Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? — Jamal

It seems like we'd have to say "no" in keeping a charitable reading. That the social whole changes will change consciousness, but I'm thinking that this is a false consciousness. In this case I'm relying upon Marx's analysis of capital to state "the social law" only because the social whole is capitalist, and this notion of the bourgeois relativist is also only interesting because these are the circumstances we find ourselves in.

But, on the other hand, it seems that since there's never a final synthesis ala Hegel we can still reach for this more general view of things -- but the relativist of tomorrow, like the relativist of ancient Greece, will have its own particular false consciousness.

It seems to me that Adorno believes that the relativist can be demonstrated objectively false on their own terms -- not because they must have a presupposition (since a relativist can always take the skeptics route of denial over affirmation), but because the social whole will require a kind of truth that is beyond this relativism.

In a way I get the feeling that the relativism he's pointing out in particular is one that thinks things done: We're at the end of history living in liberal democracies in this viewpoint, and so we're all free to believe as we wish within our individual consciousness.

And, it seems then, that this attitude will be perennial -- if the social structure changes the form of relativism will change, but it will still be embedded within a social whole which said relativist will not be a relativist towards.

Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth?

I'd say so.

In a simple way suppose that the cat wanders off the mat. Then "The cat is on the mat" is false, where it was once true. Truth isn't relative here, but the situation changes the truth value of a particular expression. (Darstellung, maybe even?!)

I actually did a post graduate course specifically on Hegel's dialectics of being. The professor refused to give me the mark I needed, even after I defended my thesis in person. It seems like there is dogmatic principles concerning "the correct" way to interpret Hegel. — Metaphysician Undercover

I guess I agree with your professor.

I noticed.

QUESTION: Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth? — Jamal

AP would say you can't have individual truth in the first place because that would defy the private language argument. Truth has to be social. Wittgenstein suggests that truth is relative to worldviews, but avoids being hypocritical because he says that philosophy is a ladder you toss once you get to the top. Once you realize your philosophy is self-consuming, you go off and do something else.

@Banno might argue that Davidson's On the very idea of a conceptual scheme helps us navigate the diversity of conceptual framework versus the solitary playing field we're apparently placing all these views on.

I noticed. — Metaphysician Undercover

:cool:

Cheers. I'm reading some secondary material on Adorno, after my brief encounter here. And you are correct, overcoming the individualism of Kant, Hegel and subsequent writers is an issue.

And you are correct, overcoming the individualism of Kant, Hegel and subsequent writers is an issue. — Banno

:up:

Care to share a reference for the secondary material?

In other words, Adorno is saying that relativism is, not logically self-refuting, but hypocritical. It makes use of thoughts inherited from the social world to produce the thought that thoughts are entirely the product of the individual. — Jamal

I agree, he basically says that the actual consequences of relativism are what refutes it. The problem i find is that the social "whole" which he refers to is not well validated.

In truth divergent perspectives have their law in the structure of
the social process, as one of a preestablished whole.

We can talk about preestablished social conditions, but the relativist will claim that they are relativistic conditions. Adorno needs the "whole" to support his objective law. This objective whole is really nothing other than Spirit in principle, as that which unites.

I'm finding it hard to work out how he makes this leap from the thesis of relativism to the contempt for Spirit. I understand the distinction he means, which is that between (1) useful productive work and the financial, class, in general materialist (in the popular sense, as Adorno says, "vulgar") concerns that go along with it; and (2) art and ideas, love and beauty, and God if you're so inclined. But how does relativism produce the exclusive focus on (1) and dismissal of (2)? — Jamal

Relativism dissolves the whole, and that means breaking down the social relations which are commonly understood under the conception of Spirit. Therefore it shows a contempt for Spirit. Referring back to earlier sections, I would say that Adorno would like to validate the whole under relations of production, or forces of production, which would unite people under principles of cooperation for production rather than Spirit.

Bits and pieces. But the OUP Very Short Introduction is at about my level.

Care to share a reference for the secondary material? — Moliere

I know the question wasn't directed at me but I feel like listing the ones I’ve liked so far:

• The one I've just finished is A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity by Peter Gordon. Specifically counters the idea that Adorno was a dour negativist with no conception of human flourishing, but amounts to a comprehensive re-interpretation of all his work. An easy read, but not shallow.
• A great overview/introduction is Brian O'Connor's Adorno in the Routledge Philosophers series.
• A brilliant but eccentric (eccentric in what she chooses to focus on and leave out) introduction is The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno by Gillian Rose.
• Two collections of essays by Adorno scholars, covering all his work in a fairly accessible way, are well worth reading: Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts edited by Deborah Cook, and the Blackwell Companion to Adorno.

I agree, he basically says that the actual consequences of relativism are what refutes it. The problem i find is that the social "whole" which he refers to is not well validated. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can talk about preestablished social conditions, but the relativist will claim that they are relativistic conditions. Adorno needs the "whole" to support his objective law. — Metaphysician Undercover

If one wanted to be sceptical of Adorno at this juncture, this would be a reasonable way to go about it.

I think the social whole is, or potentially is, validated by the explanatory power of Adorno's critiques, namely of Enlightenment, of the culture industry, the countless objects of his micrological analysis in Minima Moralia, and within ND, for example precisely this critique of relativism, which is able to explain its genesis and reveal its weakness. The presence of the social whole in his thought ties things together. Without it, things in all their contradictory nature just don't make sense. Thus, the social whole is a valid inference. I admit, of course, that he nowhere deduces it.

This objective whole is really nothing other than Spirit in principle, as that which unites. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand this interpretation. I mean, I can accept that Adorno inherited the very idea of a totality from Hegel, but he explicitly distinguishes it from Spirit.

Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? — Jamal

It seems like we'd have to say "no" in keeping a charitable reading. That the social whole changes will change consciousness, but I'm thinking that this is a false consciousness. In this case I'm relying upon Marx's analysis of capital to state "the social law" only because the social whole is capitalist, and this notion of the bourgeois relativist is also only interesting because these are the circumstances we find ourselves in.

But, on the other hand, it seems that since there's never a final synthesis ala Hegel we can still reach for this more general view of things -- but the relativist of tomorrow, like the relativist of ancient Greece, will have its own particular false consciousness.

It seems to me that Adorno believes that the relativist can be demonstrated objectively false on their own terms -- not because they must have a presupposition (since a relativist can always take the skeptics route of denial over affirmation), but because the social whole will require a kind of truth that is beyond this relativism.

In a way I get the feeling that the relativism he's pointing out in particular is one that thinks things done: We're at the end of history living in liberal democracies in this viewpoint, and so we're all free to believe as we wish within our individual consciousness.

And, it seems then, that this attitude will be perennial -- if the social structure changes the form of relativism will change, but it will still be embedded within a social whole which said relativist will not be a relativist towards. — Moliere

:up:

Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth? — Jamal

I'd say so.

In a simple way suppose that the cat wanders off the mat. Then "The cat is on the mat" is false, where it was once true. Truth isn't relative here, but the situation changes the truth value of a particular expression. — Moliere

That might be the perfect encapsulation of my own thoughts about it. It's objectively true that the cat was on the mat. This is not relative to a framework or perspective, e.g., the cat's or the cat's owner's; it's a truth about the house at that time (where the house stands for the social whole).

Introduction: Against Relativism (continued)

So far in this section Adorno has (a) dismissed the popular argument against relativism; (b) described the historical and social genesis of relativism; and (c) directly criticized relativism from an epistemological perspective. Now, he presents his positive alternative to relativism.

