Part
3: Adorno
I think it is useful for each new section to start out with a quote from Chris O'Kane's own introduction. I should have done it for the earlier sections because referring back to it will help focus the reader on his goals.
123
"In
this chapter I focus on the place of fetishism in Theodor W. Adorno’s
theory of social domination. In contrast to accounts that equate
Adorno’s theory of social domination with a nebulous conception of
reification, by focusing on the place of fetishism in Adorno’s
thought, I argue that Adorno’s account of the social constitution
and constituent properties of social domination is based upon his
conception of fetishism. I demonstrate this by focusing on how Adorno
theorises social domination in his early and late work. I argue
that in his early work, Adorno conceives fetishism through
his Marxian interpretation of Lukács, Benjamin and Freud, as
evidenced in texts such as The Idea of Natural History, The Actuality
of Philosophy, and On The fetish Character of Music and the
Regression of Listening. However, and in contrast, I argue that his
later work conceives fetishism through a Hegelian-Marxian conception
of the exchange abstraction's fetish-form. This, I will claim,
provides the latter with means to elucidate the social genesis and
the constituent properties of social domination whichare carried out
in his dialectical analysis of the objective and subjective forms of
social domination proper to a negative totality, thus functioning as
a basis for his critical theory of society. I will argue that this
later theory attempts to remedy the deficiencies of his earlier
positions by providing an account of social objectivity and of a more
fully fledged account of social constitution. However, in
the conclusion to this chapter, I will also show that the
theory is ultimately undermined by an insufficient
account of the genesis and social pervasiveness of
the fetish-form of the exchange abstraction." [Italics and
bold mine - CDW]
This
should allow us to focus on Adorno's developing notion of the fetish
and the key problem O'Kane identifies in his conception, notably that
it provides "an insufficient account of the genesis and
social pervasiveness" of the fetish-form. This
is not the same, obviously, as saying that his account of the
fetish-form itself is flawed, which was the case with Lukacs'
Hegelian-Weberian-Marxian hybrid.
125
fn358
As
always, I am interested in what is so unusual about distinguishing
between the value-form, which is the essence of capitalism, and the
labor process, which is a phenomenal form, that is, highly contingent
and prone to radical transformation, but without changing the
validity of the value-form. Insofar as the labor process is also the
valorisation process, the labor process is also the continuation of
the inner split in capitalist labor between concrete and abstract,
but here it is as a part of the movement of value qua capital,
that is, it is a different level of concreteness, of determination,
and one which has a contingent element to it because the labor
process, and thus the valorization process at the point of
production, changes dramatically over time, altering the very
constitution of the working class (subject to a variety of
determinations outside of production as well, that is, in circulation
and consumption and further, as I have argued elsewhere, even in the
spatial organization of capitalist society as a whole.)
126
"However,
as I have shown, Rose’s idiosyncratic distinction between fetishism
and reification means that this strand of commentary does not
differentiate between Adorno’s theory of fetishism and his theory
of reification. This interpretation consequently misses the
way in which Adorno’s analysis of identity-thinking is interrelated
with his conceptualisation of the fetish-form of the exchange
abstraction which grounds his theory of social domination. Like
the other account described above, which blurs Adorno’s theory of
social domination with Lukács’s theory of reification, this
reading treats Adorno’s theory of social domination as if it were
equivalent to his own theory of reification. 361 As I will show,
Adorno’s theory of identity-thinking is reflective of a central
element of his conception of fetishism and it plays a part in his
theory of social domination."
As
before, maybe I am missing something about Chris O'Kane's take on
Rose's reading of Adorno, but on p. 43 of the Melancholy Science
she distinguishes Adorno from others in the following way:
“Adorno's
theory of reification was based on commodity fetishism in a way which
depended not on Marx's theory of work or the labour process
(alienation), but on Marx's theory of value, especially on the
distinction between use-value and exchange-value.”
Aside
from the ongoing complaint of Rose's distinction of the labour
process from value, it seems clear that Rose sees Adorno's theory of
reification as arising from his theory of fetishism, his
interpretation of Marx's commodity fetishism.
