It's actually a very subtle difference of interpretation, with significant consequences. First, consider all those different connotations of "ideology" which you provided. Think about things like " a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class". Now, do you consider ideology to be a feature of the individual human being's mind (subjective), or do you consider it to be a feature of a specific society (objective)? I think you will accept the latter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, it’s both, and anyway it doesn’t follow that Adorno puts ideology on the side of essence. It’s a feature of society, but he makes a distinction within society:

subjective modes of behaviour in modern societies are dependent on objective social structures — p100

Ideology is in the realm of "subjective modes of behaviour" as that which is produced by the objective social structures (again with the caveat that this is too static a picture, a shorthand for a dialectical process).

Further, the following phrase is easy to pass over, but really needs to be seriously considered: "the distinction between essence and appearance is not simply the product of metaphysical speculation, but that it is real". That line sets the context, of the distinction between what is real (the true essence) as the social constructs, and what is appearance, as metaphysical speculation. — Metaphysician Undercover

My brain hurts.

He makes no such distinction "between what is real (the true essence) as the social constructs, and what is appearance, as metaphysical speculation."

I believe that it is one of the essential motifs ... of philosophy – that the distinction between essence and appearance is not simply the product of metaphysical speculation, but that it is real.

By "real" he means actually operative in the world. He does not mean to align it merely with essence. And he is saying that if you do philosophy you should believe that there is a distinction between appearance and essence, that it is not just an artifact of the conceptual or linguistic paraphernalia of metaphysical speculation as claimed in various ways by phenomenologists, logical positivists, pragmatists, and ordinary language philosophers. He is alluding to contemporaneous philosophies, explicitly going against the fashion of collapsing or rejecting the distinction.

Don't forget though, that what he is promoting, is metaphysical speculation. Not any speculation, but that which is "deep", as opposed to shallow. So he is promoting an aspect of appearance (metaphysical speculation), which extends right to the essence, by being deep. This would be the boundary, where our metaphysical speculations about where the boundary lies, do not always line up exactly with the real boundary. And so it is with ideology itself, it may not itself be properly representative. And that's where the facade comes in, where ideology misleads the subjects. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno is not promoting metaphysical speculation; he mentions it in reference to the tradition of dogmatic metaphysics attacked by those 20th century philosophies I just mentioned. His position is ambivalent on metaphysics. What he says about Impressionist paintings is the key:

you need only to look at such a picture with what I would call a modicum of metaphysical sensitivity for the situation to become quite clear: you will perceive something like a certain absence of sensuous happiness, a certain melancholy of sensuous happiness arising out of the picture before you; or else the expression of mournfulness from a realm that presents itself as a sphere of pleasure; or else the endless tensions that exist between the world of technology and the residues of nature that technology has invaded. . . . All such problems are really metaphysical problems, and they will become readily visible in the greatest paintings by Manet, whom I regard as a metaphysical painter of the first rank, but equally in those of Cézanne or Claude Monet and some of Renoir’s. I think that something similar happens in philosophy too. Consider, for example, the way in which Nietzsche resists the positive introduction of any so-called metaphysical ideas. The violence with which his thought rejects such attempts shows much greater respect for metaphysical ideas than writings where they are celebrated in the style of the Wilhelminian commemorative speeches ... — p105

Thus he embraces metaphysics more in a negative sense than intended by the term "metaphysical speculation".

On the other hand, I don't really object to your conclusion in that paragraph.

Then he exposes the common misunderstanding between the immediate and the mediate. This common misunderstanding places behaviour of the subjects as immediate. This is because we see ourselves as acting subjects, interacting with others, and the empirical experience of human subjects is prioritized. So this behaviour is perceived as immediate, and the structure of society is apprehended as something which develops from these subjective interactions, therefore the social structure is understood as mediated by the interactions of the subjects. That is the illusion. Adorno proposes that a proper understanding requires that we turn this around, and we see social structure as the immediate, and the interactions of the subjects as the mediated. This puts priority onto the social structure, making it the cause of subjective interactions. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. As I say, they are each dialectically intertwined and mediated with and by the other. It sometimes seems that he goes along with the base-superstructure model in Marxist sociology, but the dialectical element is the crucial difference. There is no general priority (it depends what you're looking at).

As for the abolition of human beings, here is Adorno:

If anyone objects that I am lending support to the claim that in a sense this [human beings becoming ideology] would mean the abolition of human beings, I can only reply by saying in good American: that’s just too bad.

And here is you:

What this passage means, is that if anyone objects to what he is doing, claiming that he supports the abolition of human beings, then that's just too bad (Indicated by the qualification of "good American" as —used in an ironic way to show that one is not sorry or does not feel bad about something). — Metaphysician Undercover

He doesn't claim that he supports the abolition, but rather supports the claim of abolition.

And very generally, fascism and Stalinism engendered in Adorno (and Horkheimer) a strong antipathy to collectivism and the lack of real individuality, and I think your interpretation goes against that.

