"The Right and the Righteous": Required Reading in a Time of (Toxic) Righteousness

Shannon Hoff's essay "The Right and the Righteous: Hegel on Confession, Forgiveness, and the Necessary Imperfection of Political Action", published in Phenomenology and Forgiveness, ed. Marguerite La Caze, is a necessary read, as profound in what kind of human beings, what kind of ethical and political being to enact in the world, as J. M. Bernstein's Dignity and Torture.

In the essay, Hoff works through the contemporary practical, moral and political importance of Hegel's final chapter of the section Spirit, "Conscience. The beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness".  She takes up the notions of moral action, judgment, forgiveness and their implications for moral and political action, without which political and moral ideas are mere abstractions, but which are always, inevitably, one-sided, invested, imperfect.

In a contemporary moment in which righteousness predominates, Hoff encourages us to see both the necessity and imperfection of action and the necessity and imperfection of criticism.  In this context, we require both action and criticism, but action and criticism which are themselves open to being criticized in turn, that is, to communication and forgiveness.

I will not work through the entire essay, as it is not only important to work through Hoff's arguments for oneself, but I cannot in a brief note do justice to her engaging and elegant exposition of the ideas developed herein.  It is enough to quote a paragraph that epitomizes the intellectual and ethical depth of the essay:

"The criticism that supplements and completes action, then, is not a matter of condemnation that distances the critic from the actor, but a matter of establishing solidarity through communication—it is precisely forgiveness.  As we saw earlier, our actions, as necessarily one-sided and specific, do not unambiguously manifest the principle to which they aim to answer, and so they do not “speak for themselves” but require instead communication as a supplement. And communication, insofar as it is oriented toward revealing the principle that motivates action, can precisely lead to unexpected forms of identification. The “act” of an action can never, on its own, reveal the motivation of the agent, of which it is an expression. It is through struggling to understand the action on the agent’s own terms—struggling to appreciate the action and recognize the agent—that we get into a position in which meaningful criticism—criticism that would actually be meaningful to the agent and to what the agent was doing—becomes possible. Such an understanding, however, in as much as it is precisely a matter of “sympathizing” with the agent, simultaneously fosters an identification with the agent: it involves a recognition, in other words, that the agent’s actions make sense to us. Forgiveness is precisely this intertwining of criticism and identification." (p. 15)

Some Notes on Things I've Been Reading

Reclaiming Work, Andre Gorz, 1999

This is an exceptionally interesting little book which affirms my conviction that Andre Gorz remains one of the most overlooked radical thinkers of the late 20th century.  I will post some notes on here as soon as I can transcribe them.


Interview with Anselm Jappe at the Brooklyn Rail

"Value cannot be created by decree, only by a real labor process—and it has to be “productive labor” in the capitalist sense (that means that it does not only consume capital but helps to reproduce it). Money can be created by decree—but when it does not correspond to the real amount of labor that it is supposed to “represent,” it has no “substance” and loses its value through some form of inflation (although for decades now the explosion of massive inflation has been deferred by parking large sums of fictitious capital in stock markets, real estate markets, and so on). Here the Critique of Value finds itself in sharp contrast to nearly all left-wing economists, who are generally just neo-Keynesians."

The point I put in italics is really what I find interesting vis-a-vis the notion of productive labor.  This is the clearest, most succinct reasoning as to why military production is unproductive, since military commodities cannot be used to reproduce constant or variable capital.  This is also why production of luxury goods for non-laborers is unproductive, unlike "luxury" goods consumed by potential laborers which goes toward the reproduction of labor power.

Adolph Reed Jr on Rachel Dolezal and "Selma"

I think these are two excellent articles on two related moments.

On the one hand, Reed argues acutely that the problem with Selma is a racial nationalism that has to distort history in order to promote a particularly communitarian identity politics.  On the other hand, we see the absurdity of racial essentialism and identitarian politics in the hullaballoo over Rachel Dolezal.

From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much

The Real Problem with Selma

Reed's critique of racial essentialism goes hand-in-hand with Gillian Rose's critique of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism as falling into two categories, libertarianism and communitarianism, a critique shared in many respects by Jacques Ranciere's Hatred of Democracy:

“By maligning all putative universality as ‘totalitarian’ and seeking to liberate the ‘individual’ or the ‘plurality’ from domination, both the libertarian and the communitarian disqualify themselves from any understanding of the actualities of structure and authority, intrinsic to any conceivable social and political constitution and which their opposed stances still leave intact.  the libertarian argument presupposes formal-legal rationality, just as the communitarian argument presupposes traditional rationality; both are types of legitimising domination as authority.  Politics begins not when you organise to defend an individual or particular or local interest, but when you organise to further the ‘general’ interest within which your particular interest may be represented.” [Italics mine - CDW]

Politics is thus a leap of faith, in two senses: a leap of faith that one might somehow further the general interest, and a leap of faith that one might know what the general interest is.  It is therefore also a leap outside oneself, a seeing the furthering of oneself only in the furthering of another.

