Towards a New Manifesto

Max Horkheimer,Theodor Adorno, Rodney Livingstone

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781781683910
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of "critical theory", Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism and totalitarianism. Towards a New Manifesto shows the two philosophers in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work-theory and practice, labor and leisure, domination and freedom-in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency. A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world. This new edition contains two texts on needs by Adorno and Horkheimer that have been translated for the first time or have been difficult to access.

1

The Role of Theory

March 1956

1.Never was sociology as bankrupt as it is today with the idea of the doubling of the world.

2.Sub specie aeternitatis: all will be well (even if the party no longer exists).

3.Work has been called on to replace the belief that all will be well.

AD 1 [Never was sociology as bankrupt as it is today with the idea of the doubling of the world.]

HORKHEIMER: What we see today is a doubling of the world.

ADORNO: That is exactly Marx’s epistemology. He said that the task of theory is to reflect reality.¹

HORKHEIMER: Indeed, reflect the way it looks from the situation of the proletariat. Developments in this so-called Western hemisphere have led to the growing tendency to translate thought into scientific statement. You end up with nothing more than a few clichés, such as freedom or religion. A further factor is that we no longer have either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, which might have taken its place. From a certain point on the bourgeoisie has to double itself. In contrast, the workers still had a utopia. Then Marx came along and took away their utopia with the aid of the doubling process. On the one hand, he brought them closer to reality; but he then did away with the tension with reality.

ADORNO: The motif of subjectivism. [Its] link with positivism.

HORKHEIMER: The form taken by immiseration has undergone great changes.

ADORNO: It must be said that even so subjective consciousness cannot simply be reduced to insignificance. That’s what is done by the type of Marxism that becomes rigidly dogmatic and really does turn into the ideology of existing conditions. If a worker no longer notices that he is a worker, this has important implications for theory.

HORKHEIMER: The entire rationale for theory seems to have disappeared because on the one hand the bourgeoisie transforms thought into facts and on the other the party no longer exists.

ADORNO: The Russians too no longer have any theory but only mumbo-jumbo and positivism.

AD 2 [Sub specie aeternitatis: all will be well (even if the party no longer exists).]

ADORNO: Reason, which is essential to keep the machinery in motion, necessarily contains its other. When you start to think, you cannot stop short at purely reproductive thinking. This does not mean that things will really work out like that, but you cannot think without thinking that otherness. The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away. Thought is killed off in the mere doubling process.

HORKHEIMER: Language is urbanity. The role of towns.² Whatever is right about human society is embedded in the language – the idea that all will be well. When you open your mouth to speak, you always say that too.³

ADORNO: The idea of truth transcends positivity.

HORKHEIMER: And for something to be true means that it is so constituted that everyone must acknowledge it.

ADORNO: The entire mess today arises from a subjectivity that is ignorant of itself, that mistakes itself for objectivity. The idea of the good that is tacitly assumed in the theory stems from the fact that thought necessarily includes the element of reflection. This cushions the effect of our actions. Just as the imagination developed out of the age-old misdeeds of biology among other things, helping to strip them of their demonic aspect, in the same way theory contains an anti-mythological dimension. This means that because we pause to reflect we do not just lash out blindly. A person who thinks does not just react with his fists, does not just devour things unthinkingly. The time lag caused by the moment of reflection between hunger, fury and lashing out is the origin of the idea that all will be well. By confronting the ends with the means something necessarily comes into being that brings about the suspension of the entire blindness and immediacy. For me to master nature, I have to think. But by thinking, I interpose a medium between the object of action and myself that strives to go beyond both. The gesture of the savage who pauses for an instant to reflect whether or not he wishes to eat his prisoner contains teleologically the end of violence.

HORKHEIMER: My own thoughts are far more modest; I simply say that when I speak, I postulate my subject as the universal. By speaking, I eliminate the particularity of the subject. Dewey says every act of thought contains the following element: what I say here can be said only by someone who does not really possess the whole and cannot know it. I simply put it forward for debate. Whether it is right or not will emerge in the course of the historical process of discussion.⁴

ADORNO: Artists too are actually no more than the instruments that carry something out.

HORKHEIMER: Subjectivism consists in the fact that whatever makes use of the individual subject does not distinguish itself from that subject but merely interprets it subjectively.

AD 3 [Work has been called on to replace the belief that all will be well.]

HORKHEIMER: Labour is what mediates between human beings. The ‘process of civilization’ has been fetishized.⁵

ADORNO: In Marx’s chapter on fetishism, the social relation appears in the form of the exchange principle, as if it were the thing in itself.

