Reading Notes: Minima Moralia
If Marx was a product of an earlier voluntarist∑ period of social transformation, of the age during and before-- on the threshold of-- socialist revolution and the collapse of capitalism, then Adorno is the product of an age marked, as some say our own is marked, by fatalism, an age where the structures of domination, commodification, and control seem geological in their permanence, where it is nearly impossible to even imagine the possibility of living some real alternative to the existing order. Adorno was one of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, named for the Institute for Social Research which was founded in Frankfurt in 1923, exiled to the U.S. in 1933, and reëstablished in Frankfurt in the early 1950s, and whose other members included Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Henryk Grossman, and Walter Benjamin. It is with these thinkers that one associates the project known as Critical Theory. Critical Theory was a Marxist critique of mass society-- coming from a finding that the bourgeois era, dominated by the bourgeois ego, was being replaced by a controlled, regulated, internally authoritarian mass. Fascism was not just a Nazi project (the Frankfurt School thinkers left Germany because of Nazism), but characteristic of the whole new era, which Adorno and others referred to as "late Capitalism."
While the bourgeois subject of earlier capitalism was free and unfree (its freedom was signified in ideals like liberty and individuality; its unfreedom in respect to the totality of the society that made freedom for the few and misery for the many)--- in the new social totality there was not even this contradictory freedom; there was no real freedom at all. Adorno's project for philosophy in Minima Moralia (stated in the Dedication) is an impossible one: a return to philosophy's old task-- the teaching of the good life-- in an age when life itself is impossible. His is a paradoxical work, a working through of "negative dialectics," a complicated notion which could perhaps be understood as: thinking in relation to a future synthesis which is invisible and inconceivable; or thinkin in relation to history, when the direction that gave history its meaning is no longer discernable. As Fredric Jameson writes, "a negative dialectic has no choice but to affirm the notion and value of an ultimate synthesis, while negating its possibility and reality in every concrete case that comes before it." In reading Adorno, keep in mind the following elements of his project: the thinking of the totality, the negative dialectic, the constant analytic movement towards history (the social and the economic), and the struggle for a language to describe an alienated state, when all systems of reference have been absorbed into the dominant system.
The idea of totality is central to Adorno's Marxism: that the sum of social existence informs its particular parts, whence Adorno's ability, in Minima Moralia among other works, to find traces of the social totality everywhere in daily life. Below is Adorno himself on the totality (keep in mind the oft-quoted line in Minima Moralia: "the whole is the untrue," which is itself a reversal of Hegel)):
Totality is not an affirmative but rather a critical category. Dialectical critique seeks to salvage or help to establish what does not obey totality, what opposes it or what first forms itself as the potential of a not yet existent individuation. The interpretation of facts is directed towards totality, without the interpretation itself being a fact. There is nothing socially factual which would not have its place in that totality. It is pre-established for all individual subjects since they obey its 'contrainte' [compulsion] even in themselves and even in their monadological constitution and here, in particular, conceptualize totality. To this extent, totality is what is most real. Since it is the sum of individuals' social relations which screen themselves off from individuals, it is also illusion-- ideology. A liberated mankind would by no means be a totality. Their being-in-themselves is just as much their subjugation as it deceives them about itself as the true societal substratum.
The idea of "negative dialectics" is a development of Marx's Hegelianism, but it is a self-consciously historicizing Hegelianism, a dialectic aware of its own impossibility, one that "prophesies catastrophe and proclaims salvation." Here is Fredric Jameson on Adorno's dialectic:
Dialectic... "had in Hegel as its foundation and its result the primacy of the subject, or in the well-known language of the introductory remarks to the Logic, the identity of identity and non identity." [the quotation is from Adorno in his Negative Dialectics]. But the very mark of the modern experience of the world itself is that precisely such identity is impossible, and that the primacy of the subject is an illusion, that subject and outside world can never find such ultimate identity or atonement under present historical circumstances. Yet if that ultimate synthesis toward which dialectical thought moves turns out to be unattainable it must not be thought that either of the terms of that synthesis, either of the conceptual opposites which are its subject and object, are any more satisfactory in their own right. The object considered in itself, the world taken as directly accessible content, results in the illusions of simple empirical positivism [note from Chris: common sense], or in an academic thinking which mistakes its own conceptual categories for solid parts and pieces of the real world itself. In the same way the exclusive refuge in the subject results in what is for Adorno the subjective idealism of Heidggerian existentialism-- a kind of ahistorical historicity, a mystique of anxiety, death, and individual destiny without any genuine content. Thus a negative dialectic has no choice but to affirm the notion and value of an ultimate synthesis while negating its possibility and reality in every concrete case that comes before it.