I don’t think that this general interest is per se expressed in the state, but it may be represented in the state, and this is the critique of representation.  However, the critiques of representation below are the libertarian and the communitarian: that the individual is beyond representation and at the same time that the group is beyond representation, that is, the singular and the particular severed from the universal.  The critique of representation may be a critique of the state, but it can also be the critique of the possibility of a general interest, with the possibility of governance, as such and a refusal to take responsibility for such a general interest as opposed to individual interest or group (‘community’) interest which only exist within the universal or general interest.  Rose’s critique of the critique of representation is this kind of critique of representation.

p. 4-5

“As a result of this shared refusal to take responsibility for what Weber called the ‘legitimate violences’ of modern politics, libertarianism and communitarianism require other agencies to act on their behalf.”  

“Libertarian extensions of the right of ‘individuals’, the right to purchase and consume goods and services, presuppose and widen the already unequal distribution of opportunities and resources within a capitalist society.  Extension of individual rights amounts to an extension not an attenuation of coercion: it calls for a reinforcement of the police function to contain the consequences of inequality.” [Italics mine - CDW]

This latter is neo-liberalism in a nutshell.

“Communitarian empowerment of ‘ethnic’ and gender pluralities presupposes and fixes a given distribution of ‘identities’ in a radically dynamic society.  ‘Empowerment’ legitimises the political tyranny of the local or particular community in its relations with its members and at the boundary with competing interests.  It is the abused who become abusers; no one and no community is exempt from the paradoxes of ‘empowerment’.

This is of course the politics of representation at another level: “The X ‘community’ needs an X leader because no not-X can possibly speak for/represent the interests of the community they are by definition not a member of.”  This of course also assumes that X identity is the primary or driving identity of a person, Rose’s point being that no one identity is ever adequate, nor are we simply an assemblage of identities with given weights, hence her comment on “a radically dynamic society”.

p. 5

“In their abstract and general opposition to the state, power, rationality and truth, libertarianism and communitarianism directly and indirectly aid and abet authoritarian power of control.  They do so directly, by disowning the coercive immediacy of action legitimated, and indirectly, in the way the stance at stake disowns the political implications of legitimated violence and re-imposes the burdens on agents and agencies of the state.  These reversals in the planned reconfiguration of power arise from the attempt to develop normative political alternatives to the modern state without any preliminary analysis of the actualities and possibilities for freedom and justice.  Any account of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ is deemed to depend on the ‘metaphysics’ of truth.  When ‘metaphysics’ is separated from ethics in this way, the result will be unanticipated political paradoxes.” 

Notes on Chris O'Kane's "Fetishism and Social Domination in Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Lefebvre", Part 5

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.  

Experience

Experience presents a peculiar problem for both philosophy as such and any critical theory in particular.  The scope of the problem is covered in as complete a manner as one can do in a single book by Martin Jay's Songs of Experience and I read it with the idea of working through the problem in a more systematic manner.  Sadly, I think that the book is not quite adequate for such a task.  It is not per se unhelpful or lacking in scope so much as it is too committed to not being committed.  I believe J.M. Bernstein has a sufficiently insightful review of the book and its limitations here.  I would only add a few small comments.

The first is a nit-picking issue, which is that in his discussion of mourning and melancholia, related to Freud, Jay manages to have the discussion in almost the exact same terms as those of Gillian Rose, whom he knew and eulogized after her death, but he does not give any credit to her nor take the problem as far as he could have if only he had recognized her.  The second matter is that his treatment of Hegel is too perfunctory and shallow.  The Phenomenology of Spirit is literally a phenomenology, a book dedicated to the experience of spirit.  Merely mentioning the introduction and then giving a brief gloss seems a little weak in comparison to the extensive coverage of Schleiermacher or Dilthey, never mind the eve less interesting secondary writers.  However, I believe this lack of attention goes hand in hand with Jay's own problems which lead him to the morose end of the book, as Bernstein notes in his review. 

