas cannot defend theoretically the
normative purity he thus ensures for communication. He can only
reaffirm it with bodily and topographical metaphors. Informing
this defence of the communication is a double logic: a
differentiating impulse, which divides, for instance, lifeworld
from system; and an impulse to interlink and reintegrate, which
traces, for instance, the connections between lifeworld and
SUMMARY - 3 -
system, or insists that the economy remains anchored in
communicative rationality. Habermas consciously adopts this
double logic so as to resuscitate the plans of a grand social
theory embraced by Horkheimer when he acceded to the
directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1931. The
problem with Habermas's strategy is not so much its lack of
theoretical foundations, as an internal imbalance between its
two sides. As a reading of his essay 'Die Moderne - ein
unvollendetes Projekt 1 discovers, the differentiating impulse
is far stronger than the impulse to interlink and reintegrate.
Habermas's texts continually draw distinctions which, at each
stage of the argument clarify his position, but which cannot
retrospectively be ordered into a single narrative. Art, in the
essay on modernity, is said at once to be a realm freed from
moral and cognitive constraints, a reaction to the quickened
pace of industrialized existence, and a tentative reunion of
the three distinct logics of modernity. These three aspects of
aesthetic experience could no doubt be reconciled with each
other. But Habermas himself never makes the connections.
Indeed, it seems that he could never. For, to the fact of ever
proliferating distinctions, his theoretical voice can
counterpose only the desire for reintegration. Albrecht
Wellmer's texts on aesthetics offer themselves as a potential
solution to this dilemma, but on closer inspection reveal
themselves to be no less marked by the strategic imbalance. The
synthesizing subject Habermas requires can, in Wellmer's texts,
only be repeatedly invoked in an abstract vocabulary curiously
SUMMARY - 4 -
at odds with the imagined fluidity. No more than Habermas can
Wellmer be that reintegrating individual himself.
The Habermasian project is frustrated by the very
strategic logic which guarantees its norms. It claims to have
have transcended the aporias of negative dialectics but it
instead replaces the self-conscious contradictions of Adorno
and Horkheimer with a strangely unreflexive self-undermining.
The rest of the thesis seeks to explain this shift from a
method which consciously embraces contradiction to a theory
that, though it throws up no fewer ambiguities, can see in
paradoxical arguments nothing but empty aporias and logical
inconsistencies. For Adorno, paradoxical arguments cease to be
empty sophistry to the degree that they capture, in their form
as much as in their content, the complexities, rough edges and
specificity of the objects they investigate. A dialectical
method is more than an empty argumentative trick to the degree
that it figures forth the non-identical. Part II of the thesis
takes up the concept of non-identity, in the hope that an
exploration of this often baffling term will elucidate the
break between Adorno and his consciously undialectical
successors. To understand this break it is as important to
register how the succeeding generation conceives heterogeneity
as it is to reconstruct Adorno's grasp of the term. No German
critic has devoted more energy to the question than Karl Heinz
Bohrer, so it is to his pursuit of the heterogeneous,
particularly to the essays collected in the volume
Plotzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des asthetischen Scheins, that
SUMMARY - 5 -
the argument then turns. Bohrer wishes to rescue from oblivion
whatever it is that concepts, in ordering the world into
manipulable objects, exclude. The irony of his endeavours is
that the very act of naming heterogeneity appears, to his
sceptical eyes, to deprive it of its specificity; conceptual
reflection on non-identity unmasks each epiphanic quantity as
in fact disappointingly familiar. Part II tracks Bohrer's
successive, unsuccessful attempts to give a name to non-
identity, showing how he turns first to the texture and
specificity of everyday objects, then to untheorized residues
of subjectivity, but comes finally to accept the emptiness of
his concept, to accept his very inability to do more than
negatively circumscribe the excluded novelty, as itself a
cipher for the unknowable.
While Bohrer devotedly pursues heterogeneity, he seems at
the same time constitutively incapable of conceptualizing the
desired specificity. The theoretical cause of this paradox - as
a brief comparison with Benjamin's essay on surrealism, and his
theses on history shows - is an inability to mediate between
terms without reducing one to the other. Where Benjamin
describes a surreal epiphany that is at once quotidian and
revolutionary, Bohrer cannot acknowledge the banality of his
moment of insight without doubting its novelty. As soon as an
epiphany shows even traces of social determination, it becomes,
for him, wholly standardized. The dividing logic which
jeopardizes Habermas's theoretical undertaking can similarly be
explained as a failure of mediation. Habermas is no more
SUMMARY - 6 -
willing than Bohrer to admit ambiguities in the objects he
theorizes, but counters such ambiguities with a proliferating
armoury of conceptual differentiations. This unwillingness to
mediate could be dismissed as a theoretical error, the theories
of Bohrer and Habermas could be abandoned in favour of the more
dialectical approaches of Adorno and Benjamin. My thesis
construes the deficit instead as the record of an experience.