Nice interpretation, very subtle and deep. The only defect I can see is that it's wrong.

I might elaborate later, although I fear I'd just be repeating myself. In a nutshell, first you reify what is meant to be dialectical and fail to see that both essence and appearance are mediated; and then you completely misread Adorno by saying he is "claiming that he supports the abolition of human beings," which flatly contradicts what he says.

Generally as you say I'm at an advantage because I had already read some Adorno before this started, so for what it's worth: unless I've been completely misunderstanding him the whole time, your interpretation couldn't possibly be true.

The blind leading the blind? :wink:

Heh. I've heard. In fact I think I've put off reading him so long probably because I heard he disliked Jazz, at which point I thought "No man could be a good thinker and dislike Jazz" — Moliere

Yeah I haven't even read his writing on jazz and only know about it from secondary sources. I've probably avoided it for similar reasons as you. But I seem to be able to compartmentalize his thought and pick and choose.

There we go. If that sounds right I think it all clicked for me finally. — Moliere

Yes, sounds right. Although Adorno would no doubt caution you against being satisfied with anything clicking into place.

I think expressions of elitism automatically incur some kind of disdain from me — Moliere

Then I suggest you avoid what he says about movies and jazz :grin:

Unless you really hate movies and jazz. Me, I think he just got it wrong, and didn't really know what he was talking about. Or, more charitably, he was talking about the most commercial stuff of the 30s through to the 50s and wasn't aware of the rest.

It occurred to me that his attitude can also be seen in the idea of a culture industry: the target is not "mass culture," which might imply a culture native to and produced by the masses, but rather a top-down industry assimilating the leisure, thoughts and desires of the masses.

I find myself conflicted often with his various remarks on happiness, and ideology, and especially the use of the term "bleating" -- reminds me of Nietzsche's disdain for the herd. — Moliere

I know what you mean about “bleating,” but with Adorno it definitely isn't disdain for the herd, at least not in this case:

By bleating I don’t just mean the cry of ‘Yeah! Yeah!’9 The latter, I would say, is an open and, if I may call it that, a relatively self-aware form of bleating, and as such is comparatively innocent. I am thinking rather of resistance to all those disguised and more dangerous forms of bleating of which I hope I have given you a few examples in my Jargon of Authenticity. — p107

So the bleaters are Heidegger, religious existentialists, and romantic conservatives.

I often make a distinction between elitism and snobbery, such that elitism is in a sense democratic (high art and philosophy is open to whoever is interested) and snobbery is bigoted and essentialist (those Others are constitutively unable to partake in high art and great philosophy). According to this scheme, I see Adorno as an elitist, but not a snob.

So where he seems to be disdainful of what is popular — not here particularly, but definitely in other places — it’s out of an elitism that works as a kind of sympathy for the benighted and suffering masses.

EDIT: The endnote for “Yeah! Yeah!” reveals that he said it in English, suggesting he was mockingly alluding to the American habit of relentless affirmation and cheerleading. No doubt this really got on his nerves and factored into his elitism, but even so, he says it’s comparatively innocent, so he’s not overflowing with contempt, Nietzsche-style.

I think I can get used to it too. And I prefer accuracy to readability. — Moliere

Yes, me too.

Since he designates the structures of society as "essence", and the behaviour of individuals as "appearance", then we have to assign priority to ideology, as an essential aspect. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand this interpretation of ideology as essence, since it undermines his whole point about breaking through the facade:

In other words, the sphere of immediacy that we are all concerned with in the first instance, and which we are accordingly tempted to regard as a matter of absolute certainty, is actually the realm of the mediated, the derived and the merely apparent, and hence of uncertainty. On the other hand, however, this appearance is also necessary, that is to say, it lies in the nature of society to produce the contents of the minds of human beings, just as it is the nature of society to ensure that they are blind to the fact that they mistake what is mediated and determined for actuality or the property of their freedom, and treat them as absolutes. It follows that since the immediate consciousness of human beings is a socially necessary illusion, it is in great measure ideology. — p100

On one side he has “the nature of society” and on the other side “the contents of the minds of human beings”. Essence and appearance, respectively. (That’s too static and dichotomous a formula, but you get the idea)

This makes the actions of resistance, assigned to the philosopher, non essential, therefore not-necessary, and free in that sense. — Metaphysician Undercover

Non-essential to not-necessary looks like a non-sequitur. Adorno seems to me to say explicitly that the appearances are necessary (“socially necessary illusion”).

But maybe I’m misunderstanding you.

Notice, "that's just too bad" in this context, means something like 'tough luck for you, that's what I'm doing, and you won't be stopping me'. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, and what he’s doing is claiming that, in a sense, human beings are being abolished. I don't see any support for the interpretation that he is promoting the abolition itself. It’s not “human beings are being abolished, and that's tough luck,” but rather “I’m claiming that human beings are being abolished, and that's tough luck.”