Not only is experience a significant concept for Hegel, however, but it plays the central role in classical pragmatism and in the eyes of Marxists who read Hegel and Marx via pragmatism, most recently and of interest to me, Nicole Pepperell.  Experience is also not a small matter for Critical Theory.  Jay notes it, talks about it, but never invests it with any real excitement and it is hard to find in his discussion the importance it takes on there.  Maybe part of it is that Jay seems largely fixated on Walter Benjamin and I am not particularly enthralled by Benjamin, while the entirety of the problem of one-dimensionality enunciated by Adorno and Marcuse is about the loss of the capacity to experience in a way that would lead to a mass challenge to capital, but also maybe the opening up of something else.  Moishe Postone's discussion of one-dimensionality in Frankfurt School critical theory, following on their theory of state capitalism is important here because Postone lays a ground for salvaging its insights without giving in to what John Holloway and Werner Bonefeld have referred to as the Frankfurt School's "Cassandra call".  

This recourse to Postone's critique of labor dovetails with Pepperell, and it is of course over philosophical issues that Pepperell is most at odds with Postone.  Further, I believe there is a discussion flowing from Gillian Rose's critique of an adequate conceptualization of the subject and subjectivity in Marx.  This is most evidently worked out in her Hegel Contra Sociology, but I believe other sources for this working through can be found in her collections of essays as well.  

If I am correct, then an adequate thoerization of experience remains a project.

A few notes on how I conceive of experience will have to suffice for the moment.

Firstly, I agree with the general problem presented by Adorno and Marcuse that something frustrates the capacity to experience capital's domination systemically.  However, I think that they have recourse to something that is both too transhistorical in the notion of the "dialectic of enlightenment" which finds its roots in antiquity, and also which falls victim to a traditional Marxist notion of labor and the critique of political economy.  On the latter, I believe that Moishe Postone's critique of Friedrich Pollock's theory of state capitalism as the underlying source of the notion of "one-dimensional man" is both correct and largely adequate.  Postone does not link the question to experience, which is fine.  I think there is a point where one realizes that only so much can be done in one book and by one person.  Nonetheless, Adorno and Marcuse provide a wealth of material to begin thinking through the problem.

Secondly, if there is a wealth of material in Marcuse and Adorno for taking up this problem, Hegel and Marx both have an immense amount to contribute that is not merely reproduced by or even taken up by the Frankfurt School.  Hegel's Phenomenology has to be rediscovered in its experiential dimension by critical theory.  Marx's Capital also has to be revisited, both in how we read the development of the categories, and on this Postone and Pepperell are both important to reclaiming a notion of experience in the work.  Most critical to a rethinking of experience is Marx's critique of commodity fetishism.

Thirdly, I do find some value in the separation of Erlebnis and Erfahrung because the kind of experience we are interested in is not simply that of what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us.  Experience and thought go hand-in-hand.  If I read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit seriously, then I should reflect on what has happened to me, how what I am reading applies to my life and to the world I inhabit, and my comprehension of those thing should be transformed.  If that happens, then I have had a new experience, a new erfahrung.

Such a thing happens in the process of social struggle.  I knew a guy from the Staley workers' lockout in the 1990's in Decatur, Illinois who was one of the top union activists in the strike.  He had been special forces in the Vietnam War, very patriotic, the kind of guy today who might have been a Tea Party type, except in the course of the strike his whole outlook was transformed.  Most of this was the strike, some of it was who he met from the people doing strike support work, but he did not merely consider his immediate situation, but how he understood his past and what he was going to do going forward.  His experience was not merely the strike, but the transformation of his comprehension of his past, present and future.  Old experiences, erlebnis and erfahrung, came under a new erfahrung and thus under a new comprehension in which many of his old concepts of his experience, his very conceptual categories, changed.  He became open to, was, one might even say, compelled towards, a critique of capitalism as a whole.

This is what I understand by experience, and yet, like Adorno and Marcuse, I feel that there are things about capital and its phenomenological expression which impede the capacity to experience in a way that opens up a 'we' who require for our practice and can comprehend because of our practice a systemic critique, a critique of capital as such and not merely this or that moment.  These things are bound up with Marx's comprehension of the fetish character of the commodity and the abstract nature of domination qua capital, the indirect domination by pseudo-objective relations rather than the direct domination by persons.  However, as capital develops, the phenomenological forms of this domination change and, in my opinion, these new phenomenological forms, such as the concrete labor process and formation of lived space, do not merely develop the material possibility for the overcoming of capital, for the abolition of labor, but also impede the experience of the phenomenological forms as just that, as forms of capital as a mad totality.

Some recent-ish publications of mine:

Review of Paul Mattick, Jr's "Business as Usual?"