Maybe
the argument is that, in grounding the use of reification in Adorno's
understanding of comoodity fetishism, she then never really speaks
about his theory of commodity fetishism and just focuses on
reification? This would make sense, as she never really develops
that point, staying entirely with reification and
use-value/exchange-value after her original note.
Her
discussion of reification, however, is clearly linked to her
discussion of what a concept is in classical German philosophy versus
what it is in the English world of empiricism and analytical
philosophy. I would rather not re-write that analysis here, but some
distinction needs to be made.
In
English, a concept is what one has when one correctly grasps the
meaning or sense of a word. In German, objects have concepts in the
sense that in English objects have properties or real attributes.
Rose notes that 'an objects falls under a concept' is akin to saying
that 'an object has a property.' She then works through the three
senses of identity thinking in Adorno and it is the last of these,
rational identity, which is especially important and related
to reification. It is worth reading through because it is very
difficult and I won't do anyone favors by summarising it.
Why
does this matter? Because it is key to what Adorno means by a
concept and an object. There is no object that is pure objectivity
and no concept that is merely subjective. Adorno's notion of concept
avoids that dualistic way of understanding concept and object typical
of “positivism”.
130
"In
contrast to Lukács, Adorno does not mistake objectification with the
autonomous social properties of things. Adorno treats the
commodity-form and the related problem of the ‘thing in-itself’
as social forms of objectivity possessed by things, rather than as
forms of thingified false objectivity.378 This means that criticism
does not destroy false objectivity, so as to disclose the real
underlying substratum. Yet criticism does however disclose that these
forms of objectivity are unintentionally constituted social
phenomena. This is due to several elements that Adorno elucidates
here and which he also presented in the Idea of Natural History;
namely: (a) that the essence of this unintentional process of social
constitution appears in the symbolic form,379 and (b) that disclosing
this process denaturalises and historicises these forms of second
nature and (c) that this type of criticism is indicative of Marxist
theory."
Nice
distinction.
132
"Adorno’s
later formulation of fetishism and its role in his theory of
composition and of the characteristics of social domination occurs
following his return to Germany in the 1960s. This formulation breaks
with his earlier account of fetishism and with his theory of social
domination.389"
fn
389
"This
period also signifies Adorno’s rapprochement with Marx for an
articulation of a macrosocial theory, following the Nietzschean and
Weberian narratives of The Dialectic of Enlightenment."
So
according to this, Adorno's earlier work is a mix of Nietzsche and
Weber, whereas his later work breaks with this for a Marxian
"articulation of a macrosocial theory." This seems
like a pretty big claim that would merit more substantiation. The
evidence provided seems largely to be a noting of a shift from
"micrological investigations based on the commodity" to
"macrological theories that account for the constitution and
constituent properties of social domination...based on...his
formulations of...the fetish-form of the exchange abstraction."
133
"Adorno
provides what can be called a dialectical fusion of Hegel and Marx.
He interprets the two thinkers’ theories of social constitution as
interrelated with each other. This means that Adorno has a Hegelian
interpretation of Marx, in which the latter is seen as a dialectical
theorist who views capital as a social totality; yet he also contends
that the late Marx followed Hegel in theorising capitalist totality
through ‘the objectivity of the concept’ and by viewing labour as
social labour.390 He consequently conceives Marx’s theory of
fetishism in this Hegelian light.391"
I
find this confusing. I agree with Rose, for what it is worth, when
she argues that this 'objectivity of the concept' is exactly a way to
avoid compounding Marx's theory of fetishism with Hegel's ideas on
the development of consciousness (p. 47), that is, to not fuse Hegel
and Marx. Therefore, I don't know what is a fusion of Hegel and Marx
here, unless one is of the opinion that Marx represents some absolute
break with Hegel and thus one has to bring them back together on 1)
dialectic, 2) capital as a social totality, 3) 'the objectivity of
the concept', and 4) by viewing labor as social labor. The
first two are a Hegelian Marx and the last two are a Hegelian reading
of Marx's theory of fetishism. And yet, I have not seen any
good argument that Marx's understanding of 'concept' would be
strictly different from Hegel's. It's grounding might be
different (exactly Rose's point about why Hegel is unnecessary here,
since Marx provides his ground), but there is no reason to think that
the 'objectivity of the concept' would be denied by Marx or read in
“English” fashion.
It
does help to see that Adorno self-consciously attempts to supplement
Marx with Hegel because he saw Marx as neglecting "the
conceptual element in exchange that is necessary for conceptualising
equivalents and non-equivalents as equivalents." Exchange
and identity thinking are then "dialectically interrelated"
for Adorno. So here is a case for Adorno thinking that Marx
short-changes conceptuality, but still not for a fusion of Hegel with
Marx since it does not entail that Marx rejects this kind of
conceptuality, only that he fails to develop it adequately.
This
raises a number of issues with Adorno's reading of Marx, however, as
already noted, in his focus strictly on exchange/use.
134-5
This
is something of an exegesis of notes from a seminar of Adorno's from
1962.
I
am uncertain about Adorno's notion of abstraction here:
“Exchange
itself is a process of abstraction. Whether human beings know or not,
by entering into a relationship of exchange and reducing different
use values to labor values they actualize a conceptual operation
socially. This is the objectivity of the concept in practice. It
shows that conceptuality lies not only in the minds of the
philosophers but also in the reality of the object itself such that
when we speak of being (Wesen), we refer to precisely that which
society, without knowing it, already has in itself.”
Do
we reduce different use-values to labor values (that is, socially
necessary labor time) in exchange? Isn't the use-value of a
commodity only validated through being exchanged, since their
use-value is also only posited here, but until exchange
happens it is not realized? In other words, if no one buys
the bicycles I manufactured, and they end up in the scrap heap, then
not only was their exchange-value not realized, their use-value was
not realized either. This happens with food in restaurants
constantly and in a very obvious way, especially fast food chains who
lock the garbage can so that the homeless cannot get free food
because food without an exchange-value has no use-value from the
point of capital, though it may well be useful to the homeless
person.
Here
the importance of objective conceptuality for Adorno, which follows
close on this, is even more important. If Rose is correct that
objective conceptuality is important for Adorno to avoid historicism
and idealism, how much more important is it if we realize that
use-value in Capital and usefulness to a person are not the
same thing. There is in fact something objective in the
conceptuality of the use-value side of the commodity, that is,
stripped of it's value component, it retains an objective potential
to be useful (if the homeless person gets it out of the trash, in our
example.) Exchange-value, on the other hand, does not refer to a
conceptuality that survives except as this particular social form.
The entirety of its objectivity is “second nature” as Adorno
calls it in the text.
This
issue with use-value as Adorno puts it here however indicates an
issue with his notion of abstraction, or at least as he thinks it in
relation to use-value. We don't abstract from the use-value, the
use-value is the abstract going into the useful thing. What is
useful is judged by exchangability. This is why Postone posits the
problem not at the level of exchange-value/use-value, but at Labor
itself. The use-value is already a product of a labor for exchange.
The fetishism thus is not only to the exchange-value, or abstract
labor, but to use-value and concrete labor as well, that is, Labor,
Value, Commodity are fetish-forms.
"Adorno
thus interprets fetishism as the autonomous, abstract and socially
objective properties possessed by commodities which are constituted
by social labour and realised in exchange. This is why I term
Adorno’s conception of fetishism - the fetish form of the exchange
abstraction."
And
this is why it is insufficient. The fetish form is not merely in the
exchange abstraction, produced by it.
“Exchange
still is the key to society. It is characteristic of commodity
economy (Warenwirtschaft) that what characterizes exchange – i.e.
that it is a relation between human beings – disappears and
presents itself as if it was a quality of the things themselves that
are to be exchanged. It is not the exchange that is fetishized but
the commodity. That which is a congealed social relation within
commodities is regarded as if it was a natural quality, a
being-in-itself of things. It is not exchange which is illusory,
because exchange really takes place. The illusion (Schein) in the
process of exchange lies in the concept of surplus value.”
It
is not merely the commodity which is fetishized, but the entire
movement of capital (though Marx will only arrive there in Vol. 3.)
