Closer than we think: Adorno, Hegel and the problem of totality

Vladimir Safatle
Department of Philosophy
Universidade de São Paulo

The most common reading of the relationship between Hegel and Adorno sees
the negative dialectic as a kind of Hegelian dialectic, but an “amputated” one. It
presents this relationship as if negative dialectic was a dialectic deprived of the
positive-rational moment of synthesis. This amputation is presented as the result
of liberating determinate negation from its function within the Hegelian concept
of totality. At least according to this traditional perspective, Hegelian
determinate negation is the movement of establishing relationships between
different contents of experience, a movement that is able to produce a totality
available to consciousness. When consciousness moves from one experiential
content to another through determinate negation, understanding that the result
of this movement isn’t the negation of the previous content but the revelation of
how both are deeply interdependent means that consciousness would be able to
experience that the determination of one specific content is only fully possible by
updating the network of negations that defines it. That is, consciousness would
understand the true meaning of Spinoza's adagio: Omni determinatio est negatio.
What Hegel understands as a position of totality would be exactly this update of
the network of negations that determine the content of experience. A position
which defines negativity as a kind of cunning that aims to show the limited
nature of the partial moments of the experience, because such partial moments
would be surpassed by the unveiling of the functionality of each moment in an
accessible overview of the whole.
But Adornian negative dialectic, as "an ad hoc practice of determinate
negation", would be the aporia of a totalizing critique of reason unable to
recognize a concrete horizon of reconciliation, bordering on absolute nihilism.
Some critics even accused negative dialectic of simply not being dialectical. Just
consider, in this regard, Robert Pippin 's comment: "The 'negative dialectic' is
simply not dialectic, but a philosophy of finitude and a demand for the
recognition of such finitude. The 'non- identical' plays a rhetorical role similar to
the identification of the Kantian Ding an sich against later idealism." The
reference to Kant is not casual because apparently it would be possible to see the
transcendental dialectic as a kind of negative dialectic, since it is also a critique of
totality, but by exposing the illusions produced by the transcendent use of
transcendental ideas. Perhaps this could explains why such reading of negative
dialectics as a philosophy of finitude with a Kantian air is present in various
traditions of interpretation. Let's recall, for example, Alain Badiou, for whom
"what Adorno retains from Kant is the irreducibility of the experience, the
impossibility of dissolving the pure experience in the concept’s activity. Here
remains a irreducible element of passive limitation , exactly as in Kant passivity,
which is the practice of the sensible , is irreducible”.
However, what we find in Adorno’s texts is something totally different.
This shouldn’t surprise us in someone who says clearly : "philosophical reflection
ensures the non-conceptual in the concept", i.e. , it integrates the non-conceptual
as a moment of the development of the concept . Actually, there is no concept of
the Hegelian dialectic that Adorno simply abandons. Totality, mediation,
synthesis, Spirit (understood in a non-metaphysical way as social work): none of
these concepts will be simple dismissed by Adorno.
The negative dialectic of Adorno is not the result of the abandonment of
certain concepts and processes proper to Hegelian dialectic, or even the
amputation of Hegelian dialectic. In fact, the negative dialectic is the result of a
set of displacements of the positions and presuppositions of the system of the
Hegelian dialectic. This can explain why all Hegelian concepts are operating in
Adorno's dialectic, but without being posited as they were posited by Hegel,
without being upgraded within the situations thought by Hegel. Adorno knows
that, in certain contexts, to posit a concept is the best way to cancel it. Keeping
the concept in question is sometimes the best way to rebuild its critical force. As
Adorno says:

Even the thought that opposes reality to sustain the possibility always
defeated, only does so to the extent that comprises this possibility from
the point of view of its accomplishment, as the possibility of achieving
something towards which reality itself, even though weak, extends its
tentacles.