Such thought therefore aims at maintaining contact with the concrete, painfully continuing a process of thinking about the world itself, at the same time that it rectifies its own inevitable falsifications at every moment, thus appearing to unravel everything it had been able to achieve... [Negative dialectics] is a thoroughgoing critique of forms.....it is inevitable that every theory about the world, in its very moment of formation, tends to become an object for the mind and to be itself invested with all the prestige and permanency of a real thing in its own right, thus effacing the very dialectical process from which it emerged, and it is this optical illusion of the substantiality of thought itself which negative dialectics is designed to dispel. (Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, pp. 55-57).
It is also important to keep in mind that Adorno belonged to a class which no longer exists: the independent intellectual. Adorno's institutional connections were not occupational, but strategic, emotional, and political. He lived at a time when European intellectuals, largely drawn from the bourgeoisie, were public figures whose object of critique could be the whole of society. There was no doubt during this period, as there is now, about the important and critical function that independent intellectuals could play.
Minima Moralia is part of Adorno's "contact with the concrete," his effort to fashion a way of doing philosophy in the post-Fascist period. It is an experiment in style that was not uncommon among Frankfurt school theorists: the short, sometimes fragmentary form; the footnote to some unwritten longer work. In an age when "systems" blended easily with the totalizing systems of Late Capitalism, the non-systemic form of a work like
Minima Moralia had political import.
Dedication
This sets out Adorno's methodology. Read it carefully, but perhaps read it after reading some of the numbered entries in Minima Moralia, so you will have experienced Adorno's approach. Remember that for Adorno, the individualism of bourgeois individualism is not an Absolute Good-- he knows, with Marx, that it is linked to class privilege. But it was in bourgeois individualism, particularly its early stages (the 18th century) that some abstract idea of human freedom was possible. Note how throughout the entries Adorno will valorize the early stage of the bourgeoisie, when it preserved some of its "revolutionary" and universalizing character, over the later stage.
153- Finale.
This is about Negative Dialectics.
15 and 16- Le nouvel avare and On the dialectic of tact.
I choose these entries as examples of Adorno's historicizing mode. L'avare [The Miser] is Moliere's (1622-1673) play satirizing avarice; its main character is Harpagon. The new misers are worse than Harpagon and Scrooge--- why? Goethe (1749-1832) was, like Beethoven, a representative figure from the early stage of the bourgeoisie. Tact means something different when it contains remnants of the previous era (feudalism/ aristocracy). What kind of critique does Adorno accomplish by this historicizing of tact?
17 and 18- Proprietary rights and Refuge for the homeless
These entries are on the Adornian present. Read them and weep.
The Vienna Workshops and the Bauhaus were two modernist styles of architecture and design. The Vienna Workshops refers to the work of Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffman, and others, and is characterized by curves, non-angular geometric forms, and simple "arts and crafts" decoration and ornamentation (very similar to Art Deco). The Bauhaus was aggressively modern, non-decorative, abstract-geometrical, and "clean." What do you think of Adorno's "best mode of conduct?"
The following is from Adorno's In Search of Wagner. For those of you thinking through the connections between our reading of Marx and Marxists and literary study.
Works of art owe their existence to the social division of labor, to the separation of mental and physical work. In such a situation, however, they appear under the guise of independent existence; for their medium is not that of pure and autonomous spirit, but rather that of a spirit which having become object now claims to have surmounted the opposition between the two. Such contradiction obliges the work of art to conceal the fact that it is itself a human construction: its very pretension to meaning, and indeed that of human existence in general along with it, is the more convincingly maintained the less anything in it reminds us of its character as a product, and of the fact that it owes its existence to spirit as to something outside itself. Art which can no longer in good conscience put up with this deception-- its innermost principle-- has already dissolved the only element in which it can realize itself.... And if the autonomy of art in general is unthinkable without this concealment of work, the latter nonetheless becomes problematical, itself now a program, in late capitalism., under the domination of the exchange value and the increasing contradictions of such domination.