A reconstruction of Adorno's concept of non-identity, as
it is presented in the essay 'Der Essay als Form 1 , assists this
new vision. Though the non-identity of an object might appear
to consist in contradictions and ambivalences which the
individual passively registers, Adorno questions any such clear
division between subject and object to insist that things
acquire heterogeneity and complexity only through the culture
that mediates, fragments and destroys them. Society's
interaction with objects unpacks their non-identity, bestowing
upon them a history and scattered identity that, spared this
disruption, they would never had enjoyed. This mediation is
carried out by individual subjects. Though their contribution
is made all but unknowingly, they can, in the process of
reflection or essay writing, more or less consciously
reconstruct the mediation in which they blindly participate.
This account of non-identity offers just the clue needed
to reconstrue the absence of mediation as more than a failure
of argument. For could it not be that individuals might lose
the faculty to reconstruct the larger patterns of non-identity
to which they nevertheless ceasely contribute? Certainly, the
SUMMARY - 7 -
inability of Habermas and Bohrer to trace connections between
objects would seem to testify to subjects exiled from these
larger concatenations, to individuals cut off from the history
in which they nevertheless participate. Habermas's at once
insensitive and impatient dismissal of the paradoxes and
ambiguities of Adorno's style would thus seem to be more than a
methodological divergence. It apparently expresses a
qualitatively new experience of society. It is the theoretical
approach of a subject to whom ambivalences, because they have
no correlate in the world as it daily confronts her, have lost
all theoretical significance.
But what has brought about this shift in experience? What
has broken the links that bound consciousness to the larger
patterns of non-identity and contradiction? The second half of
the thesis sketches a possible answer: an explosion of the
social totality, the logic, if not the causes of which Adorno
explores in his texts on pop culture, most notably in the
little discussed essay ' tiber die musikalische Verwendung des
Radios'. Like the radio symphony, society must now be grasped
as an untotalizable array of fragments. These fragments, in
their shattering of totality, cease not only to conflict or
compete with each other, they cease in any emphatic sense to
relate to each other at all. Society explodes into a rubble of
self-contained images, whose eerie isolation induces in
individuals the perplexity at contradiction evident in the
texts of Habermas and Bohrer.
As well as adumbrating the logic of an untotalizable
SUMMARY - 8 -
society, Parts III and IV trace a genealogy of Habermas's and
Bohrer's condition, tracking down in Adorno's own arguments the
harbingers of the troubled consciousness that will befall his
successors. If Adorno's texts analyse and denounce the loss of
contradiction, they simultaneously exemplify it. This is most
strikingly illustrated in their discussions of the culture
industry. Pop cultural artefacts loosely bind together
disparate elements, line up side-by-side melodies, chords,
characters or scenes which do not develop out of one another,
do not complement or contradict their rivals but indifferently
coexist. Tension and conflict in the culture industry are
replaced by a blank contiguity. Adorno's texts on pop culture
similarly line up irreconcilables without ever carrying out the
tension - indifferently juxtaposing the idea that high art
remains qualitatively distinct from Hollywood and Jazz, with
the converse claim that the culture industry has swallowed art
whole and usurped its history. This baffling juxtaposition of
incompatible terms inadvertently reproduces the very structures
it denounces.
This affinity would be of little import if it did not
simultaneously skew Adorno's method. Adorno hopes, in his
Philosophie der neuen Musik, to uphold a clear-cut distinction
between Schonberg's holistic approach to composition, and
Stravinsky's musical bricolage. A close analysis of the text
discovers, however, that the opposition falls in on itself.
Though he hopes to divide them, Adorno unites Schonberg and
Stravinsky in the shared figure of a blind submission,
SUMMARY - 9 -
undermining his own polemical distinction with arguments that,
despite themselves, make Schonberg and Stravinsky barely
distinguishable from the culture industry. One conclusion to be
drawn from this self-undermining would seem to be that art
should no longer be emphatically protected from pop culture,
that cultural artefacts of all types should instead be
construed as radically ambivalent. Adorno's vertiginous
dialectics should give way to a purer paradox. Certainly,
undecidable ambiguities are occasionally consciously embraced
by Adorno. Yet who is the subject strong enough to hold
together these conflicting impulses, to grasp art, for
instance, as at once reified to the core and emancipatory? Part
IV turns to Adorno's meditations on subjectivity as they are
expressed in his reading of Beckett's Endgame. As he reflects
on the battered subjects presented in Beckett's play, Adorno
not only contemplates how dialectical thought could grind to a
halt. His own text seems at the same time to lose the ability
to think even paradoxically. Adorno himself is not unaware of
this movement, but he interprets it as a triumphant step
towards post-dialectical perfection. For a reader schooled by
the non-dialectical figures of Habermas and Bohrer, it is hard
not to grasp the shift as a first inkling of the unmediated
structures of postmodern conceptuality.
This collapse of dialectics transforms our understanding
of Habermas and Bohrer. They appeared on first reading merely
insensitive to the contradictions and ambivalences which are at
once the defining attribute and signal achievement of Adorno's