In truth divergent perspectives have their law in the structure of the social process, as one of a preestablished whole. Through its cognition they lose their non-committal aspect. An entrepreneur who does not wish to be crushed by the competition must calculate so that the unpaid part of the yield of alienated labor falls to him as a profit, and must think that like for like – labor-power versus its cost of reproduction – is thereby exchanged; it can just as stringently be shown, however, why this objectively necessary consciousness is objectively false. This dialectical relationship sublates its particular moments in itself. The presumed social relativity of the intuitions obeys the objective law of social production under private ownership of the means of production. Bourgeois skepticism, which embodies relativism as a doctrine, is narrow-minded.

Once you view things in the context of the pre-established whole, i.e., capitalist society, you will no longer want to say "everything is relative," because this would be to reject the successful explanations you've reached. Once you have situated things in the social whole, you will no longer be satisfied with reducing all thoughts to their genesis in the interests of individuals or groups, since you will have established their truth or falsity with respect to objective reality, that is, the social whole.

The capitalist is compelled by competition to exploit the worker but simultaneously think of this exploitation as a fair exchange: "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay". The fact of the matter is revealed only in the context of the social whole, the capitalist system. This dialectic "sublates its particular moments in itself," in other words, the two moments of objective necessity of exploitation and that of the false picture of fairness are synthesized into a higher-level structure. Sublation not only synthesizes but preserves the contradictory elements, and this is the case here: we can see both simultaneously as bound together and interdependent. And this is a demonstration of immanent critique and determinate negation, and the validity of moving through these to the higher level context, significantly the way that we can understand objective reality through its contradictions.

Yet the perennial hostility to the Spirit is more than a feature of subjective bourgeois anthropology. It is due to the fact that the concept of reason inside of the existing relations of production, once emancipated, must fear that its own trajectory will explode this. This is why reason delimits itself; during the entire bourgeois epoch, the idea of the autonomy of the Spirit was accompanied by its reactive self-loathing. It cannot forgive itself for the fact that the constitution of the existence it controls forbids that development into freedom, which lies in its own concept. Relativism is the philosophical expression of this; no dogmatic absolutism need be summoned against it, the proof of its own narrowness crushes it. Relativism was always well-disposed towards reaction, no matter how progressive its bearing, already displaying its availability for the stronger interest in antiquity. The critique of relativism which intervenes is the paradigm of determinate negation.

Here, he gets Freudian, applying a psychological analysis to a personified reason: relativism is a defence mechanism to protect reason in capitalist society from its own emancipation, which is liable to undermine that society. Thus relativism is a symptom of a deep conflict between potentially emancipatory reason and the needs of the society that produced this reason. The result is a kind of "self-loathing".

And ultimately relativism is defeated not by an opposing doctrine but by its narrowness, meaning its inability to see the wider conditions of its own genesis, which is immanently revealed by negative dialectics when it (ND) shows that what relativism takes to be fundamental is actually derivative of an enveloping context.

Do you think Adorno talks about Marxism as if it were objectively true? If so, why? Given the terrible things done under Stalin during Adorno's lifetime, does it really make sense to read Adorno as a Marxist? Or, does criticality towards capitalism not imply Marxism?

This seems to be a tension inherent in the book; ND rejects abstract theorizing, why is Marxism the exception to this rule? Or, do you disagree that Marxism is theoretical and abstract?

The presence of the social whole in his thought ties things together. Without it, things in all their contradictory nature just don't make sense. Thus, the social whole is a valid inference. I admit, of course, that he nowhere deduces it. — Jamal

Ok, suppose "the social whole" is assumed as a means to tie things together. That could be a bit of a mistaken interpretation, uncharitable you might say, because it would represent it as something posited, or taken for granted. That would portray Adorno as having a system approach, guided by that intention of creating a whole, casting Adorno in the hypocritical light.

Notice however, if we pay close attention to the qualification in "preestablished whole", we can produce a slightly different interpretation. Instead of creating "the whole" with the intent of holding things together, we can say that "the whole" has been produced from observation and inductive reasoning. It is preestablished as an observed fact. But this implies that we ought to be able to analyze and judge the inductive reasoning involved in concluding the "preestablished whole".

I don't understand this interpretation. I mean, I can accept that Adorno inherited the very idea of a totality from Hegel, but he explicitly distinguishes it from Spirit. — Jamal

The problem is, that he can assert over and over, that his "preestablished whole" is distinct from "Spirit", which is the whole as established by Hegel, but if they are both taken for granted, and posited as a means to tie things together, to produce a philosophical system, then they are actually the very same thing. Then he falls into the category of hypocrite which the relativists get exposed as.

Notice also, that the subjective, intentional, act of assuming X for the sake of Y, where X represents the relationships between human beings, and Y represents the intent of the subject, is the essence of relativism by Adorno's description. Therefore the act of positing "Spirit" as absolute, is itself a hypocritical act, being relativistic. Then this act, by its nature, turns out to support the relativist position through what it demonstrates.

This is why I think it would be very important to determine how Adorno induces the "preestablished whole". Without appropriate inductive reasoning, "the whole" falls into that category of intent for the purpose of system, undermining Adorno's negative dialectics.

Or, does criticality towards capitalism not imply Marxism? — NotAristotle

Critical of capitalism is the larger category in relation to Marxism. Therefore the latter may imply the former, if the former is judged as an essential property of the latter, but the former does not imply the latter. .

Do you think Adorno talks about Marxism as if it were objectively true? — NotAristotle

Seems so. "In some sense" we might say; like any philosopher he'll take what he thinks is true and leave what he thinks is false, or even utilize what he thinks is interesting in a work for a new purpose even if it were false.

If so, why? Given the terrible things done under Stalin during Adorno's lifetime, does it really make sense to read Adorno as a Marxist? Or, does criticality towards capitalism not imply Marxism? — NotAristotle

One can believe that Karl Marx wrote a true description of the movements of capital as well as believe that Stalin did terrible things we should oppose.

The reason I'm reaching for Marx is because Adorno is using the language of Marx: Labour-power and exchange are central concepts to Capital.

I very much doubt that Adorno is not critical of Marx.

This seems to be a tension inherent in the book; ND rejects abstract theorizing, why is Marxism the exception to this rule? Or, do you disagree that Marxism is theoretical and abstract?

From my perspective, at least, I think of Marxism as a living philosophical tradition. It's theoretical, and concrete. It's a theory of the concrete conditions which is then supported through historical inference: Even if Stalin is bad Capitalism grows by seizing all property such that there's a class of people who own nothing but their own labor, and then exchanges through the market money for that labor, and then exploits that labor in order to grow wealth.

It occurs to me that rather than induction or deduction, there are two alternative ways of characterizing his reasoning: abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation) and transcendental argument. In fact, looking at the SEP entry for transcendental arguments, I notice the suggestion has been made that transcendental arguments are abductive rather than deductive as they are commonly taken to be. This means that abductive reasoning and transcendental argumentation might be two ways of describing the same process of reasoning.

In a transcendental argument you infer what must be the case for this fact, whatever it is, to be possible, and thereby determine its necessary conditions. In abductive reasoning you ask what hypothesis best explains the fact. You can see how these can go together.

So, I aim to answer this...

But this implies that we ought to be able to analyze and judge the inductive reasoning involved in concluding the "preestablished whole". — Metaphysician Undercover

...with a couple of examples of Adorno's reasoning.


1. The entrepreneur

Adorno begins with the fact of objectively necessary false consciousness: a capitalist must believe in a fair exchange between himself and the worker, even though this belief is objectively false. The transcendetal question is "What must be the case for this illusion to be—not just possible, but necessary?" Or "What must be the case for the maintenance of this paradox to be possible?" And here is where the abductive reasoning comes in to hypothesize the social whole as the best explanation, completing the transcendental argument by identifying the conditions. (Obviously this is just an outline)


2. Free time

Adorno gave a radio lecture entitled "Free Time" in 1969, published these days in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, among other places, and also available online on its own as a PDF. The fact to be explained is that free time, supposedly a realm of freedom, is experienced as boring, compulsory, and empty, e.g., obligatory hobbies, regimented vacations. The common views are either to shrug and say that's just what free time is like—an unproblematically mindless recovery from work; or to put it on the individual, who fails to make proper use of their free time, perhaps because people are just bad at leisure, or some such notion.

Here is where the immanent analysis begins, which identifies a contradiction, namely that free time is "shackled to its contrary" to the extent that it is experienced as unfreedom. The transcendental question then is "What must be the case for this specific, systematic perversion of free time to be possible? How can the state of freedom be experienced as a state of unfreedom?"

Reasoning abductively, the hypothesis that makes this fact intelligible is that free time is not an autonomous sphere as its name might suggest, but is entirely determined by the "totality of societal conditions," which holds sway outside work as much as in it, particularly since so-called free time is required by capital to maintain its workers. Free time is a "continuation of labor as its shadow".

Only people who have become responsible for themselves would be capable of utilizing their free time productively, not those who, under the sway of heteronomy [a kind of alienation], have become heteronomous to themselves.

The needs and impulses of individuals have been so thoroughly shaped by a society based on profit, control, and the "rigorous division of labor" that people are "heteronomous to themselves." They no longer know what authentic desire or freedom would feel like.


Adorno's work is full of such arguments or analyses, and the pattern is always the same: you start with a puzzling, painful, or contradictory fact about our experience, show the inadequacy of popular explanations, and then demonstrate that the fact becomes intelligible only when seen as a necessary consequence of the capitalist whole. Maybe this is what negative dialectics is in a nutshell.

Do you think Adorno talks about Marxism as if it were objectively true? If so, why? Given the terrible things done under Stalin during Adorno's lifetime, does it really make sense to read Adorno as a Marxist? Or, does criticality towards capitalism not imply Marxism?

This seems to be a tension inherent in the book; ND rejects abstract theorizing, why is Marxism the exception to this rule? Or, do you disagree that Marxism is theoretical and abstract? — NotAristotle

Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School were deeply affected by Stalinism. It was one of the things that convinced them that Marxism had to be revised. It was part of the catastrophic failure of socialism that critical theory was meant to help to fix.

What we do see in Adorno's work throughout his life is a commitment to (a) the Marxist theory of exploitation; (b) Marx's theory of commodity fetishism; and (c) the goal of emancipation. It does seem that Adorno treats these (the first two) unquestioningly as successful results of social science—and as fundamental and indispensable categories for a critical theory of society—in the same way as he takes for granted Freud's identification of the unconscious as the primary driver of behaviour.

But he rejects a few things too: (a) the inevitability of revolution and the teleology of history (Marx himself was ambivalent on this but it is certainly a feature of traditional Marxism); (b) the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and the gravedigger of capitalism; (c) techno-optimism: Marx and Marxism celebrated man's mastery of nature far too much for Adorno's taste; (d) economic determinism and the base-superstructure model, far too simplistic for Adorno.

At this point I'm not going to look at why he felt he could rely so completely on those Marxian theories that he did agree with, without ever arguing for them, but it's a fair question.

I think you are right that we can extract some positives from Marxist theory, especially the concern over fair and safe work conditions as well as the denunciation of exploitative working conditions. I would also agree that Adorno is critical of Marx, but only insofar as he is a revisionist of Marxist thought. As I understand it, mass culture and media play a much more important role for Adorno than they did for Marx.

I look at communist regimes historically and they are all terrible, so that is why I am wary of Marxist thought whether it is from Marx himself or even from Adorno. The promise of utopia always seems to lead to hell on earth.

Do you think exploitation of labor is definitive of capitalism or could extra capital be achieved through other avenues like technological development?

Thanks for delineating some of the contours of Adorno's thinking.

I see irony in the way Marxism purports to have pierced the veil of ideology. Yet, it presents itself as non-ideological, when precisely some of the features you mentioned (revolution of the proletariat, economic determinism, superstructure of culture etc.) seem to me to be highly ideological and that precisely because they purport to be non-ideological.