Additional Textual notes:
1. Marcel Proust 1871-1922 Best known modern French novelist.
20. Struwwelpeter- a famous German children's' story-- Bad Boys
22. Spengler-- Oswald Spengler-- pessimistic nonMarxist historian, author of The Decline of the West.
69. National Socialism-- Hitler's Nazism (Nazi stands for National Socialism, a project that obviously had nothing to do with Marx).
72. sub specie individuationis (seen) under the aspect of the individual
88. Graeculi-- Greeks ( here means something like Greek teachers or philosophers) living under Roman domination
94. All the world's not a stage-- play on the Shakespeare line "All the world's a stage..."
While the bourgeois subject of earlier capitalism was free and unfree (its freedom was signified in ideals like liberty and individuality; its unfreedom in respect to the totality of the society that made freedom for the few and misery for the many)--- in the new social totality there was not even this contradictory freedom; there was no real freedom at all. Adorno's project for philosophy in Minima Moralia (stated in the Dedication) is an impossible one: a return to philosophy's old task-- the teaching of the good life-- in an age when life itself is impossible. His is a paradoxical work, a working through of "negative dialectics," a complicated notion which could perhaps be understood as: thinking in relation to a future synthesis which is invisible and inconceivable; or thinkin in relation to history, when the direction that gave history its meaning is no longer discernable. As Fredric Jameson writes, "a negative dialectic has no choice but to affirm the notion and value of an ultimate synthesis, while negating its possibility and reality in every concrete case that comes before it." In reading Adorno, keep in mind the following elements of his project: the thinking of the totality, the negative dialectic, the constant analytic movement towards history (the social and the economic), and the struggle for a language to describe an alienated state, when all systems of reference have been absorbed into the dominant system.
The idea of totality is central to Adorno's Marxism: that the sum of social existence informs its particular parts, whence Adorno's ability, in Minima Moralia among other works, to find traces of the social totality everywhere in daily life. Below is Adorno himself on the totality (keep in mind the oft-quoted line in Minima Moralia: "the whole is the untrue," which is itself a reversal of Hegel)):
Totality is not an affirmative but rather a critical category. Dialectical critique seeks to salvage or help to establish what does not obey totality, what opposes it or what first forms itself as the potential of a not yet existent individuation. The interpretation of facts is directed towards totality, without the interpretation itself being a fact. There is nothing socially factual which would not have its place in that totality. It is pre-established for all individual subjects since they obey its 'contrainte' [compulsion] even in themselves and even in their monadological constitution and here, in particular, conceptualize totality. To this extent, totality is what is most real. Since it is the sum of individuals' social relations which screen themselves off from individuals, it is also illusion-- ideology. A liberated mankind would by no means be a totality. Their being-in-themselves is just as much their subjugation as it deceives them about itself as the true societal substratum.
The idea of "negative dialectics" is a development of Marx's Hegelianism, but it is a self-consciously historicizing Hegelianism, a dialectic aware of its own impossibility, one that "prophesies catastrophe and proclaims salvation." Here is Fredric Jameson on Adorno's dialectic:
Dialectic... "had in Hegel as its foundation and its result the primacy of the subject, or in the well-known language of the introductory remarks to the Logic, the identity of identity and non identity." [the quotation is from Adorno in his Negative Dialectics]. But the very mark of the modern experience of the world itself is that precisely such identity is impossible, and that the primacy of the subject is an illusion, that subject and outside world can never find such ultimate identity or atonement under present historical circumstances. Yet if that ultimate synthesis toward which dialectical thought moves turns out to be unattainable it must not be thought that either of the terms of that synthesis, either of the conceptual opposites which are its subject and object, are any more satisfactory in their own right. The object considered in itself, the world taken as directly accessible content, results in the illusions of simple empirical positivism [note from Chris: common sense], or in an academic thinking which mistakes its own conceptual categories for solid parts and pieces of the real world itself. In the same way the exclusive refuge in the subject results in what is for Adorno the subjective idealism of Heidggerian existentialism-- a kind of ahistorical historicity, a mystique of anxiety, death, and individual destiny without any genuine content. Thus a negative dialectic has no choice but to affirm the notion and value of an ultimate synthesis while negating its possibility and reality in every concrete case that comes before it.