That said, some have interpreted Adorno generally as an anti-humanist along the lines of Althusser. In my view, all of his supposed anti-humanism is critique of the ideology of humanism, and he retains a negative humanism, along the lines of his negative utopia and negative happiness. That is, the capacity of the subject to resist ideology remains.

Don't worry, I'm probably wrong.

What 'that list' are you referring to here? — unimportant

The one I linked to earlier:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1h7l2qk/good_leftist_critiques_of_identity_politicswokeism/

I don't think you would read that in any of the canon texts. — unimportant

Doesn't seem very objectionable to me. I'd make a couple of minor changes but I think it's basically right. It is not as it stands an endorsement of identity politics.

but there's still this element of desire as a lack that I generally think is a common but wrong way to think on happiness since I don't think happiness is something that even can be fulfilled or pursued so much as worked towards by stopping doing what we think will make us happy and starting doing what will actually make us happy. But that's not as tragic as Adorno's philosophy — Moliere

That doesn't seem all that far from his view actually.

Yeah, I've read the prologue and a page or two of the introduction and it just doesn't feel like a good translation. I have no way of knowing if it is or not, but it just feels like it isn't.

Because Minima Moralia shows that he's actually a great writer, suggesting it's the different translators that make the difference.

On the other hand, an Adorno scholar I was reading recently (can't recall which one) said that MM is his best work in terms of prose quality, and ND is not so good.

So I don't know. I think I can get used to it, and it's not as difficult as some other stuff I've read, but I might have a look at the original English translation by Ashton to see if it reads any better (but even if it does this doesn't mean it's as accurate)

No, theory is great! It's the practical stuff that's boring.

While an exciting idea, anarchism in practice is, well, boring. Far from what window-smashing insurrectionists are doing, it mostly takes the form of an extremely slow-moving and highly rule-bound process of collective deliberation. Anarchy, paradoxically, means more rules, not fewer, and more collective responsibility, not less. — David Flood

:yawn: :wink:

I think Zizek once (probably more than once) complained about people who advocate direct democracy, saying he would rather write books and watch movies than discuss who's going to collect the bins next week.

Are there any bulwarks on the contemporary Left that are seeing through this? — unimportant

Well, that list on Reddit is made up mostly of leftist thinkers, so there's a fairly strong contingent. Zizek is another prominent leftist critic of wokeism.

But if you're asking if any left-wing groups, movements, parties etc., take a stand against identity politics, I don't know off the top of my head. I'm completely out of the loop. I guess the Communist Party of the Russian Federation doesn't count :grin:

Identity politics appears to have polluted all these so called far left movements.

Is it not a product of capitalist thinking? I am reminded of the old term of spiritual materialism for religious epithets. This could be called identity materialism and a by product of the rot of capitalism. — unimportant

Indeed, there are leftist critiques of identity politics that make similar points, tying it to neoliberalism. One example:

Remember when we were supposed to celebrate the first black president, even though he disappointed the hopes of every progressive who campaigned for him? Remember when supporters of Bernie Sanders were relentlessly tarred as sexist (and racist, somehow) for opposing Hillary Clinton?

This style of politics continued to define liberalism during the Donald Trump administration. While women lost abortion rights and right-wing men gained power, liberals cheered the spectacle of prominent liberal men — mostly in media and cultural institutions — losing their jobs for sexual harassment. Land acknowledgments became prevalent in corporate and academic settings, even as the construction of pipelines on indigenous lands continued apace. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the police, many were disappointed by how little changed for poor and working-class black Americans: the most tangible outcome of the widespread street protests of 2020 was that corporate America put more black people on its boards.

This was neoliberal identity politics, an elite discourse that centered identities as a way of undermining a robust, effective class politics. Of course, race, gender, and sexuality matter and are salient political concepts in the fight for human freedom. But elites used neoliberal identity politics to undermine broad human solidarities, divide the Left, and advance policies that benefited only the 1 percent. Because bigotry is still a real problem, many good progressives would fall for it every time. — Liza Featherstone

If that’s too shallow, I found some good stuff listed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1h7l2qk/good_leftist_critiques_of_identity_politicswokeism/

EDIT: Come to think of it, your mention of religion reminds me of Hans-Georg Moeller's view that "wokeism" is a "civil religion". His YouTube channel is pretty good. (He definitely comes out of the tradition of left-wing philosophy, btw)

If I can't dance, it's not my revolution — BC

It's a good line. I hadn't heard it before. And it's good to set against the impression that anarchism is ... kinda boring.

A couple of other things I found interesting in lecture 10:

I believe that I need only remind you of those who are quiet in the land for you to realize where this kind of depth is leading, namely, to a pure evasion compared to which we have to stick with Hegel’s insight, and indeed Goethe’s, that depth does not involve immersion merely in the subject which, once it comes to reflect on itself, discovers nothing but an ‘empty depth’, but rather that depth is inseparable from the strength to externalize oneself. If a person is deep, he will be able to make that depth a reality in what he does and what he produces. In contrast to that, the depth a person as an isolated subject is aware of may serve to enable him to think of himself as belonging to an elite, and indeed a declining and endangered elite, but it will have no substance. For if it had substance it could be expressed as an act of externalization. The individual who cultivates himself as an absolute and as the guarantor of depth, and who imagines that he can discover meaning in himself, is a mere abstraction, a mere illusion vis-à-vis the whole. Inevitably, the meanings that he then discovers in himself as an absolute being-for-himself are in reality not his own absolute possession but merely a collective residue, the dregs of the universal consciousness. And this is merely an older form of debasement, I would say, one that differs from its present incarnation only in that it has not quite kept pace with current forms of debasement. So what I believe is that the mark of depth nowadays is resistance, and by this I mean resistance to the general bleating. — p106-107

As a deracinated, debased subject myself, I resemble that remark.

I like his attitude to happiness:

What I am saying, then, is that this concept of depth, which amounts to a theodicy of suffering, is itself shallow. It is shallow because, while it behaves as if were opposed to the shallow, rather mundane desire for sensual happiness, in reality it does no more than appropriate worldly values which it then attempts to elevate into something metaphysical. — p104

The idea that happiness is shallow is itself shallow.

In arguing that the great Impressionists were superior to self-consciously metaphysical painters:

you will perceive something like a certain absence of sensuous happiness, a certain melancholy of sensuous happiness arising out of the picture before you ... — p105

He's not saying that sensuous happiness is shallow and Impressionist paintings are great because they don't depict it, but rather that, in parallel with what I was saying about utopia, they negatively raise the prospect of true happiness to consciousness in the form of longing and melancholoy.

Then at the end:

This speculative surplus that goes beyond whatever is the case, beyond mere existence, is the element of freedom in thought, and because it is, because it alone does stand for freedom, because it represents the tiny quantum of freedom we possess, it also represents the happiness of thought. It is the element of freedom because it is the point at which the expressive need of the subject breaks through the conventional and canalized ideas in which he moves, and asserts himself. — p108

I think we see the influence of Nietzsche here, and I see a parallel between the dismissive "deep" attitude to a supposedly shallow happiness, an attitude which is itself shallow, and the pompous aloofness of some philosophy, especially what we might call fan-philosophy (on the model of fan-fiction), that has contempt for the body.

Adorno is not afraid to stand up for happiness and pleasure. But elsewhere he criticizes the ideology of happiness:

The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously down stairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. — Minima Moralia 38

Note the extra-Adornian claim I've put in bold (Minima Moralia was written right at the end of the war).

In the same work he has an analysis of happiness that I find true to life:

To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity. — Minima Morali 72

I have at times thought to myself, "in the future I'm going to think back on this moment as a happy one, so I should try to raise this happiness, which in the normal run of things will only become apparent later, to consciousness in the here-and-now." Now I'm in that future, I think back on those moments and mainly just remember my effort to be consciously happy, so I'm not sure if I really was happy and the memory of this conscious effort is obscuring it, or if I really wasn't happy and that's why I can only remember that conscious effort. This is my punishment for sinning against happiness.

Something I found interesting in this lecture is the connection of speculation to depth, and thereby speculation to the appearance/essence distinction. Part of me wonders if it is better to read it as "essence" since he makes the remark about how Marx was enough of a Hegelian to maintain essence in his philosophy, but I'm not sure. Either way I can see avoiding debates on essentialism is a good idea :D -- I'm just thinking out loud on how to interpret him. — Moliere

Yes, good point. Preserving "essence" importantly traces his use of the legacy of Hegel and Marx.

So a quick summary as I understand it: Philosophy is resistance to the facts as they appear. It engages in speculation in order to probe the depths of the phenomena, and while Adorno emphasizes that this is never a complete process it's something that philosophy must do in order to obtain depth, or even be a worthwhile philosophy. He makes some notes about how there's a false depth which is bound up with suffering such that expressions of happiness are taken as a mark of shallowness, and Adorno notes how this is to miss depth for what depth is about. Depth expresses human suffering rather than says "I am suffering, so I am wise" -- analogy to the artists who give impressions, and thereby were more metaphysical painters than the ones who painted explicit scenes of people "touching the source". — Moliere

You have a talent for concision. :up:

What he says is that subjective behaviour of human beings is just the appearance, while the objective social structure which in a sense is the cause of that behaviour, is the essence. So what we take as the immediate, subjective behaviour, is really the mediated. He turns around the common perspective. Then, he says that this perspective, which we commonly hold, of the immediacy of consciousness, is just appearance, and actually an illusion. Further, this illusion is "socially necessary", so it is ideology.

I would interpret this as similar to Plato's noble lie. The idea of the immediacy of consciousness, and priority of the subjective human existence, is set up by the social structures, as an ideology of deception, because it hides from the individual subject, the reality that the individual being is just an extension of the true essence, which is society.

So, when he says that human beings are ideology, I think he means that the idea of individuality, that we are distinct individual human beings with that sort of freedom, is ideology. So, human beings are ideology. Further, I think he says that this ideology needs to be abolished, because it is an "inhumanity". — Metaphysician Undercover

You're quite close to my own idea of ideology, but your interpretation differs from mine at critical points.

First, I think you're missing that Adorno is noting a historical degradation:

It follows that since the immediate consciousness of human beings is a socially necessary illusion, it is in great measure ideology. And when I said in my lecture on society ... that I regarded it as the signature of our age that human beings were becoming ideology, then this is precisely what I meant. — p100

It's not that subjectivity is just ideology, but that it's becoming ideology. He marks a contrast between the era in which the ideology of liberal humanism had something real, or emancipatory, about it; and the late twentieth century, in which it has been entirely hollowed out. My way of putting this was to say that ideology has become all-pervasive due to the total absorption of the masses into the system by means of bureaucracy, all-encompassing commodification, mass media and the culture industry.

The liberal humanism of the Enlightenment was a force of emancipation: from the domination of religion and the traditional feudal network of obligation. Certainly, it was (and still is) ideology in its justification of the rights of property and of capitalist exploitation by the appeal to free and equal exchange and so on, but even so it represented the subject's effort to resist domination. It had this potential because it was produced by real changes in social relations, that is, it was not merely a lie.

I think Adorno is a self-consciously Enlightenment thinker in that he remains wedded to this emancipatory potential of the subject while remaining relentlessly critical, even going so far as to turn the Enlightenment resistance to domination back on itself to expose its fundamental contradictions and tendencies towards domination. Incidentally, I'm tempted to say he was the last Enlightenment thinker: after him you get the domesticated liberalism of Habermas and Rawls on one side (and more recently, in the popular sphere, the triumphalism of Pinker's Enlightenment Now); and postmodernism on the other. [EDIT: But I suppose Zizek carries on the tradition].

So, human beings are ideology. Further, I think he says that this ideology needs to be abolished, because it is an "inhumanity". — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is a crucial misinterpretation. Look at what he says:

If anyone objects that I am lending support to the claim that in a sense this would mean the abolition of human beings, I can only reply by saying in good American: that’s just too bad.

He is not lending support to the abolition of human beings (in the sense of human subjectivity), but to the claim that human beings are being abolished. He doesn't mean he thinks it's a good thing; he means that we should not not be afraid to point it out. This is backed up by the comments immediately following:

By this I mean that this abolition is being brought about not by the inhumanity of the idea
that describes it [the idea that human beings are being abolished], but by the inhumanity of the conditions to which this idea refers [late capitalism]. And if you will permit me to make a personal remark, it seems to me very questionable for people to take offence at statements that go against their own beliefs, however justified and legitimate these beliefs may be, simply because they find such statements uncomfortable ... — p101

The statement that human beings are being abolished makes people uncomfortable, but the abolition of potentially critical and emancipatory subjectivity, though a very bad thing, is real and we have to face up to it.

Pretty much. I'm just saying I might skim read the rest in one go and write a post collecting a few thoughts about what's there, just before starting ND.

LND lecture 10

In this lecture he talks about essence vs. appearance, philosophical depth, and reaffirms the importance of negation. He's circling around concepts already introduced, trying new ones, especially to elaborate on his version of speculation.

The basic thrust of the lecture is to argue for a philosophy that smashes through the facade of appearances.

He clears the ground by rejecting the traditional quest for absolute certainty. Oddly, he seems to associate this with positivism. I think he does this because he thinks the latter, in condemning thought that goes beyond facts, functions in the same way as the demand for certain foundations. In both cases, one supposedly needs an established ground before one can philosophize legitimately.

This brings him to appearance vs. essence, which we can think of as appearance vs. reality so as to remove any hints of essentialism: the essence behind the appearance is not anything transcendent, but rather the form of something which is specific to the conditions—usually, of course, social and historical conditions.

He is committed to maintaining the centrality of this distinction, because of ideology. In case there's any confusion, Adorno always uses this term in the Marxian sense:

Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory or inconsistent experience.

The word is used with a wide variety of connotations, even among Marxists; Terry Eagleton, in his Ideologies, lists a range of meanings:

[*] the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
[*] a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
[*] ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
[*] false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
[*] systematically distorted communication;
[*] that which offers a position for a subject;
[*] forms of thought motivated by social interest;
[*] identity thinking;
[*] socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power;
[*] the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
[*] action-oriented sets of beliefs;
[*] the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
[*] semiotic closure;
[*] the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
[*] the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality;

Marxists seek to subject all ideology to critique, uncovering the internal contradictions in an ideology and exposing the social interests expressed by it. — marxists.org

"Smashing through the facade" and "blasting open the phenomena" are ways of describing philosophy's attempt to uncover the social reality behind appearances, and the method is the critique of ideology in the context of a new epistemology, i.e., negative dialectics.

Then he says something strange: human beings are becoming ideology, and in a sense this would mean the abolition of human beings. (p.100-101)

I think what he means is that in modern industrial capitalism, supported as it is by a culture industry, ideology is now all-pervading and there is little space left for independence of thought and action. Human beings have the potential to be spontaneous, to be free, to question prevailing beliefs, and to resist compulsion—and to some extent they have at times realized these potentials. But now, subjectivity is a standardized construct of ideology rather than the source of freedom and independence as it was in the Enlightenment era.

I think this is even easier to see now than it was in the sixties. Individualism seems to remain strong, and the need to form an identity that expresses one's "true self" is widely felt, and yet the resulting identities are standardized, not unique, and even nonconformity is comformist. In consumer capitalism, individuality is reduced to one's choice of car. And now, what is persistently framed as self-actualization is in fact the curation of a public profile whose features and limits are determined by social media trends and expectations, and algorithmic validation.

For some, the figure of the entrepreneur is the paradigm of individuality, but as such a paradigm it is just a standard template, produced as a by-product of the market. The meaning of autonomy shrinks within the bounds of capital, in which entrepreneurship seems to be the only road to self-actualization and autonomous engagement with the world.

Resistance seems pointless, because resistance itself is branded. The film Barbie was hailed all over the place as "subversive" and yet its feminist and anti-corporate critiques functioned, very deliberately, as marketing for Mattel. But the people who said it was subversive knew all that, so what were they thinking? Similar to autonomy, the meaning of "subversive" has shrunk to a signal.

But what about the "abolition" of human beings? He did say "in a sense," and the sense I think he intended was that there is a qualitative change in the concept and experience of being human. If the human being had once been the authentic, autonomous individual of the Enlightenment and the classic era of the bourgeoisie (which despite everything was a promising avenue for human development), then such a creature was going extinct, replaced by administered puppets with manufactured desires, their resistance pre-emptively co-opted.

On the surface this might seem to rely on a transcendent essentialism of the human, but it's not that. It's a response to specific conditions rather than an appeal to an essential purity. Adorno thought the very ability to think critically was actually in danger, and that what had been the dominant conception of human beings, which was in itself a product of specific historical conditions but at the same time provided space for resistance, was losing its anchor in reality.

Incidentally, philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller, who has a pretty good Youtube channel, has an interesting theory about all this called Profilicity. He sees Adorno as stuck in the age of authenticity and doesn't seem to think the new age of profile-based identity is all that bad.

In profilicity, the old Nietzschean motto of authenticity is modified to “become who you wish to be seen as.” Applying the terminology of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, the shift from authenticity to profilicity can be described as a shift towards thoroughgoing “second-order observation.”

While in authenticity recognition, including self-recognition, is supposed to emanate from authentic selves who see what they see in the mode of individual first-order observation, in profilicity observation is more complex and is fascinated by observing how and what others observe. — Hans-Georg Moeller

Well, that was a lengthy digression. I'll probably post something else about this lecture soon.

NOTE: After I'm done with this lecture I'm going to skim over Adorno's notes for lectures 11-25 and bring things up here if I find them interesting. What I won't be doing do is reading "The Theory of Intellectual Experience," which is printed first alongside the notes to lectures 11-25, and then in full in an Appendix, because this is just the introduction to ND, and we'll be coming to that very soon.

An explanation is unhelpfully buried in the notes to lecture 10:

Since these notes [Adorno's notes for lectures 11-25] for the most part refer to specific pages of the ‘Introduction’ to Negative Dialectics, they are printed on the right-hand side of the page and juxtaposed to the related passage from the Introduction on the left-hand side. The Introduction is given in extenso in the Appendix of the present volume.

Don't be a bore. All I did was mock your post for its excessive length, and implied that reading Marx instead of reading your posts is a better use of time. I felt justified in doing so because of your pompous rudeness in response to a post rightfully criticizing your verbosity.

You got the wrong end of the stick.

A beginner won’t have the time to get through Marx if they feel obliged to read your rambling mega-posts.

However, both thinkers seem to be pointing to the same thing or structure, each from their own perspective, and each demand that it is recognized as the most important. — Pussycat

I used to think so too, but now I’m not so sure. Is one pointing at the same thing when one says it's unsayable as when one says that concepts are distorting it by the exclusion of particularity? One is pointing at the unrepresentable, while the other is pointing at the misrepresented. The former is transcendental, the latter is immanent. So their differing views on what to do about it can be seen as presuming different ontologies, i.e., a different "it".

Take the example of pain. Adorno would say that the pain scale does conceptual violence to pain by reducing particular suffering to numbers—the pain as experienced is nonidentical with pain as measured (this is not to say he was against its use in medicine). But Wittgenstein would not say that pain is unsayable or mystical; that one cannot “say” one's private experience is unproblematic, because that's not what language does.

I’ve alluded in this post to both early and late Wittgenstein without distinguishing them. It might matter but I’m not sure.

