The work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most important German philosophers (and cultural critics) of the 20th Century, is most obviously critiqueable from a political or practical perspective - "yes, what you're saying might be true, might be untouchable in the realm of theory, but how are we supposed to enact, to live out, your philosophy?" A precis of his thoughts on human agency: devoting ourselves to the "bad social totality" is wrong, but so is rebelling against it to the extent that the latter action helps this totality to reproduce itself, to change but persist, while also allowing the rebels to slip back into it seamlessly at a later stage.
A good example to apply this idea to is the Occupy movement.
Where are the protesters now? Working in jobs, I assume.
What has happened to global capitalism? Nothing, it continues to function as normal.
So what do we do then Adorno?
The progression of his own life provides a number of fragments that we can rearrange into a broad thesis about the politics of this intellectual giant - or better, about his non-politics of withdrawal. Towards the end of his life Adorno was stationed in Frankfurt; it was here that during the 1968 student protests the philosopher became the subject of much ire from the young radicals. During one of his lectures on dialectical thinking, a student chalked on the blackboard: "if Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease", following which three ladies strolled up to their lecturer and threw petals on his head as they pulled up their shirts and bared their breasts.
Left weary of confrontation after a number of similar incidents, he withdrew to the small town of Zermatt, at the bottom of the Matterhorn, deep in the Swiss alps. He died some months later.
This final relocation (after so many throughout his lifetime, within and from Germany to America and back) in the face of mass insurrectionary action is somewhat telling - Adorno eschewed revolutionary measures and instead withdrew from the "bad social totality" (his term, not mine).
This is what I mean when I describe his "non-politics of withdrawal"; on a concrete-political level, a critique can be made very easily: while revolt may be a type of opposition which is inscribed in the totality, an Adornoian personal withdrawal allows the totality to function untouched, undisrupted. Insurrection may only lead to reform which allows the totality to persist (as occurred after 1968) but withdrawal negates the possibility of a true revolution, no matter how slim it might be. Also, such reform might make this totality "less bad".
However, our intervention here remains on a purely practical/political level. The mere fact that we had to extract a solid political argument from Adorno's life events (couple with his theoretical writings), the fact that this great philosopher, musician, essayist rarely wrote about what should be done in the political sphere, instead focusing on what shouldn't, shows that such an intervention will be inadequate if we wish to thoroughly critique his thought - Adorno must be attacked on his own plane, philosophy must be refuted on the level of philosophy.
Philosophy is a battlefield, the Kantian "Kampfplatz", where a war rages between materialism and idealism - we have Louis Althusser to thank for this insight (Lenin & Philosophy, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, Verso: 1990). This is because any kind of philosophy has no concrete object "it is impossible to prove the ultimate principles of materialism just as it is impossible to prove...the principles of idealism. [This is] because they cannot be the object of a knowledge, meaning by that a knowledge comparable with that of a science that does prove the properties of objects (Ibid, p. 193)."
And because philosophy has no object, essentially nothing can happen in it - "Philosophy merely re-examines and ruminates over arguments which represent the basic conflict of these tendencies in the form of categories (p. 193)".
This argument is quite familiar to those who readily dismiss philosophy - "it's all bullshit" - but it's quite astounding that Althusser was able to think this idea within its lofty realm.
Anyways, every philosopher falls on either side of the fence: "There is no third way, no bastard position, anymore than there is in politics (p. 192/3)". This materialism/idealism opposition complements the opposition between science and ideology - in the latter, we have provable/proven hypotheses about the properties of objects conterposed with the spontaneous understandings of the world which allow people to function in their social roles and obscure the contradictions constitutive of the societies in which they live. Materialism, a concept, a position, which has been the subject of innumerable elaborations, essentially holds "that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena (from the American Dictionary of the English Language, 2000; on thefreedictionary.com). Those in the idealist camp argue the inverse, that "the real is of the nature of thought or that the object of external perception consists of ideas (Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, 2010; on thefreedictionary.com)". In this way, materialism is profoundly linked to science, while the two ide's - idealism and ideology - make a cosy couple. This thesis is fortified by the history of "dialectical materialism", better known as "Marxist philosophy". Interestingly enough, this philosophy was never fully outlined by Marx; he provided some initial sketches in a number of his early writings (e.g. The German Ideology), then wrote his groundbreaking historico-sociological work of analysis, Capital, and died. It was up to his followers; Engels, Lenin and later Althusser (among others); to elaborate the principles of this philosophy.
So why didn't the main man do it himself? His successors elaborated the principles from Capital; his philosophy was at work, in its practical state, in its three volumes, in which he founded "historical materialism" and thus (in the words of Althusser) opened up the content of history to science. There is no doubt - Capital was a scientific work, with human social formations as its object, which was written from the side of materialism. That's why it was so revolutionary; it overturned the previous idealist conceptions of society and history and revealed the idealism veiled in the work of some so-called materialists which obscured the domination inscribed in capitalism.
There you have it - science and materialism versus ideology and idealism - the former two representing "truth" and thus being a just and necessary guide for revolutionary practice, and the latter two being obfuscatory and instrumental to prolonging domination.
So at the end of this long divergence, we arrive at the beginning - which side did Adorno fight for?
My instinct is that he was an idealist wolf in a materialist sheep's costume, purely because of the political consequences of his philosophy.
As Marx said, philosophy and revolutionary practice are inseparable, they both inform each other. So if the practical advice which can be extracted from Adorno's philosophy is essentially "withdraw", "do not rebel", then it must be assumed that his philosophy is, on a deeper level, a malign and underhanded praise of the current state of the world, and hence idealist.
But again, we are dabbling too close to the political plane here - like I wrote earlier, his philosophy must be critiqued on a purely theoretical level if we are to slay the beast dead, if we are to prevent it from striking out from the ground with philosophical arguments to counter our (currently political) attacks.
I will read more and then pick up the sword - this topic needs more thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment