Theodor W. Adorno

Dialectic of Enlightenment is the book Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote together in Californian exile from early 1942. It first appeared in 1944 as a mimeographed edition titled Philosophical Fragments, and in 1947 the Querido publishing house in Amsterdam issued it under its present title. Faced with the mass murder of the Jews and of other groups, the two authors asked on its first page why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.

“Enlightenment” here means not only the eighteenth-century movement but the whole long effort to free human beings from fear through the power of thought and to install them as masters of nature. The book’s two theses are that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” When early humans offered sacrifices to appease the powers of nature, the logic of exchange and calculation, putting one thing in place of another, was already at work; in modernity reason became “instrumental reason,” which calculates means and no longer asks about ends. Once this reason became the ruling form of industrial capitalism and bureaucracy, the world again looked like an inescapable fate. The authors read the scene in which Odysseus ties himself to the mast to hear the Sirens while his rowers have their ears stopped with wax as the prototype of the bourgeois individual: the moment people suppress the nature within themselves in order to preserve themselves, the purposes for which they live are emptied out.

The most widely read chapter is the one on the culture industry. In this chapter, which bears Adorno’s hand most clearly, film, radio and magazines “form a system.” “Industry” refers not to factory chimneys but to the standardization of cultural products and the rationalization of their distribution. Products made for the masses are planned to produce set effects such as excitement and distraction, and are valued for what they sell for rather than for their use. They therefore duplicate reality and idolize the existing order. Authentic art at least lets the contradictions of society speak, Adorno held, whereas the products of the culture industry drive out people’s desire to know and determine themselves and make their acting, thinking and feeling uniform.

The idea grew out of his first years in exile. On arriving in the United States in 1938 he took charge of the music section of the Princeton Radio Research Project led by Paul Lazarsfeld. In “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” written then, he argued that hit songs are judged by the profit they bring as much as by their quality, and that listeners passively take in isolated sensory effects without following the work as a whole. He was applying Marx’s “commodity fetishism,” the way relations between people come to look like relations between things, to music. He did not despise film as such: critics point to his regard for Charlie Chaplin and Fritz Lang. Adorno often said that he saw all his later major writings as excursuses to Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Negative Dialectics, published in 1966, is Adorno’s main philosophical work; he himself called it an “anti-system.” Its starting point is the dialectic of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel held that the knowing subject and the known object are mediated through each other, and on that ground criticized Immanuel Kant for setting the subject against the object with no connection between them. Adorno takes up this idea of mediation but stresses an inequality within it. The subject is by its nature always also an object, whereas the object can only be thought through the subject yet remains something other, not identical with it. Thought that refuses to recognize this deceives itself, he held, and merely confirms the powerlessness of mind before the wrong arrangement of reality.

The book is therefore called a “philosophy of the non-identical.” The non-identical is what concepts do not fully contain: the individual and the particular. Hegel had declared no interest in such things and labelled them “lazy existence”; Adorno defends precisely them. He distrusted “identifying thought,” which fits everything into the same frame through concepts that abstract from the concrete. Dialectical thinking objects when a concept presents a state of affairs as fixed, unchanging and always the same. Treat a person only as “labour power” or as “a case,” for example, and what is unique about that person disappears. Yet philosophy cannot think without concepts. Adorno therefore set the paradoxical task “to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.” This philosophy opposes both philosophies of origin, which posit a first principle, whether mind or matter, and philosophies of the subject, which treat the object as subordinate to the subject.

What this thinking hopes for is “reconciliation,” which Adorno glossed as “the non-violent integration of what diverges”: a state in which mind and nature, subject and object, universal and particular, individual and society no longer stand in a relation where one dominates the other. Reconciliation would set the non-identical free and open up the plurality of what is different. The word he often used for this is mimesis, an approach to the other that draws near by resembling it rather than mastering it. If Dialectic of Enlightenment criticized a reason that had turned into the domination of nature, Negative Dialectics looks in the language of philosophy for a way of thinking that could get beyond that reason. Rolf Wiggershaus, the historian of the Frankfurt School, called this philosophy of the non-identical the horizon of Adorno’s critical social theory, and Albrecht Wellmer called Adorno an “advocate of the non-identical.”

The West German student movement of the late 1960s grew out of the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) to the emergency laws planned by the grand coalition government and to the Vietnam War, with the Socialist German Student League (SDS) at its head. Many of those who embodied the spirit of revolt were Adorno’s students, and they tried to draw “practical consequences” from critical theory. Adorno himself opposed the emergency laws and spoke publicly at a rally of the action committee “Democracy in Emergency” on 28 May 1968. When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a policeman at a demonstration in West Berlin on 2 June 1967, Adorno expressed his sympathy for the student before his aesthetics lecture. But he kept his distance from the students’ direct action, and in the 1969 radio talk “Resignation” he called it “pseudo-activity” and “impatience with theory.”

In a Spiegel interview in May 1969 he said: “I put forward a theoretical model, but I could not have suspected that people would want to carry it out with Molotov cocktails.” Since a first “circus” against him in Berlin in 1967, groups of students had repeatedly demanded his solidarity and practical action, and he had refused. Students called their former mentors “bailiffs of the authoritarian state” in a leaflet, and his lectures were broken up several times; in April 1969 three women students bared their breasts on the podium around him and showered him with petals. “The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary is at least surprising,” he wrote to Samuel Beckett. The political right, for its part, accused Adorno and Horkheimer of being the intellectual authors of student violence.

The decisive moment came on 31 January 1969. When students entered the Institute for Social Research to force an immediate discussion of the political situation, the Institute’s directors, Adorno and Ludwig von Friedeburg, called the police and filed charges against the occupiers. For Adorno, who had always opposed the police and surveillance state, this broke with his own self-understanding. He had to testify in court against Hans-Jürgen Krahl, one of his most gifted students. From February 1969 he carried on a fierce dispute by letter with Herbert Marcuse, who criticized Adorno’s abstention from practice, Jürgen Habermas’s charge of “left fascism” against the rebelling students, and the police clearance of the occupied Institute. Adorno defended Habermas’s charge: he too now saw tendencies that “converge directly with fascism,” and he took the danger of the student movement turning into fascism far more seriously than Marcuse did. The day after Krahl’s trial he left for his summer holiday in the Swiss mountains, and on 6 August 1969 he died of a heart attack in Visp.