I'm wondering why anarchism is often placed closer to the far left than anywhere else. It's rather its own direction, a dismissal of all government. — Christoffer

I treat anarchism as left libertarianism unless it's otherwise qualified. Even though the word 'anarchy' literally just means without a leader or without government, the historical actuality is that anarchism as a political tradition is left-wing.

Welcome to the forum! Your post isn't low quality. It's honest and curious and serves as a great starting point to discuss a topic that is hotly contested.

I don't have much to offer in reply right now, so I'll leave that to others. I'll just say one thing: it's probably important to see that the differences between these two traditions of political thought are about both means and ends. That is, Marxists and anarchists disagree not only about the end goal (although quite often they agree about that, and call it communism), but also, I'd say primarily, about how to get there: can we overthrow the rulers and transition to a communistic society by taking control of the state, using the institutions, hierarchies, and powers of government, police, education, the legal system, etc.—as Marxists usually believe—or does it have to be a ground-up, grassroots revolution, as the anarchists believe.

A good place to start with anarchism is Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread. For a modern overview, I can recommend Ruth Kinna's Anarchism: A Beginner's Guide.

The reason I mention the above is while I get the sense that Adorno is hounded, I also get the sense that the positivists are wrong about science too :D -- science is a speculative endeavor. It doesn't just give you a list of facts, but explains the facts, orders them, predicts them and so forth. — Moliere

This is a very good point. It's too easy when reading Adorno (and Horkheimer) to interpret them as always viewing science as the enemy, but that's likely not the case, and what you say here is a bridge to a better way of thinking about it.

I don't think he mentions anyone, but examples of philosophy that tries to be art might be the novels of Sartre and Camus, late Heidegger, and maybe some of the more poetic Nietzsche like TSZ—Adorno was heavily influenced by Nietzsche but he might have been less keen on the arty stuff, but I'm not sure.

I wonder to what extent he means the bad kinds of philosophy and art that try to do what the other is doing -- does he have particular examples? — Moliere

As I recall (I don't have the lectures to hand right now) he mentions a few examples of art that tries to be philosophical. Mystical French and German painters whose work had self-consciously metaphysical themes (it's possible that's in lecture 10, not sure). But these days we can think of better examples, since the rise of conceptual art. It's in the name after all.

I went to a gallery once and in one room there was a bunch of bananas on the window sill. The label had the title "bananas, urine injected". Another, much earlier example is Duchamp's "Fountain". The artists are provoking philosophical questions.

EDIT: I posted that by mistake and I hadn't even got to philosophy that tries to be art. I'll put that in another post.

Isn't Adorno's non-identical similar to Wittgenstein's mystical, in that both resist conceptualization?

Wittgenstein, early at least, suggests quietism, while Adorno believes it will be revealed via negative dialectics. — Pussycat

That's roughly right as far as it goes, but I think it probably minimizes vast differences, between (a) the nonidentical and the mystical, and of course (b) what to do about it.

You seem to be both more radical and also more conservative than Adorno. You go further than him in your rejection of Enlightenment reason, but defang this critique in your appeal to the pre-modern and anti-rational. Adorno, modernist through and through, would say you are regressive, retreating from reason's critique of itself to irrational comforts.

So your defanged critique floats above history and flattens it, failing to perceive historical specificity while claiming to properly historicize events:

The common appeals to the Holocaust in these discussions, now the better part of a century later, start to strike one as properly historical in particular. If reason must lose its luster, or even its authority after the Holocaust, then it should have already shed these in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the conquistador conquests, the Mongol sweep across Asia, the aftermath of the sack that gave us the Book of Lamentations, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Adorno addresses this in Minima Moralia (maybe you're alluding to that, I'm not sure):

[...] neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the British colonial administration of India deliberately burst the lungs of millions of human beings with poison gas ...

One cannot bring Auschwitz into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states in terms of a mere gradual increase of horror, regarding which one preserves one’s peace of mind.

I think this Holocaust exceptionalism is justified. It was an industrialized, bureaucratic genocide, unimaginable without the means. Not impracticable without the means but literally unimaginable for pre-industrial people. It's not that Germans had always been wanting to exterminate the Jews but just didn't have the ability; it's that the shape, scale, and goal of the Holocaust was engendered by the means of its execution (bureaucratic classification and calculation, mass production, racial science, and instrumental rationality itself). This was unprecedented in both scale and character, I believe.

So the materialist critique that characterizes the Holocaust specifically as capitalism's collapse into barbarism seems a stronger one, and thus in a sense more radical, than a theological or existential critique; whereas you, I suppose, see the materialist critique as also implicated in reason-gone-wrong. The thing is, only reason can critique reason.

Well, this is not really the place for a more thorough debate about it, but it's given me a lot of food for thought. :up:

Right, and if you combine this with something like MacIntyre's view of traditions it could be the traditions themselves that are "rigid frameworks," but not necessarily! Calcified historical frameworks can also be the "matter" of such traditions, perhaps even a sort of material sickness frustrating the actualization of form (i.e. the tradition's attainment of rationality), sort of in the way that all animals are different and yet they all strive for life and form, and yet can be frustrated in this by material deficits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice. But...