Review of "George Lukacs: The fundamental Dissonance of Existence"

Book Review: Not Adorno's Negativity

John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, Sergio Tischler
Negativity & Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism
Plutio Press, 2008. 256pp.  $37.00 pb
ISBN 9780745328362

     One of the novel features of the struggles over the last 6 or 7 years has been their negativity in the sense of a lack of demands and in their tendency towards a raw refusal without an alternative. In light of this, the title Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism would seem to promise an interesting union of this negative activity and Theodore Adorno's philosophical notion of negativity. Yet the title is discordant, even jarring. Negativity. Revolution. Adorno. Political Activism.

     Revolution and Political Activism? “Activism”, with its connotations of a kind of professionalization of political action, carried out by specialists known as “activists”, goes uninspected in this entire book. In a book which nominally takes Adorno seriously his profound distrust of activism generates no self-reflection.

     Negativity and political activism? The activist negativity, the “No!” of refusal, has little to do with Adorno's philosophically informed negativity, which is to say as determinate negation. The two are forced together in an uncomfortable union. This is enabled by the repetition, over and over again, of certain formulations of Adorno's, taken out of context and without any attention to the development of those formulations, a very un-Adornian way of proceeding. This general lack of critical reflection on activism is nowhere more self-evident than in chapter 5, which poses a post-vanguardist activism against a vanguardist activism, but which has no notion whatsoever of where that vanguardism came from or that the activism in both cases is possibly more critical in binding them together than the vanguardism in question drives them apart.

     Adorno and Revolution? Adorno was a determined enemy of this society. He sought to work out in concepts its increasingly barbarous character. However, Adorno did not believe that revolution was on the front steps, around the corner or even in the same neighbourhood. Not only did he not think that the massive counter-revolution that ran from 1923-1945 was simply going to be reversed, but he believed that capital was going about consolidating its victory in a variety of ways that would likely cement it in place, at least for the indefinite future. Most importantly, Adorno believed that the problems of the present were not simply grounded in capital, but in instrumental forms of Reason going back to the Greeks. Sadly, little to nothing of Adorno's own political thought is engaged with, but instead he is himself used instrumentally.

     Which brings us to Negativity and Adorno. Despite the invocation of Adorno's negative, most frequently this is reduced to nothing so much as a “No!”. Negativity as raw refusal goes against every ethical aspect of Adorno's thought. Interestingly, this denigration of negativity gives rise to a constant need to scold Adorno for his role in 1968. The “No!” is first and foremost said to Adorno, ritualistically, at the beginning of almost every chapter. You can almost invariably tell the quality of the coming chapter simply by noting the presence or absence of this revolt against the Father in the first 4-5 paragraphs. This means that the Introduction and Chapters 2 and 6 lack any awareness of how far they depart not only from the negativity of Adorno, but from Holloway's own earlier work before he was usurping the Name of the Father in order to kill the Father. 

     More importantly, the general lack of a properly philosophical negativity seems to go hand-in-hand with a positive, ontological treatment of labour, of sociality, and of direct, unmediated relations that was foreign to Adorno.

   Good, concrete labour is posited against bad, abstract labour, but Adorno saw communism entailing a world in which labour no longer mediated the relation between Man and Man. Labour belongs to the realm of necessity, not freedom, a point which Adorno understood explicitly. Along with Holloway's contributions in Chapters 2 and 6, so too Sergio Tischler's chapter 7 sings the praises of living labour as Doing. This hypostatization of labour, of living labour against dead labour, is just the lauding of variable capital against constant capital. The raw, simplistic “No!” to capitalism gives way to a joyous, simplistic “Yes!” to the ontological positing of “Doing”. Such a positing of Doing is no better than a positing of Being, since all it can claim in effect is that our Being is our Doing and so we run full circle back to a social ontology of Being, and thus capital reappears through the back door. The irony of this conception of labour is that the familiar, and philosophically underdeveloped, critique of Deleuze's concepts carried out in chapter 4 by Alfredo Bonnet can be turned on this conception of labour with equal force. Just as Deleuze turns away from negativity and dialectic towards difference, desire, and life and thereby make these into first principles, into metaphysical and positive-ontological essences of a transhistorical human existence, so Holloway in particular transforms labour into just such a creative essence.

