The phenomenology of the anti-Spirit": Adorno's Marxism as Critical Theory

Paper delivered at Historical Materialism New York, 4/25/15

Introduction

What is Marxism?

For those outside the Marxian tradition, we might assume the answer is relatively
straightforward: Marxism was a movement predicated on the ideas of Marx, which
was eclipsed when the march of history proved them to be faulty. For in the end it was
capitalism that was communism’s gravedigger, not the other way around.

For those within the Marxian tradition, however, the answer is not so straightforward,
particularly these days. Is Marxism inextricably linked to the worker’s movement? Or
is that traditional Marxism? Is non-traditional marxism something that is solely the
province of academics with tenure-track jobs who would rather bicker over Marx’s
jottings than engage in class struggle? Or is it symptomatic of a renewed interest in
Marx that has emerged in cycles of struggles played out in the aftermath of the global
financial crisis?

The matter becomes even more complicated when you consider that the only
comments that Marx left on this issue were that he was not a Marxist. Doubly so
when the Marxism of Theodor W. Adorno is considered; because, as I’m sure most of
us were taught, Adorno traded in his Marxism for a plush suite in the grand abyss
hotel which provided ample support for his critique of instrumental reason, which
instead of holding that class exploitation should be abolished by praxis and class
struggle, held that everything (or at least reason from the Greeks till now) was shit.

Yet if there is not a Marxism as such, what does this hold for Adorno’s Marxism and
for representations and receptions of it in the Anglophone world? And how are these
representations and receptions shaped by the reception of Adorno in the Anglophone
as incumbent on notions of Marxism as such?

The answers to the questions are not so easy. Whilst a definitive account of the
reception of critical theory in the Anglophone world has yet to be written, it is
important to note that this reception was formulated beginning in the mid-late 1960s
by a number of figures, such as Martin Jay, who can be said to have treated the
critical theory of society -- as formulated by primarily by Adorno and Horkheimer --
as an element of larger topic of investigation. One such approach can be said to be
‘institutional,’ which, as reflected in the term Frankfurt School Critical Theory,
associated those who were employed or affiliated with the Institute for Social
Research at the University of Frankfurt with critical theory. Another is based on a
broad category, often politically inflicted, that was meant to capture important
theoretical and historical differences between Soviet and Western Marxism.1
1
The term was Western Marxism was first used by Merleau Ponty in The
Adventures of the Dialectic. It was taken up in number of historical works such as
Jay’s Marxism and Totality.
Although there were doubtless compelling reasons to use these analytic lenses at the
time, they can also be said to have had unintended consequences. By virtue of his
association with the Institute for Social Research, Jurgen Habermas and his
interlocutors took up the institutional mantle of Critical Theory. From this it followed
that Habermas and Habermasian criticisism’s of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical
theory soon gained hegemony, particularly within the burgeoning scholarship in
critical theory in England and America in the 1970s. At the same time, the category of
Western Marxism, came to treat the contributions of Horkheimer and Adorno as the
logical terminus of an academic Marxism, which preferred ruminating on aesthetics in
the Grand Hotel Abyss to revolutionary praxis.

In so doing, both of these strands relied on assumptions on what Marxism consisted in

as a criterion to disassociate Adorno’s critical theory from Marxism. This gave birth
to a number of shibboleths that misrepresent Adorno’s interpretation of Marx and its
central role in his critical theory of society. For contra accounts of Western Marxism,
Adorno’s Marxism did not consist in ‘precisely the same Hegelian-Marxist position
which Lukács had developed in History and Class Consciousness – but he supported
it independent of class considerations and as unashamed speculation’2, nor, contra the
Habermasian reception, was it abandoned in favour of a totalising critique of
instrumental reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Instead, the years that Adorno
spent in Frankfurt also mark the period of his most sophisticated engagement with
Marx, which also coincided with his criticisms of Lukacs’s notion of reification.
Moroever, as I and Patrick touch upon, his interaction with a number of students that
would take up this aspect of Adorno’s critical theory in their subsequent work, which
doubtlessly due to the institutional reception and hegemonic status of Habermasian
critical theory, has been mostly ignored in the Anglosphere.