I do think at some point we may have to confront these theories (Freudian thought, Marxist thought) that weave throughout Adorno's writing and ask whether the reliance on them contradicts the overall aim of negative dialectics or if they serve a wider literary objective.

Lastly, I will just comment on the prose itself. I find it remarkably difficult. Maybe even intentionally opaque? There are a lot of allusions I do not understand and the method of expression is not in any way explicit or easy to elucidate. Still, I appreciate the level of interpretation the text allows because of its complexity.

Do you think exploitation of labor is definitive of capitalism or could extra capital be achieved through other avenues like technological development? — NotAristotle

I don't think these are at odds, exactly.

We have to be careful here because Marx's use of "exploitation" is specialized to capitalism. For instance we might easily say that slavery exploits labor, but it is not, for that, capitalism. Capitalism as Marx describes exploits labor through the free exchange of labor: that's the important part. The way the bourgeois economist describes our economy is due to the perspective of the owner: attempting to build a firm which produces goods and services and turns a profit requires theorizing things like firms, supply, demand, and exchange which in turn requires a state to enforce these claims to property.

So yes the exploitation of labor is part of capitalism, but it's a particular kind of exploitation: Slavery, in the Marxist sense, is primitive accumulation -- our tribe took your tribes shit and made you into slaves so we now have more wealth. Greece's economy was a slave economy which exploited labor, but not as a capitalist does.

Also it's something of a Marxist point to note how technological development is part of the process of the economy in general (and therefore also a part of capitalism in particular): The whole base-superstructure notion is basically to note that as technology changes so do our societies. Capitalism required more than the worker-boss relationship, but needs to expand into Rents to absorb surplus-value, and also must expand railroad systems (or systems of transportation, generally) so that the world may even be able to be treated as an open market where we can all trade and make different firms more competitive depending on their environment (and thereby make the market more efficient).

So, yes, capital can be achieved through other avenues, but exploitation and the development of technology aren't at odds with one another. If anything the development of automation has allowed for an increase in the rate of exploitation as manufacturing centers drift across this global economy: With automation you can hire fewer workers and have a labor-reserve which depresses wages of those who have a job because there's another person waiting to take your place.

This isn't to say automation is bad, though. It's the social relationship of capitalism which puts automation in the service of exploitation (rather than in the service of freeing us from labor).


****

I can understand being wary of Marxist thought. We're pretty much conditioned, in the states at least, from a young age to have negative associations with the USSR, Marxism, and all that rot. We are taught it's bad because Stalin was evil (List all the Big Bads here as you wish like Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh: but note that Pol Pot was deposed by a Marxist state)

But here we're just using the words of a philosopher and not building a worker's paradise. Instead we are describing the hell we see before our very eyes: the hell of capitalism.

What would nonexploitative labor look like? And do you maintain that such labor is necessarily inconsistent with a capitalist system? (And if so, please explain why this inconsistency)

Lastly, I will just comment on the prose itself. I find it remarkably difficult. Maybe even intentionally opaque? There are a lot of allusions I do not understand and the method of expression is not in any way explicit or easy to elucidate. Still, I appreciate the level of interpretation the text allows because of its complexity. — NotAristotle

This is something that Adorno put a lot of effort into, so basically yes, it’s meant to be hard. Adorno was deeply suspicious of the fixation on “clarity” seen especially in Anglo philosophy. He thought that clarity, under the guise of neutrality and transparency, delivered pre-digested ideas along pre-defined rails, and he thought this was part of the “administered society,” representing the bureaucratization of philosophy and individual insight. He believed that clarity was conformity.

He also saw clarity and accessibility as features of the culture industry: they enable cultural products to be easily standardized and therefore commodified, and they encourage passive consumption. His prose style rebels against this; I think we can agree that he succeeded in preventing his work from being easily packaged and disseminated in mass culture. And it's certainly the case that you can't read ND without working through it—for me, I can't understand a passage of ND until I begin to type it in my own words or respond, in writing, sentence by sentence. Just reading it like a regular book is impossible.

Personally, I think he was an amazing prose stylist and I even enjoy the particularly difficult prose of ND, precisely for the way it makes me slow down and then rewards me with startling insights and arguments once I've distentangled it.

BUT! It should be said that ND is particularly hard compared to his other work, and this might be a translation issue. It's standard in scholarship now to use the Redmond translation, as we are doing, but it's clunky and inelegant in a way that I suspect the original is not, and it hasn't even been properly published—no decent official English translation, in proper book form, is available.

In contrast, the prose of Minima Moralia is often stunningly brilliant.

For a much cuddlier and more conversational Adorno, his lectures are good, as are his popular essays and radio broadcasts.

Anyway, in this thread I've already said a few things about his prose, which you might find interesting:

as we approach ND itself, I am thinking about Adorno's style of presentation. It's a fact that his style is very deliberate, something he was always conscious of, and something he was forever pre-occupied by (because he didn't separate form and content). I think it will help to know how to read him, which is not always a matter of finding an answer to "what is he trying to say?" at the level of a paragraph but of keeping multiple descriptions, analogies, etc. in mind over the course of the work.

One aspect is his attitude to definition. It's a principle of his method that in his writing he avoids definitions of concepts, instead circling around them, or approaching them from different angles. (More than that, I suppose he does not even regard them as fixed points that can be honed in on)

Even though these lectures were recorded, not written, I think we've already seen this principle at work. We've seen him going over similar ground repeatedly, never satisfied with a single metaphor or encapsulation. — Jamal

But this section goes deeper than that, since he is talking about his own mode of expression, i.e., it's meta. Expression in language that aims to uncover reality in the way described above should itself enact dialectics in its mode of expression. Thus, we get Adorno's way of writing: style as substance, form as content (I'm glad we've finally got back to this topic, which I think I mentioned on the first page of this thread). Rather than obscurantism, this is the fullest stringency (EDIT: or maybe better put, the best balance between expression and stringency). He does not want to explain and describe, but to performatively expose. The same applies to negative dialectics as applies to screenwriting: show don't tell. — Jamal

Before diving into a more comfortable rewording, it's worth stopping to wonder why he wrote like this. It is initially quite annoying. I don't think it's an intentionally inflated pomposity or pretentiousness, although it reads a bit like it is. It's a serious attempt to performatively express content in form. Difficult substance, difficult style. The idea, I suppose, is that the mode of clarity and linearity would be too comfortable to elicit proper intellectual engagement. Personally, I'm 50/50 on this issue. Sceptical but also sympathetic. In a way, this kind of writing is easier than a plainer kind of style, because you don't have to constantly remind yourself to slow down as you do when reading, say, Plato; it's forced on you. — Jamal

Adorno's style is mimesis in action, showing in the form of his writing the real contradictions of the world. — Jamal

What would nonexploitative labor look like? And do you maintain that such labor is necessarily inconsistent with a capitalist system? (And if so, please explain why this inconsistency) — NotAristotle

Democratic ownership and control over the means of production such that surplus-value is directed by all of us rather than for private benefit, or even potentially not generated at all: Rather than getting what you're paid you'd get what you've earned. (In a slogan: Communism is free time and nothing else)

So, yes, insofar that the private ownership of the workplace is capitalism then this would be inconsistent with capitalism.

And, really, it's not hard to see given the history of the labor movement and socialism. The only reason jobs are what they are now isn't because the captains of industry are wisely leading us to a better tomorrow, but because workers organized fought and died for it; and as we see labor unions becoming dismantled by the state we also see that wages stagnate with increases in productivity.

So there really does seem to be something to Marx's description in the world we inhabit even if we do not have an alternative answer.

It's not that Stalin was evil so we can't think about Marx's ideas, but rather it's important to think about his ideas because they properly describe the world we inhabit. We don't live in the USSR. There are lessons there, of course, but it's not relevant to using Marx's ideas in thinking about our world.