The illusion is that the process is one of concrete labor producing
use-values as goods to be sold for a surplus. Then again, there is
also the issue that the exchange, as an exchange of equivalents, is
also an illusion. The exchange takes place, but between the worker
whose labor is the commodity for sale, and capital, the exchange is
and is not of equivalents.
136-7
“Because
exchange-value is the dominant principle, fetishism realises itself
necessarily in an autonomous form of compulsion. Both sides of the
class relation are forced to take on the function of ‘character
masks,’ which are ‘derived from objective conditions’ wherein
‘the role […] [is] imposed on the subject by the structure.’
Workers are compelled to sell their labour power in order to survive.
Capitalists are compelled to valorise value to ‘prevent themselves
from going broke.’404
Fetishism
also determines reification, which Adorno distinguishes from the
above accounts of compulsion, and derives from the fetish form of the
exchange abstraction. Reification is thus established by the fetish
form of the exchange abstraction. This is because the fetish form of
the exchange abstraction is ‘not simply false consciousness but
results from the structure of political economy.’ For Adorno ‘this
is the actual reason why consciousness is determined by being.’405
Reification is thus defined as ‘human beings’ becoming ‘dependent
on those objectivities’ of the fetish form of the exchange
abstraction ‘which are obscure to them.’406 However, since
reification is
established
by the autonomous and personified properties of the fetish form of
the exchange abstraction, ‘reification [Verdinglichung] is not only
false consciousness but simultaneously also reality, insofar as
commodities really are alienated from human beings. We really are
dependent on the world of commodities [Warenwelt].’"
This
is key:
Compulsion
is abstract, that is, it applies to all (albeit not equally) and is
not really challenged by consciousness or interpersonal relations.
Fetishism
determines reification, though there are questions as to Adorno's
development as I have pointed out.
137
"Thus
Adorno’s interpretation of Marx distinguishes between the reified
social relations of exchange, reification and fetishism. For Adorno,
reification on a practical and theoretical level is established by
reified social relations and the personification of things with both
as central elements of social domination... On the one hand, the
pernicious effects of the fetishistic, autonomous objectivity of
social totality on persons exceeds an account of reification, as it
includes accounts of compulsion, psychological and ontological human
maiming that are explicated in his account of fetishism and social
domination and are not described or captured by the metaphor of
thingification or objectification. On the other hand at this
point in his work408 Adorno also differentiates this type of
domination from practical reification and reified consciousness.409
This is also why he states that other types of reified consciousness
are of secondary importance to the reified consciousness
established
by the fetish-character of commodities.410 In contrast to accounts
that subsume all of these aspects of Adorno’s theory under
reification, I focus on foregrounding his account of fetishism and
the way it is realised in his account of the compulsive and maiming
aspects of social domination." [Italics mine - CDW]
Well
stated and especially a good distinction between reification and
fetishism.
140
"Adorno
distinguishes his theory from Benjamin’s through the heightened
importance that his macrological theory of the exchange abstraction
grants to that abstraction’s mediation of every fragment of social
totality; and he differentiates himself from Lukács in several
respects. Firstly, on a
methodological
level, he moves away from using the concept of the commodity in
favour of using exchange as the basis for the critique of capitalism
as a socio-cultural totality. Secondly, on a theoretical level, this
is reflected in his move away from his use of Lukács’ early
conception of second nature to his conception of the exchange
abstraction, and in a further move, away from describing the
objective and autonomous aspect of social domination through
alienation towards addressing it via abstraction, autonomisation,
personification and inversion. This is coupled to his
criticism
of the ‘tireless charge of reification’ for its ‘idealist’,
‘subjectivist’ and un-dialectical focus, which conflates
domination with objectification, bases itself on the ‘isolated
category’ of ‘thingly’ appearance and ‘blocks’ a properly
dialectical diagnosis of social domination.429 These deficiencies of
Lukács’s theory of reification are contrasted with Marx’s
properly dialectical and objective theory of the fetish character of
commodities.430"
Adorno's
move away from Benjamin and Lukacs, based on his reading of the
importance of the exchange abstraction rather than the commodity
(alienation).
My
complaints about the working through of Rose and Postone's comments
on Adorno and Lukacs matters less here than the presentation of
Adorno, which I think is very engaging and thoughtful, and can be
productive both for a value-form reading of Marx's work and for
trying to understand Adorno as an independently interesting
contributor to Marx's critique of value and a theory of social
domination.
The
issues with Rose and Postone will come back at two levels later: how
do we understand the value-form/labor process relationship (a point
also important for Postone and a host of other thinkers), and what is
the importance of the status of labor for this? Clearly, their
critiques at these levels also distinguish them from a variety of
readings of Marx's critique of value that are broadly still
value-form readings.
141
"Adorno’s
theory is dialectical because it treats society as a dialectical
totality that is collectively composed by subjects who are in turn
composed by that society.431"
It
may be my allergic reaction to "dialectical" as a
much-abused and poorly developed term, but this seems circular. Once
you say "X theory is dialectical because it treats society as a
dialectical totality" feels awfully close to a theory is
dialectical because it assumes its object is dialectical. Totality
and a discursive relation of subjects and society are not inherently
dialectical. The footnote from Adorno in fact is more
complicated than that:
"‘Subject
and object diverge in this society, and, to an unprecedented degree,
living people are the objects of social processes which, in their
turn, are composed of people.’ (T. W. Adorno 2002, 137)"
First,
subject and object diverge and people are "the
objects of social processes". This divergence is important
because this is not the totality of Lukacs, where the perspective of
totality is good and "totality" is taken as a given. In
a "dialectical view", to use that awkward term, only
capital constitutes a totality in the Hegelian sense, and thus a
negative totality constituted through domination. Also,
subjects and people are not quite the same thing. The people
are subjected, but not Subjects in the sense of a subject-object
dialectic. This is where Postone's insistence on Capital as
Subject differs critically from Lukacs' Proletariat as Subject of
History.
143
"As
was the case with Lukács’ social analysis, the capitalist society
that Adorno theorises is different than the early liberal type of
capitalism that Marx sought to theorise in its ideal average.
Foremost among these differences are several developments that Adorno
explicates through his theory of the fetish-form of the exchange
abstraction. These include the totally administered society as the
outgrowth of Keynesian capitalist state bureaucracies, administration
and rationalised Fordist
production,
and the emergence of mass societies through the integration of the
working class."
And
in this there is no recognition of the transformation of the labor
process pace Rose.
The labor process in Adorno's day is also radically different
from Marx's day. Hans-Dieter Bahr's "The
Class Structure of Machinery" is necessary reading, but
the same insights come from Italian operaismo and French critiques of
the labor process (Serge Mallet, Andre Gorz). Without a grasp
of the transformation of the labor process, rationalised Fordist
production remains an empty phrase and the emergence of mass
societies and the integration of the working class cannot be
understood at all.
This
results in Adorno falling back onto an explanation of the totally
administered society through extension and intensification of
exchange-relations to society as a whole, but the domain of
production remains unexplored. Adorno extrapolates the whole of
society from the first chapters of Volume 1 of Capital.
145
fn 442
Highlights
this limit of stopping with "industrial labour", as if the
industrial labour of 1880 was like that of 1968 and contemporary
society was just this industrial model becoming "the pattern of
society everywhere".
The
actual change in the relation of the worker to work, the
transformation of the nature of work, etc. is replaced with an
abstraction.