Such thought therefore aims at maintaining contact with the concrete, painfully continuing a process of thinking about the world itself, at the same time that it rectifies its own inevitable falsifications at every moment, thus appearing to unravel everything it had been able to achieve... [Negative dialectics] is a thoroughgoing critique of forms.....it is inevitable that every theory about the world, in its very moment of formation, tends to become an object for the mind and to be itself invested with all the prestige and permanency of a real thing in its own right, thus effacing the very dialectical process from which it emerged, and it is this optical illusion of the substantiality of thought itself which negative dialectics is designed to dispel. (Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, pp. 55-57).
It is also important to keep in mind that Adorno belonged to a class which no longer exists: the independent intellectual. Adorno's institutional connections were not occupational, but strategic, emotional, and political. He lived at a time when European intellectuals, largely drawn from the bourgeoisie, were public figures whose object of critique could be the whole of society. There was no doubt during this period, as there is now, about the important and critical function that independent intellectuals could play.
Minima Moralia is part of Adorno's "contact with the concrete," his effort to fashion a way of doing philosophy in the post-Fascist period. It is an experiment in style that was not uncommon among Frankfurt school theorists: the short, sometimes fragmentary form; the footnote to some unwritten longer work. In an age when "systems" blended easily with the totalizing systems of Late Capitalism, the non-systemic form of a work like
Minima Moralia had political import.
Dedication
This sets out Adorno's methodology. Read it carefully, but perhaps read it after reading some of the numbered entries in Minima Moralia, so you will have experienced Adorno's approach. Remember that for Adorno, the individualism of bourgeois individualism is not an Absolute Good-- he knows, with Marx, that it is linked to class privilege. But it was in bourgeois individualism, particularly its early stages (the 18th century) that some abstract idea of human freedom was possible. Note how throughout the entries Adorno will valorize the early stage of the bourgeoisie, when it preserved some of its "revolutionary" and universalizing character, over the later stage.
153- Finale.
This is about Negative Dialectics.
15 and 16- Le nouvel avare and On the dialectic of tact.
I choose these entries as examples of Adorno's historicizing mode. L'avare [The Miser] is Moliere's (1622-1673) play satirizing avarice; its main character is Harpagon. The new misers are worse than Harpagon and Scrooge--- why? Goethe (1749-1832) was, like Beethoven, a representative figure from the early stage of the bourgeoisie. Tact means something different when it contains remnants of the previous era (feudalism/ aristocracy). What kind of critique does Adorno accomplish by this historicizing of tact?
17 and 18- Proprietary rights and Refuge for the homeless
These entries are on the Adornian present. Read them and weep.
The Vienna Workshops and the Bauhaus were two modernist styles of architecture and design. The Vienna Workshops refers to the work of Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffman, and others, and is characterized by curves, non-angular geometric forms, and simple "arts and crafts" decoration and ornamentation (very similar to Art Deco). The Bauhaus was aggressively modern, non-decorative, abstract-geometrical, and "clean." What do you think of Adorno's "best mode of conduct?"
The following is from Adorno's In Search of Wagner. For those of you thinking through the connections between our reading of Marx and Marxists and literary study.
Works of art owe their existence to the social division of labor, to the separation of mental and physical work. In such a situation, however, they appear under the guise of independent existence; for their medium is not that of pure and autonomous spirit, but rather that of a spirit which having become object now claims to have surmounted the opposition between the two. Such contradiction obliges the work of art to conceal the fact that it is itself a human construction: its very pretension to meaning, and indeed that of human existence in general along with it, is the more convincingly maintained the less anything in it reminds us of its character as a product, and of the fact that it owes its existence to spirit as to something outside itself. Art which can no longer in good conscience put up with this deception-- its innermost principle-- has already dissolved the only element in which it can realize itself.... And if the autonomy of art in general is unthinkable without this concealment of work, the latter nonetheless becomes problematical, itself now a program, in late capitalism., under the domination of the exchange value and the increasing contradictions of such domination.
Additional Textual notes:
1. Marcel Proust 1871-1922 Best known modern French novelist.
20. Struwwelpeter- a famous German children's' story-- Bad Boys
22. Spengler-- Oswald Spengler-- pessimistic nonMarxist historian, author of The Decline of the West.
69. National Socialism-- Hitler's Nazism (Nazi stands for National Socialism, a project that obviously had nothing to do with Marx).
72. sub specie individuationis (seen) under the aspect of the individual
88. Graeculi-- Greeks ( here means something like Greek teachers or philosophers) living under Roman domination
94. All the world's not a stage-- play on the Shakespeare line "All the world's a stage..."