One would be led to this view though only if one actually accepted the adage in PR that "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" (Hegel at his more Aristotlelian). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That’s precisely what Adorno will not accept. For him, the actual is the site of reason's failure, not its fulfillment.

You continue to resist the reciprocity, then. For Adorno, it's not a dualism between separate forces so much as a dialectical entanglement between reason and that which is in reason but often excluded by it to its detriment.

I think Adorno would agree that reason needs to broken free of rigid frameworks, but this is reason's way of correcting itself, not an irrationalist rebellion.

His view of utopia might shed some light on this. He thinks the utopian impulse, the sense that there is a way we could live that would be much better than the way we live now, is vitally important. But he also thinks that making it explicit can be bad: we should not turn it into a more concrete vision or programme.

Here's the point. Utopia as merely implicit or semi-secretly motivating can be characterized as negative, opposed to utopia as an explicitly asserted, positive vision. But utopia as such is also fairly characterized as positive, in that it is in opposition to total hopelessness, cynicism, and the bad society itself, whether or not it is implicit or explicit. It depends how you look at it.

EDIT: Adorno would prefer dystopian science fiction like Nineteen Eighty-Four to the utopian variety like Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the former is in a sense also utopian in that it shows us the opposite of what we want to happen, bringing to consciousness the latter. 1984 is negative (utopia negatively defined) and TNG is positive (utopia positively defined) but the utopia implied or negatively defined in 1984 is, as a utopia, itself positive, thus 1984 is in a sense positive too.

EDIT2: Question: would negative form, positive function be too reductive?

Now, Adorno proposes a rational/irrational relationship, and these two seem to be codependent. Of course the rational can be associated with the consciousness, but where does the irrational fit? My first inclination was to place it in the unconscious, as the source, or category, of the emotions, or something like that, a property of the body in a traditional Platonic dualism sense. But now I think what he means is that the irrational is right in consciousness, as a part of the intellect itself, the irrational part. This would describe this feature, what I called the artistic aspect, which manifests as the intuitive, the speculative, as a sort of irrational part of the intellect. It's irrational in the sense that it doesn't follow the habits and rules of rationality, yet it is still intellectual. It's creative, and creativity defies rationality. The rational part would get lost in itself without the irrational part to throw it a bone to sniff at, and the irrational part would make totally arbitrary decisions without the influence of the rational part. So the two are codependent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno problematizes the binary while also talking in terms of that binary. The first view of the irrational as associated only with the unconscious is the common view, in philosophy and in culture. The second view, that the irrational is part of consciousness, is (a) what Adorno is advocating as a deliberate philosophical practice, and (b) actually how reason works without our necessarily being aware of it. What Adorno thus advocates under the name of speculation is a self-aware use of the irrational within reason.

I think by the interpretation I gave above, we'd have to say that the speculative is negative, in the sense of being irrational. The speculative part is what negates the existing, the status quo, to get beyond it, then the rational reestablishes itself through some sort of synthesis. — Metaphysician Undercover

So according to the way I've put it above, the speculative is the intentional appropriation of the irrational by reason. Now, whether this is positive or negative is the issue that I feared was lapsing into insubstantial nonsense. Depending on how you look at it, each can be characterized as either positive or negative relative to the other, since each is such at all only relative to the other.

So I see what you mean, and you are right. And as I noted, Adorno would (might?) deny that speculation in this context is positive—he would deny the synthesis. But I still want to say that my framing is crucial (and this is my "how you look at it"): speculation in Adorno is positive or quasi-positive in that it aims to realize the potential of reason to get beyond facts and existing concepts. It's the positive bounce-back of reason's (negative) critique of existing concepts.

I'm not saying this way of looking at it ought to be privileged, only that it is crucial to see things in this way sometimes, so that we can see that there is more than negativity to critique—there is also an emergent reach for truth, or perhaps just, it is also the reach for truth.

And this aligns well with the traditional conception of speculative philosophy, which is characterized as dogmatic as opposed to sceptical/critical/pragmatic/etc—in the sense that it offers postive doctrines (but Adorno doesn't go that far, so his speculation remains also negative, and this is why I said it was a negative positivity).

The assignment of positive and negative is somewhat arbitrary, but only somewhat. There is a range of important historically sedimented meanings for these words that can be made use of or called into question deliberately, and that's what I take Adorno to be doing.

Whether or not it's unnecessarily confusing, I couldn't possibly comment (Adorno's reply: "No, it is necessarily confusing).

EDIT: Coming up for air now, the general point here is that without the positivity I've identified, Adorno is merely nihilistic or self-defeating.

I don't think it's lacking in substance. — Moliere

:smile:

Btw, Tuesday is when I'm catching up on 9 — Moliere

:cool: