Why Adorno?

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / English

 John Holloway

I

Why Adorno? Adorno is difficult to read. Even worse than that, Adorno called in the police in 1969 when the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt was occupied by students. So why turn to him now when our aim is not to become experts on Adorno or the Frankfurt School but to sharpen our critique of capitalism?

Rupture and revolt and fragility and uncertainty and openness and pain are at the centre of Adorno’s thought: that is why he is so exciting.

The starting point, for him as for us, is the political-theoretical failure of orthodox Marxism: he writes “after the attempt to change the world miscarried”, after the “moment to realise [philosophy] was missed”, as he puts it in the opening lines of Negative Dialectics (1990, 3). After Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima there are no certainties, above all no guarantee of a happy ending. That is why it is necessary to abandon the notion of dialectics as a process of negation leading to a synthesis, a negation of negation leading to a positive ending. The only way in which we can now conceive dialectics is negatively, as a movement of negation rather than of synthesis, as a negative dialectics.

But why bother with dialectics at all when orthodox “dialectical materialism” had “degenerated into a dogma” (1990, 7)? Others (Negri, for example, but also the whole post-structuralist current – Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Virno and so on – that is currently so influential in anti-capitalist thought) took the opposite route and decided to reject dialectics and emphasise materialism. To focus on Adorno is to question the post-structuralist route taken by those authors.

Why dialectics, then? Adorno’s reply is that dialectics is not a standpoint. It expresses rather the inevitable insufficiency of thought, the disjointed relation between thought and the objects of thought. “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder… Contradiction … indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.” (1990, 5) Thought identifies (“to think is to identify”), but that which is thought overflows the thought itself. Dialectics is thought’s awareness of its own inadequacy, of the non-identity which is contained within, bursts from and overflows the identity which thought would impose. “Contradiction is non-identity under the aspect of identity”, and “dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity”.

That is the central theme of Adorno’s thought: dialectics as the consistent sense of non-identity, of that which does not fit. It is both libertarian and revolutionary. It is libertarian because its pivot and driving force is the misfit, irreducible particularity, the non-identity that cannot be contained, the rebel who will not submit to party discipline. It is revolutionary because it is explosive, volcanic. If there is no identity other than the identity that is undermined by non-identity, then there is no possibility of stability. All identity is false, contradictory, resting on the negation of the non-identity which it suppresses, which it seeks to contain but cannot contain. And it cannot contain it not just for some contingent reason such as the inefficiency of the police, but because identification always runs behind the flow of non-identity, is never able to pin it down and hold it still.

It is clear that non-identity is the hero, the centre, the moving force of the world as Adorno presents it. But what do we understand by non-identity? Is it just a philosophical concept or is it the conceptualisation of a social force? The answer, surely, is that we are non-identity. The force that does not fit, the force that contradicts all identification, the force that overflows is subjectivity, we. And who are we? We are the subject, uncontainable within any definition. We can say that we are the working class, but that makes sense only if we understand “working class” as a concept that explodes against itself, a concept that bursts its own bounds.

Does Adorno actually say that we are non-identity? Not as far as I know. Perhaps I am reading Adorno in a non-identitarian way, against-and-beyond Adorno. But how else can we understand non-identity? Non-identity can only be a force that changes itself, that drives beyond itself, that creates and creates itself. And where do we find a creative and self-creative force? Not animals, not god, not nature, only humans, we. Not an identitarian we, but a disjointed, misfitting, creative we.

This is not a liberal-humanist we, but an antagonistic, self-antagonistic we. We are part of an antagonistic entirety in which the “subject [is] the subject’s foe” (1990, 10). Dialectics exists because we are in the wrong place, in the wrong sort of society: “dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction.” The dialectical we is the contradictory we who live in-and-against capitalist society, a non-identitarian class we.

II

Adorno meets Tronti. In his seminal article, “Lenin in England” (first published in 1964, two years before Adorno’s Negative Dialectics), Tronti wrote that “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to put the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.” (1979, 1) Words far removed from Adorno’s, yet here is the question, the interweaving of autonomist and critical theory. Tronti (and the other theorists-practitioners of operaismo) turned orthodox Marxism on its head and put working class struggle (and not capital) at the centre of their analysis. Adorno (and the other members of the Frankfurt school) turned orthodox Marxism on its head and put non-identity at the centre of their analysis. Adorno probably did not meet Tronti and quite possibly would not have wanted to, but we can make them meet.

“Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity.” Dialectics means thinking the world from that which does not fit, from those who do not fit, those who are negated and suppressed, those whose insubordination and rebelliousness breaks the bounds of identity, from us who exist in-and-against-and-beyond capital. This is surely the same as the autonomist project formulated by Tronti: less explicitly political, but it goes much deeper, because the attack on identity goes to the core of life itself, it touches directly who we are and how we think. The autonomist project of operaismo was ambiguous precisely because it did not go far enough, because it did not question the identitarian concept of the working class as an identifiable group of people. It turns the capital-labour relation on its head, but to be consistent, it should have turned the whole world on its head, putting non-identity at the centre of the way we breathe and the way we think. It is this limitation that leads then to the later unfortunate and stultifying union of some autonomist thinkers with post-structuralism, a tradition which denies the centrality of the subject and hence of working class struggle.

The development of the autonomist project (the drive towards social self-determination) requires critical theory (just as, indeed, the development of critical theory requires the autonomist project – and not the social-democratic ruminations of Habermas, for example). Why? Because the autonomist project puts working class struggle (or anti-capitalist struggle) at the centre of our understanding of the world, as driving force and not as reaction. And because the project of critical theory also puts working class struggle (as non-identity) at the centre of our understanding of the world, as driving force, not as reaction. Am I then saying that we can replace “working class struggle” for “non-identity” in Adorno: “dialectics is the consistent sense of working class struggle”? Yes, but obviously only if we understand class struggle as the movement of non-identity (a tautologous expression, since non-identity can only be understood as movement). Thus: “We too have worked with a concept that puts identity first, and non-identity second. This is a mistake. And now we have to put the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the movement of non-identity.” Is this not doing violence to both Adorno and Tronti? Of course, but is it a creative violence, does it take us forward in the struggle against capitalism, against the identity of a system built on death?

Non-identity is creativity, identity is the negation of creativity: everything is. In capitalism, non-identity exists “under the aspect of identity” (1990, 5), creativity exists in the form of non-creativity, doing exists in the form of alienated labour. The strength of the subject exists as the “fallacy of constitutive subjectivity”: “to use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constituted subjectivity – this is what the author felt to be his task ever since he became to trust his own mental impulses” (1990, xx). Dialectics turns the strength of the subject against the fallacy of constituted subjectivity: the “subject [is] the subject’s foe” (1990, 10). Dialectics is the consistent sense of that which lies hidden: the non-identity that exists under the aspect of identity, the creativity that exists as the fetishised rule of things, the strength of the subject that is concealed by the “fallacy of constitutive subjectivity”. “Our thinking heeds a potential that waits in the object … the resistance of thought to mere things in being, the commanding freedom of the subject, intends in the object, even that of which the object was deprived by objectification” (1990, 19). Dialectics seek to bring to light the power of human creativity that lies in all that negates that power, to understand the world and not just the capital-labour relation (understood in traditional identitarian terms) from the perspective of human creativity. That is why dialectics has to be at the core of the autonomist project and why the autonomist project has to be at the core of critical theory. Without that connection, they both dry up, become academic playthings and Adorno becomes an intellectual adornment, part of the culture industry which he hated.

“Thought as such, before all particular contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it” (1990, 19). Life too.

Bibliography:

Adorno T. W. (1990), Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge)

Tronti M. (1979), “Lenin in England”, in Red Notes, Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (London: Red Notes)