The Melancholy Science

An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno

Gillian Rose

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781781681527
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781685150
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The Melancholy Science is Gillian Rose's investigation into Theodor Adorno's work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernable among the many fragments of Adorno's oeuvre, and argues that his influence has been to turn Marxism into a search for style. The attempts of Adorno, Luk?cs and Benjamin to develop a Marxist theory of culture centred on the concept of reification are contrasted, and the ways in which the concept of reification has come to be misused are exposed. Adorno's continuation for his own time of the Marxist critique of philosophy is traced through his writings on Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger. His opposition to the separation of philosophy and sociology is shown by examination of his critique of Durkheim and Weber, and of his contributions to the dispute over positivism, his critique of empirical social research and his own empirical sociology.
Gillian Rose shows Adorno's most important contribution to be his founding of a Marxist aesthetic that offers a sociology of culture, as demonstrated in his essays on Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Brecht and Sch?nberg. Finally, Adorno's 'Melancholy Science' is revealed to offer a 'sociology of illusion' that rivals both structural Marxism and phenomenological sociology as well as the subsequent work of the Frankfurt School.

1

The Crisis in Culture

The Frankfurt School, 1923–50

All the tensions within the German academic community which accompanied the changes in political, cultural and intellectual life in Germany since 1890 were reproduced in the Institute for Social Research from its inception in Frankfurt in 1923.¹ These changes were widely diagnosed as a ‘crisis in culture’.² By this very definition the ‘crisis’ was deplored yet exacerbated. The Institute carried these tensions with it into exile and when it returned to Germany after the war and found itself the sole heir to a discredited tradition the inherited tensions became even more acute. These tensions are evident in the work of most of the School’s members, and most clearly, self-consciously and importantly in the work of Theodor W. Adorno.

From 1890 the German academic community reacted in a variety of ways to the sudden and momentous development of capitalism in Germany, and to the new role of Germany in the world. This resulted in disillusionment with various scientific and philosophical methods, and the pedagogical and philosophical revival which followed occurred across the political spectrum, to the extent that the spectrum was represented in the universities. The different attempts to ‘re-engage learning’ and reinvigorate German life have been indicted for their political naïvety and irresponsibility.³ Although the Frankfurt School was deliberately set up to be outside the academic community, the aims and work of the Institute amount to a most ambitious attempt to ‘reengage learning’.⁴ For, on the one hand, the School tried more concretely than any university department to reunify the fragmented branches of knowledge in the social sciences without sacrificing the fruits of any of them. Neo-Marxist, it was not deterred by academic cries against ‘materialism’ and ‘materialist’ methods. On the other hand, the School faltered in its attempt to redefine Marxism intellectually and politically for its generation. By the early thirties, it had dropped its orientation towards the workers’ movement, a process which was capped by the replacement of Carl Grünberg by Max Horkheimer as director of the Institute, and by the substitution of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research) edited by Horkheimer for Grünberg’s Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers’ Movement).⁵ It even dropped its interest in class analysis and increasingly turned its attention to the analysis of culture and authority. Instead of politicising academia, it academised politics.⁶ This transposition became the basis for its subsequent achievements. Yet time and time again, the history of the School reveals this tension: as an institution, it reaffirmed and reinforced those aspects of German life which it criticised and aimed to change, just as it reaffirmed and reinforced those aspects of the intellectual universe which it criticised and aimed to change. Only if this is realised can the goals, achievements and failures of the School and of the work of Adorno be defined and assessed.

During the thirties, first in Germany and later in exile, the School is best examined in the same light. Under Horkheimer’s directorship, it avoided the pedantry and conservatism of the universities, while engaging in sociological research which united theoretical and empirical inquiry.⁷ Many of the themes which recur in the articles and books by members of the School published during this period echo themes raised throughout the German academic world,⁸ such as the lamented fragmentation of knowledge, the appeal to an often diffuse notion of ‘totality’ as the lost perspective, the attack on positivism and the recovering of traditions. All of these emphases and the academic assumption that to ‘reengage learning’ would be to rescue society from the ravages of capitalism and modernity were epidemic in Germany until 1933.⁹ Yet the Frankfurt School, although implicated in this more than its own rhetoric or scholarship to date suggests, deserves different treatment too. The special case of the School has always rested on its particular fusion of the Idealism, which arose in opposition to neo-Kantianism, with the revival of Marxism after the First World War.

It may be said that the members of the School were addressing themselves in their collaboration during the upheavals of the thirties to the question which Marx asked at the end of the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘How do we now stand in relation to the Hegelian dialectic?’.¹⁰ They asked this question for their generation, which was the generation younger than Lukács’, disappointed with the working class since 1919, but, unlike him, increasingly disillusioned with the development of communism in Russia during the twenties. Like Lukács, the School considered that to be consistent with Marx, it was necessary to take account of flourishing non-dialectical philosophies and sociologies,¹¹ just as Marx had scanned the philosophy and political economy which flourished in his day. On the one hand, the School was dismayed that the social sciences had developed so separately from each other and sought to combat this fragmentation. On the other hand, Horkheimer did not believe that one man alone could undertake research in all the relevant fields.¹² The members of the School tended to specialise while, at the same time, breaking down the established barriers between philosophy and sociology in their particular areas. Horkheimer was particularly concerned to take advantage of the developments in empirical research techniques which in Germany had occurred quite apart from developments in theoretical sociology and at a time when almost every German professor of sociology considered it incumbent on him to produce a theoretical sociology.¹³ By combining several empirical methods in any inquiry, he believed that the evils of too restricted an empiricism could be avoided. This unity underlying the work of the members of the School is evident in the various publications of the thirties, in the Zeitschrift and most clearly in joint works such as Autorität und Familie (Authority and the Family).¹⁴ However, from the outset, the inheritance of non-Marxist critical traditions affected the style and presentation of many of the contributors. This inheritance from non-Marxist criticisms of Hegel’s system, for example, those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, tolerates idiosyncracy and hence makes for another kind of fragmentation. It is this inheritance from a tradition which has itself never been widely understood even within Germany which, paradoxically, has often increased the School’s appeal, while at the same time, exposing it to misinterpretation. But it has prevented the work of the School from having a more cogent and continual impact on sociology.

Many of these non-Marxist influences, Hegelian and post-Hegelian, were present in Lukács’ writings too, especially up to 1923.¹⁵ The School rejected many of Lukács’ assumptions and theories, particularly the idea of the working class as the subject/object of history and the notion of ‘imputed’ class consciousness. However, a subject/object dichotomy was retained, and ideas from the non-Marxist critical traditions developed in a way which affected the style of the work of many members of the School. Many of Lukács’ central concepts were thus retained, such as ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘fetishism’ and ‘reification’, but they attained a quite different status. The School sought to define Marxism as a mode of cognition sui generis on the assumption that there is no longer any privileged carrier of that cognition, any universal class.¹⁶ The influence of Lukács on the School has been both underestimated¹⁷ and overestimated,¹⁸ and nowhere have the continuities and discontinuities been adequately traced.

Similarly, the continuity of the dispute, which has become notorious since 1964 as the Positivismusstreit (the Positivist dispute),¹⁹ with the polemics undertaken by the School since its earliest days, has been overlooked. This has contributed to the many failures on the part of the School’s opponents to understand the terms of the later debate.²⁰ From the late twenties, members of the School conducted disputes with various forms of philosophical and sociological absolute systems, positivisms and relativisms.²¹ It may be said that some form of dispute concerning ‘positivism’ is as old as Marxism itself. After 1950 the adversaries changed, but the enterprise did not. It involves demonstrating the social necessity of the position which is criticised, while rejecting, in more strident tones, its claim to absolute validity.

The discontinuity in the membership of the School, especially after the war when very few returned to Germany, has meant that the School’s general theory of change in the social organisation of production, which underlies all its other work, is difficult to identify. In the post-war writing of Horkheimer and Adorno the theory of change in late capitalism is implicit but not directly presented in any one place. These ideas were originally formed in the attempt to analyse the development and success of the Nazis in Germany, and always bore the mark of this origin.²² Friedrich Pollock’s article ‘State Capitalism’, written in 1941,²³ offers an example of the difficulties which beset the School’s analysis of capitalism and which reappear in Adorno’s works in an indirect and inverted form. Pollock pictured state capitalism as a system where the state has taken over the organisation of production and replaced price and market mechanisms by its own plans. Power to command instead of the profit motive becomes the motor of this system, which has taken over from monopoly capitalism and which may proceed under a totalitarian or democratic political structure. An image of a static and stable regime emerges, although it is not clear to what extent this ‘idealtype’ is intended to offer an historical analysis or a prediction.²⁴ Pollock relies inconsistently on Marx’s method for analysing capitalism and his account lacks cogency because of this. He presupposes Marx’s theory of value and commodity production and hence, however unemphatically, the distinction between use-value and exchange-value, but he does not go on to develop on this basis a notion of labour-power and of the extraction of surplus value and thus of class formation. Instead, the state appears as a force sui generis in Pollock’s account and there is no attempt to relate the posited change in its role to the underlying processes of production. These processes are merely declared to be no longer operative. This leaves Pollock, as it will leave Adorno, without a satisfactory theory of the historical development of capitalism and without an adequate theory of the state.

Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Adorno wrote with Horkheimer in the United States in the early 1940s, might be considered the School’s response to Marx’s critique of political economy.²⁵ In this book Horkheimer and Adorno attempt to decode the history of the philosophical subject as the domination of nature whether under the guise of myth or of enlightened reason.²⁶ The book is concerned with ‘instrumental reason’, or, as it is also called, ‘technological’ reason, but not with technologies for the domination of nature.²⁷ Instrumental reason is seen as a feature of both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, although it only becomes a structuring principle in capitalist societies. Ideas are developed here which Adorno was investigating in his empirical work at the same time, especially the ‘culture industry’ and ‘anti-semitism’, but he did not share Horkheimer’s concern with instrumental reason and the logic of domination. The concept of reification and Marx’s theory of value are much more important in Adorno’s analysis of society. Adorno and Horkheimer fused – each in his own way in his individual works – the Nietzschean and Weberian hyperbole which is so evident in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

During the years of the School’s exile in America, especially in the late thirties and during the forties, the conflict in its position was particularly acute: it was more critical than ever of German society while at the same time more concerned than ever to carry on and develop those aspects of that society and its culture which it deemed worthy of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. The Crisis in Culture
• 2. The Search for Style
• 3. The Lament over Reification
• 4. A Changed Concept of Dialectic
• 5. The Dispute over Positivism
• 6. The Dispute over Modernism
• 7. The Melancholy Science
• Glossary
• List of Abbreviations of Titles
• Notes and References
• Bibliography