151-2
"This
condition of unfreedom becomes the basis for a conception of freedom
as the negation of unfreedom: ‘Subjects become aware of the limits
of their freedom as their own membership in nature, ultimately as
their powerlessness in view of the society, becomes autonomous before
them.’466 This conception of freedom is metapsychologically derived
as the ‘polemical counter-image to the suffering under social
compulsion.’467 It is also grounded in the limits of the
subsuming powers of the commodity-form. The latter reaches its limit
in its determination of that which ultimately determines it in turn:
labour power.468 Furthermore, and by extension, this notion of
freedom is also premised on the negation of exchange and social
totality." [Italics mine - CDW]
152
"In
sum, Adorno’s dialectical social theory of domination uses his
theory of the fetish-form of the exchange abstraction to theorise
supra-individual forms of social domination, and to thereby
articulate the ways in which these forms invert to compel, condition
and maim individuals to the point where they become reliant on the
very forms that oppress them. This dialectical social theory is
summarised as a whole in Negative Dialectics:
[T]he
economic process, which reduces individual interests to the
common denominator of a totality, which remains negative,
because it distances itself by means of its constitutive
abstraction from the individual interests, out of which it
is nevertheless simultaneously composed. The universality, which
reproduces the preservation of life, simultaneously endangers
it, on constantly more threatening levels. The violence of the
self-realizing universal is not, as Hegel thought, identical to
the essence of individuals, but always also contrary. They are
not merely character-masks, agents of value, in some presumed
special sphere of the economy. Even where they think they have
escaped the primacy of the economy, all the way down to
their psychology, the maison tolère, [French: universal home]
of what is unknowably individual, they react under the
compulsion of the generality; the more identical they are with
it, the more un-identical they are with it in turn as defenceless
followers. What is expressed in the individuals themselves, is
that the whole preserves itself along with them only by and
through the antagonism.469"
This
returns to the idea from 141, and here again we can see certain
elements of Adorno's thought left out. It is not merely dialectical
"it treats society as a dialectical totality that is
collectively composed by subjects who are in turn composed by that
society", but because the totality is negative i.e. something
antagonistic to the subject who compose it and the totality is only
able to proceed through this antagonism. That the totality is,
that it is a negative totality antagonistic to its substance, and
that only through this antagonism can it subsist is "dialectical".
The presentation of the matter on 141 lacks this negativity,
and thus determinacy, for all determination is negation.
155
Para
2.
I
don't think that "just society" is an appropriate term.
Justice is a slippery bourgeois concept intimately tied to
exchange. If fn 474 is any indication, Adorno is as critical of
equality as he would be of justice:
'What
the critique of the exchange-principle as the identifying one of
thought wishes, is that the ideal of free and fair exchange, until
today a mere pretext, would be realised. This alone would transcend
the exchange. Once critical theory has demystified this latter as
something which proceeds by equivalents and yet not by equivalents,
then the critique of the inequality in the equality aims towards
equality, amidst all skepticism against the rancor in the bourgeois
egalitarian ideal, which tolerates nothing qualitatively divergent.
If no human being was deprived of their share of their living labor,
then rational identity would be achieved, and society would be beyond
the identifying thought.' (Adorno 2001, ‘On the Dialectics of
Identity’) http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ND2Trans.txt
This
paragraph is a critique of equality because an egalitarian society is
precisely one in which "the inequality in the equality"
reigns. "The critique... aims towards equality." One
suspects that "towards" here might in fact be "at".
Adorno expresses freedom as human beings residing peacefully
side-by-side in their inequality. Raymond Geuss in Philosophy
and Real Politics puts forwards a very sharp critique of
equality and justice premised upon Adornian critical theory, albeit
with an obvious analytical influence.
155
Now
begins the critique of Adorno:
"The
most fundamental problem is that Adorno’s theory of the fetish form
of the exchange abstraction is insufficiently theorised... an
explanation of the genesis of exchange and the extent of its
pervasiveness is never really given."
ASIDE:
It occurs to me that in an earlier post, I may have been hasty in
saying that Chris O'Kane is not repetitive. I meant relative to
Postone. With some proper editing, much material could be
disposed of, such as repeating that Adorno didn't make Lukacs'
mistakes here, again, for the third or fourth time.
156
"As
I have shown, these expositions provide an account of how the fetish
form of the exchange abstraction is realised in exchange. They
do not however account for Adorno’s modification of Marx’s theory
through its fusion of Hegel, or for his transformation of
Marxian categories, such as exchange and fetishism. Nor does
Adorno provide an account of how these categories are indicative of
virtually all aspects of social life." [Italics mine - CDW]
On
the two items I italicized. The first remains completely
underdeveloped. I read a claim early in this section that
Adorno was Hegelianizing Marx, but no actual evidence that this was
the case. Maybe it is hidden in the lengthy quotes from a draft
translation of Negative Dialectics in the copious
footnotes, but it is not clearly argued in the doctoral thesis
itself. The second is also not well developed, except insofar
as it is noted that Adorno has some criticisms of Marx's treatment of
epistemology, but it is again hardly clear in the thesis proper where
and how Adorno engages in "transformations", a very strong
charge.
So
I think the thesis has shown what it claims in the first sentence,
but not really adequately either of the second or third claims.
157
"This
is why Adorno’s attempt to utilise some of Marx’s categories in
relation to his category of exchange whilst neglecting other
important ones is problematic: for instead of the development of the
categories of abstract labour, value, surplus value and capital that
are, as we have seen, central to Marx’s theory of fetishism and
social domination, Adorno opts for a socialised Hegelian reading of
Marx. This involves a dialectically conceived notion of exchange,
understood in relation to late capitalist social totality. Yet in
this interrelated reading of Hegel and Marx, how and why exchange
possesses its socially determinate function, and how it relates to
late capitalist totality, is not sufficiently explained; instead it
is interpreted and presupposed as an already existent feature of a
totality that is not intelligible as a whole, whilst the dialectical
function of totality is accounted for through Adorno’s comments on
the properties and pervasiveness of exchange.478"
While
some of this seems valid, especially the first part of the first
sentence, once again the problem is imagined as "a socialised
Hegelian reading of Marx" and "a dialectically conceived
notion of exchange, understood in relation to late capitalist social
totality." But what does this mean? The text nowhere
really develops this "Hegelian" charge nor the notion of
"dialectical", which should be handled with great
circumspection by Hegelians and Marxists alike. The one
explanation of "dialectical" by the author is actually
close to a social constructivist notion than to Adorno even as
present in the excerpts from Negative Dialectic. Never
mind that I can't imagine what a "socialised" Hegel even
is, as Hegel is from the outset a philosopher of the social. It
is like saying "a historicized Hegelian reading". Very
odd.
157
"Adorno
falls back on analysing these aspects of society through modified
Marxian terms, such as fetishism, exchange, exchange-value, etc., or
by treating these phenomena as harmonious or reflective of exchange.
Yet, these deficiencies in his accounts of the genesis of exchange
and of its pervasiveness mean that he does not conclusively show how
or why the latter mediates them. This lack of a theory of the genesis
and pervasiveness of the exchange abstraction thus undermines
Adorno's analysis of society... it is not apparent in Adorno’s
account of exchange if or how this basis can be generalised to other
social and conceptual phenomena, let alone serve as ground for their
criticism."
This
is better. This is the meat.
158
fn 479
Concrete
labor is confused with the labor process, which was the earlier way
the author took issue with Rose and Postone. These are
important distinctions, though it is important to understand that the
labor process is also the valorization process (and thus concrete and
abstract labor move forward together in their more determinate
manifestation.) I have addressed the point re: the labor
process earlier and why it matters here.
158
"These
problems are further undermined by Adorno’s comments, presented
elsewhere, which express hostility to an objective theory of
society.480 Adorno often uses such comments to advocate his method of
constellation;481 or his points that society is ‘intelligible’
and ‘unintelligible’482, yet they also contradict his contentions
that the fetish form of the exchange abstraction objectively
constitutes society."
This
does not follow. Adorno objects to "an objective theory of
society", but what does he mean by this? His notion of
society is not "objective" in the sense used here, not
merely because a subject-object dialectic always involves the subject
side, but because an objective theory of society would undermine the
antagonistic and fractured quality of this society; it would be a
fetishistic view. Thus the last part of the sentence overlooks
the character of the fetish form, which "objectively constitutes
society" in an antagonistic and perverse manner.
Also,
and this has happened a lot, the footnotes do not correctly reference
the item in the bibliography. Adorno 2001 is 4 different
citations in the biblio (2001a-d). This is unhelpful.
"This
is also the case for several comments Adorno makes which characterise
exchange as having occurred since ‘time immemorial’484 casting
doubt on whether his analysis of exchange is specific to the social
relations of capitalism, going against statements made elsewhere that
it is, and undermining the historical account also outlined above
that treats the properties of exchange as an all-around mediator as
the outcome of particular historical and social conditions."
This
is better, especially as Adorno says the "surplus-value of
labour", except that there is no "surplus-value"
outside of capital. There could be surplus wealth, surplus
product, etc., but "value" in the sense used by Marx is a
capital-specific category.
"Adorno
attempts to bypass these problems by placing the various strands of
his theory into totality. This makes totality the basis of
causality.485"
Unfortunately
the footnote itself is clearly a complaint with the limited, now
ideological validity of causality as such in capitalist society
because the logic of identity, of propositional thinking, of formal
causal logic, is the (il)logic of capital. So of course he
ranges causality under totality because causality is at best limited
(Hegel's position) and at worst, sheer mystification (IMO, closer to
Adorno.)
fn485
'Causality
has withdrawn as it were into the totality; in the midst of its
system it becomes indistinguishable. The more its concept, under
scientific mandate, dilutes itself to abstraction, the less the
simultaneous threads of the universally socialised society, which are
condensed to an extreme, permit one condition to be traced back with
evidence to others. Each one hangs together horizontally as
vertically with all others, tinctures all, is tinctured by all. The
latest doctrine in which enlightenment employed causality as a
decisive political weapon, the Marxist one of superstructure
and
infrastructure, lags almost innocently behind a condition, in which
the apparatuses of production, distribution and domination, as well
as economic and social relations and ideologies are inextricably
interwoven, and in which living human beings have turned into bits of
ideology. Where these latter are no longer added to the existent as
something justifying or complementary, but pass over into the
appearance [Schein], that what is, would be inescapable and thereby
legitimated, the critique which operates with the unequivocal causal
relation of superstructure and infrastructure aims wide of the mark.
In the total society everything is equally close to the midpoint; it
is as transparent, its apologetics as threadbare, as those who see
through it, who die out.'
(Adorno
2001, ‘On the Crisis of Causality’)
One
suspects that the translation ought to be "superstructure and
base", as infrastructure is a weird way to what seems like an
obvious reference to the mechanical causality of DiaMat/HistoMat.
159
Now
it occurs to me that the complaint that "he presupposes the
function of totality without
explicating
its genesis or its function" is not entirely accurate if one
reads Adorno (or Lukacs) as proposing a way of reading Capital and
instead of re-creating the wheel, suggesting that read in the right
way, Marx has already done this part. Capital is the totality
and Marx has explicated its genesis and function, but 1) it has been
so misread that we must be taught to read it anew, 2) once understood
in a new way, we have before us the work of addressing those things
Marx did not, such as the state, the world market, culture, etc,, and
those he could not, that is, our present rather than his.
"Yet
with so much hanging on the category, like the fetish form of the
exchange abstraction, it likewise lacks an account of how it is
constituted, how it functions to reproduce itself and it incorporates
or reflects different theories of dialectics and different aspects of
an eclectic array of
theorists.
486"
This
and the fn (a copy and paste of the complaint about Rose, Postone,
and Fetscher from a couple pages earlier.) We can generously assume that the recycling of footnotes is a mistake.
If
the labor process is not dealt with in its historical specificity, as
it changes the actual class relation, the actuality of capital, its
impact on our experience and our capacity for experience, and so on,
that is, if one remains in the first few chapters of Capital then
the present looks like the past and in the face of the disintegration
of the working class as an estate, as a separate culture,
as a coherent ethical opposition, Leftists repeat tired nonsense
about Bolshevism, councilism, trade unions, anarchism, syndicalism,
and fantasize about 1968 as the future, rather than as the last gasp
of an era past.
For
all of his tendency to read exchange back transhistorically, he at
least had the merit of living in the present and thinking theory in
the present.
That
said, I think the concern that Adorno stops short is valid. There
is a genesis that has to be worked through that is beyond Marx. We
can't just read Capital better, though that is
important. We have to continue to write it, and that means,
first and foremost, accounting for what has changed in the phenomenal
forms that have to be accounted for.
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