In what follows I sketch the contours of Adorno’s late engagement with Marx, by
focusing on how Adorno utilized Marx in conjunction with his theory of social
objectivity in his theory of natural history and his theory of contemporary society. I
then outline the reading of Marx that set up the latter by focusing on the most detailed
comments Adorno made in Marx in a 1962 seminar that appears as the appendix to
Backhaus’ Dialectic of the Value-Form. In so doing, I outline the role of Marx in
these central elements of Adorno’s critical theory whilst differentiating it from the
misrepresentations I outlined above

The collection of philosophical fragments entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment has an

interesting history that can only be cursorily dealt with here. Written by Adorno and
Horkheimer in the dark days of their American exile, the book was first published by
a small Dutch press in 1944 . Yet it is interesting to note that the book was not
available for the majority of the time after Adorno had returned to Germany. In his
preparatory lectures in 1964-65 for Negative Dialectics he states that the little known
book will soon be republished.

2
Wiggershaus 1995, p. 95.
Moreover, the comments Adorno makes in these lectures on Dialectic of
Enlightenment hardly characterize it as what it would become in the course of its
eventual reception; not as one of the formulations Adorno makes of his concept of
natural history written in a particular context with Horkheimer, but the definitive
statement of Adorno’s formulation of it, which Habermasian critics have charged
provides a totalizing account of the inexorable march of instrumental reason and a
transhistorical account of simple commodity production as evidenced in Odysseus as
the first bourgeois.

However, as Werner Bonefeld points out such an interpretation ignores how Adorno
conceives of history. For Adorno, history is not trans-historical, nor is it teleological.
Oddyseus is not the first bourgeoisie because he was a member of the capitalist class
or because he acted in a way that inexorably led to contemporary society. Rather,
history can only be comprehended from the standpoint of the present alone, Thus as
Bonefeld notes, ‘In Adorno’s view, Marx’s critique of political economy amounts to a
critique of history because his critique of capitalism reveals the whole of history in the
present conditions of domination’. Consequently, in a manner akin to Marx’s account
of primitive accumulation, Adorno is not making the factual statement that Oddyseus
was bourgeois, instead he is characterizing him as such in order to identify the salient
aspects of contemporary society that can be seen to be presupposed in a similar yet
different sense in Oddyseus because it is realized in our society.

This can be seen in an important footnote to Dialectic of Enlightenment, which

indicates that the negative philosophy of history adumbrated in Dialectic of
Enlightenment sketches the genesis of the domination of external and internal nature
from the perspective of the present by adumbrating the subsequent development of
different forms of second nature encapsulated in the pre-capitalist practices of
‘animism’ and ‘myth’ and the contemporary one of commodity fetishism. As Adorno
notes in a gloss of this schema ‘In the enlightened world, mythology has entered into
the profane [...] It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men
from the objects dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of
men - even those of the individual himself - were bewitched. [...] Animism
spiritualises the object, whereas industrialism objectifies the spirits of men.’

These salient aspects described in Dialectic of Enlightenment – the domination of

nature leading to historically differentiated instances of the external and internal
domination of individuals by second nature – were revisited and reformulated by
Adorno in the 1960s. A key interlocutor in this formulation of natural history was
Adorno’s student, Alfred Schmidt, who wrote his thesis on Marx’s Concept of Nature
under Adorno, which seems to have provided the impetus for Adorno to articulate
these themes by drawing on Marx, not only explicitly, but also extensively.

Space and time limit an in depth account of this influence, But let me quickly note
how these aspects of Schmidt’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of nature are echoed,
and indeed, serve as the basis of Adorno’s account of natural history in Negative
Dialectics.

Schmidt argues that Marx’s idea of the metabolism with nature held that “the whole
of nature is socially mediated and, inversely, society is mediated through nature as a
component of total reality.” This is because “by acting on the external world and
changing it” humanity “at the same time changes his own nature.” Consequently, “In
a wrongly organized society, the control of nature, however highly developed,
remains at the same time an utter subjection to nature.” This means “that men are still
not in control of their own productive forces vis-i-vis nature, that these forces
confront them as the organized, rigid form of an opaque society, as a “second nature”
which sets its own essence against its creators.”

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno uses passages from Marx often sourced from Schmidt,
and more specifically Schmidt’s work on Marx, to articulate his account of society as
the domination of external and internal nature and of capitalist society as a negative
totality that is a historically-specific variant of such a society. This is most evident in
a statement of Adorno’s that is essentially a paraphrase of Schmidt’s analysis of
Marx’s account of the relationship between domination of nature and of society as a
dominating second nature: “Marx recognized that against Hegel”, ‘the objectivity of
historical life is that of natural history.”3

Thus, while

Hegel described the first nature, a world of things existing outside men,
as a blind conceptless occurrence. The world of men as it takes shape in
the state, law, society, and the economy, is for him 'second nature', manifested
reason, objective Spirit. Marxist analysis opposes to this the view that Hegel's
'second nature' should rather be described in the terms he applied to the first:
namely, as the area of conceptlessness, where blind necessity and blind chance
coincide. The 'second nature' is still the 'first'. Mankind has still not stepped
beyond natural history4

The centrality of Marx to this conception of natural history can also be seen in the
following point from History and Freedom in which Adorno discusses the historical
nature of social objectivity as negative, aligning and basing his account of second
nature qua natural history with Marx:

Marx makes a point of confronting Hegel on this issue, even though he agrees with
him in claiming that objectivity asserts itself over heads of individuals and through
their actions: ‘And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery
of the natural laws of its movement . . .’ or ‘My standpoint, from which the evolution
of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can
less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he
socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them’
(Capital, vol. 1, Preface to the first German edition, p. 10). The idea of natural laws
governing history, the idea that social entanglements are the natural outgrowth of
history, goes together with the unfreedom of the individual. There is this to be said
about the interpretation of Marx: in contrast to the prevailing belief that Marx had a
positive view of the natural laws of society and that one needs only to obey them to

3
Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialectics
4
Alfred Schmidt The Concept of Nature in Marx, 42-3
obtain the possibility of the right kind of society – in contrast to this belief, Marx
wishes to get beyond them into the kingdom of freedom, i.e., to escape from the
notion of history as natural history. 117

Consequently, following Schmidt, Adorno draws on Marx to characterize the history

of society as “that of the control of nature, progressing into domination over human
beings and ultimately over internalized nature.” Contra the Habermasian notion of
totalizing instrumental reason in then seems fair to say that Adorno did not abandon
Marxism in Dialectic of Englightenment for a historical and totalizing account of the
development of instrumental reason. Rather, the Marxian elements in Dialectic of
Enlightenement were later taken up and elaborated in his later work in order to
conceive of historically-specific supraindividual domination of capitalist society in a
Marxian vein insofar as its “Natural lawfulness is real … as a law of motion of
unconscious society.”5

II

This brings us to Adorno’s account of negative social objectivity in contemporary

society, which in his late work turned to Marx’s theory of value, or what Adorno
often characterizes simply as exchange or fetishism. Adorno’s students, HG
Backahuas and Helmut Reichelt, argue that despite Adorno’s perceptive comments on
Marx’s theory of value, he never got to the heart of it, which lead them to formulate a
new interpretation of Marx’s theory of value, that Patrick will provide some
comments on. As Christian will also show, it is nevertheless the case that this notion
of exchange is central to Adorno’s critical social theory. In what remains, I will focus
on discussing how Adorno interpreted these aspects of Marx’s work and signal how
Adorno drew on them in order to set their contributions.

Before that a quick note on Lukacs. Although as I noted above this element of
Adorno’s theory is often simply treated as his theory of reification, which he is said to
have taken from Lukacs whilst relinquishing praxis, Adorno’s late interpretation of
Marx’s theory of value is significantly different 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
negative socio-cultural totality that has to be abolished rather than as a totality that has
to be grasped and then seized by the class that constitutes it. 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,
inversion and personification. 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. These
deficiencies of Lukács’s theory of reification are contrasted with Marx’s properly
dialectical and objective theory of the fetish character of commodities in which ‘The
fetish-character of commodities is not chalked up to subjective-mistaken
consciousness, but objectively deduced out of the social a priori, the process of

5
Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialectics,
exchange.’ Thus, contra Lukacs, for Adorno value is a socially objective
phenomenology of the non-mind

But why and how is this the case?

On a general level, Adorno sees ‘the highly obscure and difficult theory of the so-
called law of value’ as ‘the summation of all the social acts taking place through
exchange. It is through this process that society maintains itself and, according to
Marx, continues to reproduce itself and expand despite all the catastrophes that may
eventuate.’ P 50

Although how sees this dynamic as playing out is littered through out his work, I now
turn to Backhaus’s notes from the 1962 seminar which provide Adorno’s most in
depth account in terms of his interpretation of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.
On the interpretation that he presents there, it is abstract labour which makes
commodities exchangeable. Abstract labour thus ‘abstracts from living opponents’
making commodities ‘a kind of sum of something solid, objective [Dinglichem].’ By
virtue of these attributes of abstract labour, the commodity also possesses its fetish
form which Adorno characterises in autonomous and personified terms:

On the face of it, these abstractions make what is exchanged a thing in itself. What is
a social relation appears as if it was the sum of objective qualities of an object. The
concept of commodity fetishism is nothing but this necessary process of abstraction.
By performing the operation of abstraction, the commodity no longer appears as a
social relation but it seems as if value was a thing in itself.

As Adorno contends, these autonomous and personified properties are

constituted in social production for exchange:

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.

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.

For Adorno, the fetish-form of the exchange abstraction is objective, not subjective or
psychological. This is because ‘[i]n a society in which exchange value is the dominant
principle, this fetishizing is realised necessarily.’

Moreover, 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.’

Thus, Adorno sees Marx’s theory of value as a supraindividual account of social

domination; a theory of the social constitution of an autonomous society that inverts
to compel and dominate the individuals on both sides of the class relations that
constitute and reproduce it. This the reason why Marx’s theory of value is so
important to Adorno, for it is ‘still is the key to society’ and is what ‘distinguishes’
the Frankfurt School from ‘all other traditions of sociology.’

This can be seen in Adorno’s discussions of the exchange abstraction’s place in his
social theory as a theory of social domination.

Adorno describes the exchange abstraction as having emerged historically from the
‘dissolution of all products and activities into exchange-values.’ This dissolution was
‘presupposed’ by the social form of production, which consisted of ‘the dissolution of
all solidified personal (historical) relationships of dependency in production, as much
as the all-round dependency of the producers on each other.’

Due to this development, a contradictory form of atomised dependence arose in which

‘the production of every individual is dependent on the production of all others; as
much as (also) the transformation of one’s products into food has become dependent
on the consumption of all others.’ What Adorno refers to as ‘this reciprocal
dependency’ is ‘expressed in the constant necessity of exchange and in exchange-
value as an all-round mediator.’

As a result, this constant necessity constitutes the exchange abstraction, which lies in
‘society itself’ and ‘becomes constitutive of society’. 415 This is because a necessary
process of abstraction occurs in exchange: ‘in terms of average social labour time the
specific forms of the objects to be exchanged are necessarily disregarded; instead,
they are reduced to a universal unit. The abstraction, therefore, lies not in the
abstracting mode of thought of the sociologist, but in society itself.’

The development of this exchange abstraction also means that it comes to constitute
society and is constitutive of society as such; ‘society is a system in the sense of a
synthesis of an atomized plurality, in the sense of a real yet abstract assemblage of
what is in no way immediately or 'organically' united. The exchange relationship
largely endows the system with a mechanical character.’ This means that ‘something
like a 'concept is implicit in society in its objective form’’

Adorno’s description of how this concept functions as an ‘all around mediator’

reflects his description of Marx’s theory of fetishism as an alien, autonomous,
inverted form of domination. This can be seen in Adorno’s characterisation of this
‘mediating conceptuality’ as an alien form of conceptuality that is ‘independent both
of the consciousness of the human beings subjected to it and of the consciousness of
the scientists.’ It is also reflected in his characterisation of its autonomous and
dominating properties as a ‘conceptuality which holds sway in reality’, and which is
‘the objectively valid model for all essential social events’, so that ‘society obeys this
conceptuality tel quel.’ Finally, it is evident in his statement on the inverted status of
society in which ‘the fetish character of commodities [...] historically has become the
prius of what according to its concept would have to be posterius.’

This reading of Marx and its centrality to Adorno’s critical theory as a theory of social
domination is cashed out in the following, which to me is the essence of Adorno’s
Marxism:

[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.

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