Adorno and the Political

Espen Hammer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415289139
• eBook ISBN: 9781317834885
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Interest in Theodor W. Adorno continues to grow in the English-speaking world as the significance of his contribution to philosophy, social and cultural theory, as well as aesthetics is increasingly recognized. Espen Hammer's lucid book is the first to properly analyze the political implications of his work, paying careful attention to Adorno's work on key thinkers such as Kant, Hegel and Benjamin.

Examining Adorno's political experiences and assessing his engagement with Marxist as well as liberal theory, Hammer looks at the development of Adorno's thought as he confronts Fascism and modern mass culture. He then analyzes the political dimension of his philosophical and aesthetic theorizing. By addressing Jürgen Habermas's influential criticisms, he defends Adorno as a theorist of autonomy, responsibility and democratic plurality. He also discusses Adorno's relevance to feminist and ecological thinking. As opposed to those who see Adorno as someone who relinquished the political, Hammer's account shows his reflections to be, on the most fundamental level, politically motivated and deeply engaged.

This invigorating exploration of a major political thinker is a useful introduction to his thought as a whole, and will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of philosophy, sociology, politics and aesthetics.

1
Permanent Exile

Adorno’s political experiences

The development of Adorno’s political thought is inseparable from the historical experiences he, as a male German of Jewish ancestry, had — from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, from the United States of the New Deal Era to the Federal Republic of Germany. As opposed to the widespread view of Adorno as devoid of political interest, a closer reading of his work reveals a wealth of political references that often, especially after the return to West Germany in 1951, serve as direct interventions in current state of affairs. Although he neither formulated a political program nor advocated any form of activism, he engaged theoretically in trying to resist the identitarian regimes that block the realization of freedom and happiness.

In this chapter I outline the history of Adorno’s political experiences, highlighting his early years, his period of exile in the United States, and his encounter with the Student Movement in the late 1960s. I argue that while his vision of the conditions of democratic political activity is extremely bleak, the desire to resist and anticipate change remains a constant focus throughout his life.

From liberalism to Marxism

Like many European intellectuals of the same generation, Adorno experienced the First World War as the end of the old world of bourgeois certainty and the beginning of a new and dark world whose meaning could only be approached adequately through experimental, avant-garde art practices. The First World War led to the downfall of the traditional liberal order, yet it also involved a near complete shattering of the political hopes for a better future. After the failed revolutions in Germany in the aftermath of the war, the young Adorno tended to sublimate his desire for change into a quest for the aesthetically or even religiously absolute. In Ernst Bloch and Franz Rosenzweig he found thinkers ready to translate political struggle into artistic or theological terms, leaving politics to become a matter of reading off utopian potentials from an otherwise oppressive and decadent social reality.

The fact that the First World War represents such a watershed in Adorno’s perception of contemporary Western history may have been a reason for his nostalgic, though highly ambivalent, assessment of liberalism. The war, with all its destruction and bloodshed, is what separates Adorno and his contemporaries from the old order and makes unproblematized cultural transmission impossible. While his approach to liberalism will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 8, it is worth noticing that, like virtually all the other neo-Kantians of the day, Adorno’s earliest political orientation was predominantly liberal, though vaguely tinged with a sympathy for socialism.¹ Even in his most Marxist phases, he never repudiated his basic subscription to a liberal (or Kantian) concern for the autonomy of the individual. Although he viewed the formation of human individuality as dependent on the social structures in which it is embedded, the interests of the social group or collectivity as a whole should never be satisfied at the expense of the freedom of any single human being.

Adorno viewed liberalism as the ideology of a more humane order that has come to pass and disintegrated. Rather than calling for a return to past certainties, however, the correct relation to liberalism would be to retain its promises of human freedom and dignity while radically rethinking their meaning. Although the bourgeois family structure may have permitted the formation of stronger egos, and market relations may have been more transparent and less mediated by corporate structures, Adorno was enough of a Marxist, even in the early 1920s, to view the self-representation of the early liberal state as ideological: its freedoms and rights, though pronounced universal, predominantly served the interests of the burgeoning bourgeoisie.

Adorno often speaks as though the categories of liberal thought have suffered a decay. Failing to actualize what they promised, they no longer enjoy any historical right to claim simple, straightforward validity. In some early texts, following Horkheimer, the decay is related to the post-1848 demise of bourgeois liberalism, in others to the social upheavals and concentrations of capital in the 1870s, and, in yet others, to the First World War. The decay has particularly hit what Adorno considers to be the arch-bourgeois vision of a continuity between reason and reality. In his Antrittsvorlesung from 1931, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” he claims that “The autonome ratio [autonomous reason] — this was the thesis of every idealistic system — was supposed to be capable of developing the concept of reality, and in fact all reality, from out of itself. This thesis has disintegrated” (2000a: 25). In the classical entrepreneurial phase of early capitalism, the active representatives of the bourgeoisie were able to conceive of themselves as epistemically and morally self-authorized: they were “self-made men” facing a social world not yet entirely dominated by systemic imperatives. As ownership of capital was concentrated in fewer hands, and state and economy lost their former independence from one another, the early bourgeois claim to a harmony between reason and reality collapsed, leaving philosophers and intellectuals with the need to design more overtly compensatory ideological systems. According to Adorno (2000a), the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, with which he was once, following his teacher Hans Cornelius, in great sympathy, represents an example of such a compensatory stance.

There can be no doubt that Adorno’s political views were radicalized in the late 1920s under the influence of Marxist thinkers and friends such as Lukács, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, and Marcuse. However, unlike several of the associates of the Institute for Social Research, including especially its first group of researchers under the directorship of Adolf Grünbaum (Karl August Wittfogel, Richard Sorge, Henryk Grossmann, Franz Borkmann, Friedrich Pollock, and Felix Weil), he was never attracted to Leninism, and after the Moscow trials in 1934 he persistently rejected the authoritarian practices of Eastern communism. In light of the late realization on the part of many Western intellectuals on the Left of how oppressive Soviet communism actually was (in France it did not become a major political issue until the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in the early 1970s), it is in retrospect admirable that Adorno grasped the nature of Leninism and Stalinism as early as he did. Of course, the repudiation of Eastern-style communism was conditioned by the peculiar fact that, for someone whose political commitments were eventually shaped so heavily by Marx’s Capital and Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, he neither had any connection with, nor took any direct interest in, the labor movements that formed the outlook of the German Social Democrats in the 1920s and 1930s. While Jameson’s claim (1996: 7) that Adorno’s dismissal of Moscow (as well as his lack of sympathy or understanding for Third World revolutions) was determined by class is unduly crass, his distance from the actual political struggles of the day, which to a large degree were inspired by Leninist internationalism, could hardly have been greater.

But was Adorno in the radical years before and immediately after 1930 in any way committed to a socialist revolution? According to Müller-Doohm (2003: 121–2), while he was convinced that the pre-war bourgeois world had come to an end and that capitalism was corrupt, he was so repelled by collectivist ideologies that he was never prepared to join the Communist Party, let alone take part in activities that would demand obedience to leaders or principles of any kind. There is, however, no doubt that his political views gradually became shaped by socialist ideals, and that he considered the problems of contemporary society to be largely caused by the antagonistic dynamic of capitalism itself, a dynamic which, according to standard Marxist interpretations of history, was predetermined to come to an end.² Although the historical development had been stalled by war as well as the shift from a liberal to a more organized social and political order, its immanent meaning pointed towards the overcoming of social antagonism in a classless society. As in the last decade of his life, Adorno faced what he saw as a conflict between theory and praxis: while a theoretical analysis showed society to be objectively in need of radical social transformation, the praxis that could bring it about was missing. In the light of this cul-de-sac, Adorno chose to focus on the theoretical dimension, using philosophy of history, political theory and historical materialism to both diagnose the present and to uncover the potentials for change.

Political experiences in the United States

I discuss Adorno’s specific response to the Nazi takeover in Chapter 3. Moving further forward in time to Adorno’s political experiences in the United States after leaving Oxford in 1938, the context that met him was largely defined not by a Marxist–socialist activism, but by an altogether diminishing commitment to radical social reform. However important it may be to consider Adorno’s perception of this trend in the light of his negative assessment of American culture as a whole — its alleged standardization, its interweaving of high and mass culture, and so on — it is likely that it reflected a larger geopolitical transformation. According to Pels (1985: 76f.), whereas in the years following the crash of the stock market the political climate in liberal and left-wing circles had an explicitly Marxist or even communist bias, aiming to overcome injustices stemming from the existing capitalist system of distribution, the Moscow trials and the rise of fascism forced many to reconsider their allegiances. This reaction was precipitated further by the outbreak of war in 1939 and the rapid advancement of Hitler’s troops, culminating in the attack on the Soviet Union and the Japanese onslaught at Pearl Harbor. At stake, it seemed to many, was not simply the concern for social justice but the protection of the relative freedoms still enjoyed by the American citizenry. The correct response, even among those who had previously subscribed to the radical goals of the Popular Front, seemed to be to support Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and to use whatever means deemed necessary to defend American democracy.

The New Deal represented a shift from traditional liberal concerns with civil rights and individual freedoms, toward a greater emphasis on social interventionism and a closer collaboration between state power and corporate capitalism. What Roosevelt saw as the solution to America’s internal social problems was a more organized and planned economy in which government agencies more actively than ever before used fiscal incentives in order to try to influence and ultimately control the running of major capitalist enterprises. While initially based on stringent federal control of credit, the Roosevelt administration’s strategy, extending the directing and regulating powers of the Treasury Department, intensified to involve large-scale extensions of federal authority and especially of presidential power to counter the effects of the crisis on industry and employment. The New Deal led to a greater concentration, if not of capital, then of power, and while on the whole agreeing with the Roosevelt administration’s foreign policies (especially its decision to commit troops in order to curb fascist expansionism), both Adorno and Horkheimer argued that this process had as its consequences an increasing bureaucratization and a weakening of participatory democracy, yet with no discernible benefits to the working class. From employing totalizing terms mainly in the context of philosophical analysis, Adorno now started to extend the notion of totalization explicitly to social phenomena, speaking of “totally administered societies” [totalverwaltete Gesellschaften], as if such societies no longer leave any scope for individual deliberation, critique, and autonomous participation.³

In late modernity, Adorno argues, politics is under constant threat of being colonized by competing sub-systems of purposive-rational action, in particular the techno-administrative complexes, for which the demand for responsible and autonomous decisions is devalued in favor of strategic calculation and end-indifferent, instrumental intervention. Although he neither presents a detailed analysis of such processes, nor any theoretical model by which they can be fully understood, Adorno views modern complex societies as under the spell of a mechanized, regimented system of social integration for which no one is accountable. While political action should be free and relatively uninhibited by external constraints, administrative action is formal, highly codified and in every respect constrained by the system’s internal requirements.

The thesis about the rise of totally administered societies is both simple and seductive, and in Adorno’s later work it arguably takes the form of a dogma. There can be no doubt, however, that it generates many significant questions that are never fully addressed. The most glaring difficulty with it may be that it fails to differentiate adequately between the systemic integration taking place in a totalitarian regime and that taking place in a liberal democracy.

The parallel being drawn, for example, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, between Goebbels’ highly organized and targeted propaganda machinery and Hollywood productions, while perceptive in that both seek to establish allegiance by exploiting the economy of subliminal desire, is far too dismissive of the differences between these two forms of rhetoric, especially with regard to the masochistic submissiveness which Nazi propaganda wants to instill in its listeners as opposed to the hedonistic and narcissistic appeal of advertisement and consumerism. In general, it seems unlikely that an analysis such as this can retain much explanatory power when made to cover both totalitarian societies and liberal democracies.

In order to better understand how he arrived at such a view, it is worth keeping in mind that, like Horkheimer, he increasingly viewed the advanced capitalism of the United States and the fascist totalitarianism of Nazi Germany as political systems that are similar in that both, each in their own way, complete a more general world-historical passage towards greater abstraction, rationalization, and repetition — that is, the aggressive unfolding of a logic of identitarian reason that is being traced in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.⁴ Nazi Germany realizes this operation by enacting, on a grand scale, an administered regression into a political myth of national foundation, excluding anyone who does not fit in with their exclusionary narrative; American capitalism realizes it through the culture industry and the ever more insidious manipulation of the everyday by means of advertisement and consumerism: both are for Adorno aspects of total administration.

For contemporary purposes the perhaps most weighty critique of the thesis of a totally administered society is that while at least partly valid in the classical industrial phase of capitalism, it fails to capture the emergence, in postmodernist consumer society, of new forms of individualism that radically overturn the older relationship between the private and the public sphere. According to Bauman (2000), today’s Western societies are not integrated through highly organized and centralized social-control mechanisms. It is not true any longer that the public sphere invades and subjugates the private sphere. On the contrary, what marks late (postmodern) capitalism above all is the extraordinary extent to which public life is usurped by private initiative and consumer attitudes.⁵ The individual should not, as in Adorno’s conception, be viewed as “outer-directed” and heteronomous; rather, the individual finds itself in a rapidly changing environment in which, without communal backing or assurance, it is necessary to constantly make choices, and in which the readiness for self-invention, self-transformation and self-renewal becomes imperative. For Bauman, the most pressing political task facing Western societies today is to restore politics (and the public sphere in general) as a space in which questions of the common good (as opposed to individual preference and interest) can be raised and dealt with.

In response to Bauman, it can be argued that while Adorno’s thesis of the victory of the society and the universal over the individual and the particular may today appear somewhat anachronistic, it does not follow from the apparent individualism of late capitalist societies that the systemic integration is less intense than in classical industrialist capitalism. In his theory of the culture industry, for example, Adorno allows for a considerable degree of individual choice. In contrast to Bauman’s position, however, the exercise of autonomy is according to Adorno mainly apparent: the consumerist attitudes which guide such choices do not reflect a genuine capacity for autonomous deliberation and action but are ultimately created and maintained by the individual agent’s identification with the commercial imperatives of mass advertising. It should also be pointed out that Adorno obviously does not castigate the public sphere as inherently threatening to the individual; rather, it is the perversion of public life, the transformation of participatory politics into pure administration, which is the target of this critique. Adorno would therefore be just as interested as Bauman is in seeing the public sphere being accorded its proper significance.

Standardization of life practices is thus another aspect of Adorno’s political experience in the United States. Minima Moralia, his collection of aphorisms, is replete with the twin Adornian laments over the loss of individuality and the withering of experience. Although I return to these themes in my discussion of the culture industry, the speculative figure underlying these reflections is that objectivity — the administrative apparatuses, the social structures, and the exchange relation as such — threatens to eradicate subjectivity. While in liberal capitalism the subject once enjoyed a relative freedom, in monopoly capitalism it largely conforms to the demands of the system. The capacity to respond autonomously to social norms and expectations, as well as the ability to experience particulars that have not already been subsumed and abstractly determined by universal mechanisms of exchange, are seen to have more or less disappeared. For Adorno, even the landscape appears alienating and strange, a material allegory of lifelessness and destruction, reflecting not just the despair of the émigré but an otherworldly coldness stemming from the universal reduction of things and men to their exchange value, leaving culture and nature to merge indistinguishably with each other:

The shortcoming of the American landscape is not so much, as romantic illusion would have it, the absence of historical memories, as that it bears no traces of the human hand. This applies not only to the lack of arable land, the uncultivated woods often no higher than scrub, but above all to the roads. These are always inserted directly in the landscape, and the more impressively smooth and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming track appears against its wild, overgrown surroundings. They are expressionless. Just as they know no marks of foot or wheel, no soft paths along their edges as a transition to the vegetation, no trails leading off into the valley, so they are without the mild, soothing, unangular quality of things that have felt the touch of hands or their immediate implements. It is as if no-one had ever passed their hand over the landscape’s hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless. And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what the hurrying eye has see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Permanent Exile: Adorno's Political Experiences
• 2 Adorno's Marxism
• 3 Approaches to Fascism
• 4 The Politics of Culture
• 5 The Persistence of Philosophy
• 6 The Politics of Aesthetic Negativity
• 7 The Transformation of Critical Theory
• 8 Adorno in Contemporary Political Theory
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index