     The positive adulation of the social goes hand-in-hand with this reading of labour. The romantically non-alienated aspect of everything social is part and parcel of a Leftism that denigrated the individual in favour of the collective, at times with utterly murderous consequences. Further, pre-capitalist society was oppressive and exploitative exactly through directly social relations of domination. Marx never deploys pairs of concepts except to indicate their existence as categories of capital. Use-value is a category of capital, the way in which things people use exist first and foremost as useful for valorization. Concrete labour is the particular labours through which abstract labour must subsist, but it isn't labour free from social form. So too sociality and individuality dance as a pair. If it was any other way, it would be hard to make a claim that use-value was self-contradictory, that is, that the contradiction between using things to meet human needs comes into contradiction with objects as useful for valorization, first and foremost among these, labour

     Finally, there is a tendency to imagine revolution as direct irruption of social Doing, as the end of mediation. This depends on a frequent elision of or confusion over the difference between mediation, contradiction, and antagonism. The end of antagonistic social relations does not necessarily entail the end of contradictions, the absence of which does not entail the end of mediation. The struggle with this is nowhere more clear than in Werner Bonefeld's essay. The very idea that critical theory has as its task to de-mystify actuality of course assumes what Bonefeld himself has long criticised: the idea that appearance is merely illusion, rather than the mode of existence of the essence, its necessary form of appearance. There is no de-mystification which can lead us to some direct knowledge of what really is the case. The appearance “really is” because it is the way in which essence must express itself, and not as two different worlds, but as one world which appears in a mediated fashion. Bonefeld actually formulates the problem of the entire approach taken by the majority of essays in this book:

Marx’s thesis that the understanding of the world of things has to comprehend human practice implies that this practice is constitutive. However, this formulation is full of dangers, too. It presupposes a definite resolution to the stated problem: If social practice constitutes, is it ursprünglich, be it primitive or original? If it constitutes, does it remain external to its creation? Can it remain innocent in the perverted world that it has created? (116)

However, not far down the conflation of antagonism and contradiction already occurs: “There is only one reality - a reality of disunion, contradiction, fissures, and antagonism” (117). Where Marx suggests that all science would be unnecessary if essence and appearance directly coincided, this entails that this non-coincidence is a part of actuality as such, not merely one where antagonistic relations obtain. Nor is contradiction synonymous with antagonism. There is a difference between a contradiction and an antagonistic contradiction in both Hegel and Marx. A contradiction in Marx's sense involves two unlikes which can each subsist only in and through each other, that is, which constitute a relationship of opposites which mediate each other. This contradiction does not need to be antagonistic. Nor does the resolution of the contradiction result in some kind of immediacy in relation to either object. That is, even in a resolved contradiction, the result is not an unmediated actuality.

     Were mediation to indicate only mediation of a contradiction and that contradiction only capable of being antagonistic, then communism would entail a world without mediation, of pure immediacy. This would erase the conceptuality of the world and reduce us to a world of pure immediacy, which would in effect be a state of psychosis. Following Bonefeld's own logic in reverse, if mediation exists, then contradiction exists, and then antagonism exists, and so capital becomes a closed loop.

     This results from the un-Adornian treatment of labour, immediacy, and sociality. Once one has taken the path, it is hard to veer off of it. So I do not find it surprising that the main political concept of a book on negativity is very positive: dignity. The concept has deep roots in Kant's own bi-polar, antinomic split of ethics and law. It is fitting that Adorno himself says that “Dignity was never anything more than the attitude of self-preservation aspiring to be more than that.” (133, Theodore Adorno 2002. The Jargon of Authenticity, 2^nd Edition (London: Routledge).)  This Adorno, no doubt associated with the Bad Father who called the police and was against activism, is not only of no interest to most of the authors, but is replaced with the Good Father, Subcommandante Marcos.

     The ultimate note of discord echoes from the effect of two chapters, which seem oddly out of place because they are distant from activism and genuinely engaged with Adorno. Adrian Wilding actually stages both a spirited engagement with Adorno's lectures and a subtle appreciation of his care to avoid becoming a guru or an institution, showing how badly his own students misunderstood him by trying to condemn him with the words “Adorno as an institution is dead.” Marcel Stoetzler's chapter provides a nuanced critique of sexual dimorphism, gender, and sexuality and the problem of the “liberation of sexuality” as opposed to human liberation. At odds with most of the rest of the book both in terms of quality and tenor, they set in relief rather than bring relief from the weakness of the book as a whole.

     The book remains a disappointment, despite these last, genuinely valuable contributions. The editors intended to produce a work that was self-consciously not a scholarly treatment of Adorno, but a genuine appropriation of his dialectic of negativity. They have indeed produced a work which is not scholarly, but they have not produced a convincing appropriation, critique or comprehension, of Adorno's negative dialectic.