HORKHEIMER: The instrument becomes the main thing.

ADORNO: But our task is to explain this by speculating on labour’s ultimate origins, to infer it from the principle of society, so that it goes beyond Marx. Because exchange value seems to be absolute, the labour that has created it seems to be absolute too, and not the thing for whose sake it basically exists. In actuality the subjective aspect of use value conceals the objective utopia, while the objectivity of exchange value conceals subjectivism.

HORKHEIMER: Work is the key to making sure that ‘all will be well’. But by elevating it to godlike status, it is emptied of meaning.

ADORNO: How does it come about that work is regarded as an absolute? Work exists to control the hardships of life, to ensure the reproduction of mankind. The success of labour stands in a problematic relationship to the effort required. It does not necessarily or certainly reproduce the lives of those who work but only of those who induce others to work for them. In order to persuade human beings to work you have to fob them off with the waffle about work as the thing in itself.

HORKHEIMER: That’s how it is among the bourgeoisie. This was not the attitude of the Greeks. The young worker on the motorbike treats work as his god because he enjoys riding the bike so much.

ADORNO: But even if he really does enjoy it, that subjective happiness still remains ideology.

HORKHEIMER: But if you were to tell him about our idea that it is supposed to be enjoyable, he would find that hard to understand and would rather we left him in peace.

ADORNO: All that is delusion.

HORKHEIMER: Yes and no. It really does call for great effort.

ADORNO: So does riding a motorbike.

HORKHEIMER: That is an objectively measurable effort; he is happy to make it. His true pleasure in motorbike riding is in the anal sounds it emits. We just look foolish if we try to give explanations that are too precise.

ADORNO: Work figures as early as the Bible.

HORKHEIMER: Initially as the exchange principle.

ADORNO: But it is still unclear why work should be cathected in the first place.

HORKHEIMER: It is also the worst punishment for someone not to be allowed to work at all.

ADORNO: Concentration camps are a key to all these things. In the society we live in all work is like the work in the camps.

HORKHEIMER: Take care, you risk coming close to the idea of enjoying work. The uselessness of the work and derision deprive people of the last bit of pleasure they might obtain from it, but I do not know if that is the crucial factor. No ideology survives in the camps. Whereas our society still insists that work is good.

ADORNO: How does work come to be an end in itself? This dates back to a time far earlier than capitalism. Initially, I suppose, because society reproduced itself through labour, but then in each individual case the relation between concrete labour and reproduction is opaque. In socially useful labour people have to forget what it is good for. The abstract necessity of labour is expressed in the fact that value is ascribed to labour in itself.

HORKHEIMER: I do not believe that human beings naturally enjoy working, no matter whether their work has a purpose or not. Originally, the position of man is like that of a dog you want to train. He would like to return to an earlier state of being. He works in order not to have to work. The reification of labour is a stage in the process that enables us to return to childhood, but at a higher level.

ADORNO: It has a positive and a negative side. The positive side lies in the teleology that work potentially makes work superfluous; the negative side is that we succumb to the mechanism of reification, in the course of which we forget the best thing of all. That turns a part of the process into an absolute. But it is not an aberration, since without it the whole process wouldn’t function.

HORKHEIMER: It is not just a matter of ideology, but is also influenced by the fact that a shaft of light from the telos falls onto labour. Basically, people are too short-sighted. They misinterpret the light that falls on labour from ultimate goals. Instead, they take labour qua labour as the telos and hence see their personal work success as that purpose. That is the secret. If they did not do that, such a thing as solidarity would be possible. A shaft of light from the telos falls on the means to achieve it. It is just as if instead of worshipping their lover they worship the house in which she dwells. That, incidentally, is the source of all poetry.

ADORNO: The whole of art is always both true and false. We must not succumb to the ideology of work, but we cannot deny that all happiness is twinned with work.

HORKHEIMER: The shaft of light must be reflected back by an act of resistance.

ADORNO: The animal phase in which one does nothing at all cannot be retrieved.

HORKHEIMER: Happiness would be an animal condition viewed from the perspective of whatever has ceased to be animal.

ADORNO: Animals could teach us what happiness is.

HORKHEIMER: To achieve the condition of an animal at the level of reflection—that is freedom. Freedom means not having to work.

ADORNO: Philosophy always asserts that freedom is when you can choose your own work, when you can claim ownership of everything awful.

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