That is, the possibility that criticism presupposes as its ground is not "mere
possibility", but a possibility latent in reality. The negativity of possibility in
relation to reality is the force that puts reality in motion. In this sense, Adorno
knows that sometimes we should not try to make explicit what is implicit. If we
can say that negative dialectic displaces the system of positions and
presuppositions of the Hegelian dialectic then that is because Adorno refuses to
accept the reconciliations that Hegel believed to be already mature. It is because
Hegel believed that the time had come to trust on the strength of expliciteness in
philosophical language.
If we accept the interpretation that I propose, we will need to state that
the concepts related to the "positive-rational" moment do not disappear from the
negative dialectic. They shall remain in silence in order to deny the bad
reconciliations present in contemporary social life, and with the pressure of
irreconcilability, to open the way for the advent of another kind of reconciliation.
As Adorno says: "the philosophical anticipation of reconciliation is an attack on
real reconciliation". When philosophical speculation abstractly posits
reconciliation, it relies on figures of concrete reconciliation currently present in
social life. For Adorno, this means that philosophy will be too weak to avoid
justifying the present course of the world, thereby perpetuating false
reconciliations.

The totality

In his readings of Hegel, Adorno criticizes mainly three figures of reconciliation,

moments of the Idea, namely: the State, World spirit as a vector of rationality of
the historical process, and the identity between subject and object within the
Absolute. These are three figures that can no longer be posited. They are the
figures which Adorno alludes to when he says, "none of the reconciliations
supported by absolute idealism proved valid, from the historical-political to the
logical reconciliation." However, this does not mean at all that the experience of
totality would be interdicted to thought or operate only as a negative reference,
in other words, as an illusion that should be reported as the constant unfolding
of the false universality of Capital and as the generalization of the equivalent-
form proper to the logic of commodity. In fact, the totality in social life is untruth
that thought seeks to denounce on a speculative level. But, as much as Adorno
speaks of a "nonviolent synthesis ", he will present models of a reconciled totality
at important moments of his work. A good question is: where are such models
and why can they only be present in very specific spheres of social life?
Everyone knows the canonical statement of Adorno: "The whole is the
untruth." But a detailed analysis of how Adorno understands the problem of
totality in Hegel demonstrates a more complex relationship between the
thinkers. Adorno knows that the simple negation of totality necessarily leads us
to the positivist fascination for the immediacy of factuality and of the given. Such
a simple negation of totality is the password to validate a science that just take
notes, classifies and accepts a disjointed existence, losing the strength to carry
out all criticism of reified reality. This leads Adorno to search in Hegel for a
critical model against these positivist temptations, and he finds one precisely in
the concept of totality. For this, Adorno needs to remember that for Hegel:

As the parts are not taken autonomously against the whole, which is the
element of them, the critic of the Romantics also knows that the totality
will be realized by means of the parts only by separation, alienation,
reflection, in short, through everything that is anathema to the Gestalt
theory.

Adorno does not subscribe to the current idea that the Hegelian totality would be
a kind of structure prior to the experience of consciousness, a structure always
present and ready to be unveiled at the end of the process. A process determined
a priori and with just false movements. This would give us a whole as a
movement without event. A paradigmatic example of such an interpretation can
be found in Heidegger's critique of Hegel. Rather, Adorno insists that the
Hegelian totality should initially be regarded as the quintessence of the partial
moments pointing beyond themselves. This is what allows one to say that, in the
case of the Hegelian totality: " the nexus [between experiential contents] is not
one of continuity, but one of sudden change, the process does not occur in the
approximation of moments, but properly breaks through". This is another way of
saying that the totality should not be understood as a normative determination
able to define, by itself, the sense of what it subsumes. Totality must be
understood as the strength able to decenter the identity of individuals. A
decentering felt by individuals as a rupture and sudden change. This leads
Adorno to claim that Hegel's system does not aim to be a scheme that covers
everything but the center of a latent force acting on singular moments, driving
these moments with the openness of transcendence.
Thus, Adorno does recognize in the best moments of his texts that totality
in Hegel cannot be seen as a simple negation of particularity and as a complete
subsumption of particular situations under a generic structural determination.
Actually, totality will be the necessary consequence of understanding the
particular as always more than itself. Totality will appear as the condition for not
losing the force that transcends static identity of individuals, but for allowing this
force to produce relationships.
In this respect, one can understand totality as a dialectic category in two
different ways. In the first case, totality appears as a closed structure where all
relationships are predetermined within a meta-stable system. In this context,
relations of necessity tend to be profoundly deterministic, as we find, for
example, in Lukacs with statements such as:

When consciousness is related to the totality of society, than it is possible

to recognize the thoughts and feelings that men would have in a particular
situation of life, if they have been able to fully understand the situation
and the interests arising from it, both in immediate action and in relation
to the structure of the whole society.

Lukacs could not be clearer: totality as an explanatory key to phenomena allows

us to deduce all the mental and emotional life of individuals, at least if it reallu
reflected their social position in a given situation. From a socio-political point of
view, such totality, updated by class consciousness, would be the condition for
the revolutionary transformation of history and for a criticism of a false
consciousness immerged in its particularism. Probably, readings of the Hegelian
totality like this are a major reason for the often hyperbolic character of
Adorno's critique of Hegel.
However, we find in Hegel a relatively distinct notion of totality, namely,
something that should be described as a process that is continuously reordering
a series of elements. In this case, the relationships between the elements and
moments are still necessary, but this necessity does not obey a deterministic
logic. Rather, it obeys a complex process of transfiguring contingencies into
necessity. This transfiguration requires us to think totality as a system open to a
continuous instability, because a continuous integration of new elements initially
experienced as contingent and indeterminate reconfigures the meaning of
previous elements. The determinate negation doesn’t appear only as a passage to
another content that would show the limited nature of the partial moments of
experience. Determinate negation is mainly the posterior rewriting of contents
already taken as parts of a whole. The movement that produces determinate
negation is a movement that produces changes forwards but also backwards.
Adorno emphasizes this point by stating that what Hegel refers as synthesis, "is
not only the quality that emerges from determinate negation, but the return of
the denied , the dialectical progression is always also an appeal to what has
become a victim of the concept : progress in the realization of the concept is its
self-correction."
A good example of this movement is the way that Hegel reminds us that
the Spirit can "undo what happened" [kann ungeschehen machen was passiert ist]
reabsorbing a fact by giving it new significance. It is just in a whole as a
continuous process that an event can be undone and that Spirit's wounds can be
healed without leaving scars. At this point, it is difficult not to agree with Lebrun,
who says: "If history is progressing, this progression is also a looking back, it is a
line of progression by reversion effect ( ... ) the Hegelian 'Need- providence ' is so
little authoritarian that it seems to learn, along with the course of the world,
what your goals were."
Thus, totality cannot be defined here as what allows the semantic
understanding of all the elements it subsumes (as is assumed in the above quote
from Lukacs), but as a perspective that allows the syntactic comprehension of
the continuous movement of absorption of what initially appeared indeterminate
and contingent. In Hegelian ontology, there is a risk of indeterminacy that we
must fully accept before we try to overcome it.

Subject-object

Perhaps the best example regarding this concept of totality as an open process is
the dialectic between subject and object, since the dialectical relationship
between subject and object is the methodological basis for understanding the
relationship between form and material, concept and intuition, identity and
difference, among many others. In fact, normally we accept that there is a strong
difference between subject-object dialectic in Hegel and Adorno. And the text
seems to bear this out - just remember several explicit assertions of Adorno. In
many situations, Adorno argues that Hegel cannot take the subject-object
dialectic to its real consequences. Hence, statements like the following:

The Hegelian subject-object is the subject. This clarifies the unresolved

contradiction in regard to the Hegelian requirement of full coherence,
according to which the subject-object dialectic, which is not subjected to
any superior abstract concept, is present during the whole process and,
however, upgrades itself as the life of the absolute Spirit.

Adorno recognizes the truth of the Hegelian criticism of the opposition between
consciousness that gives form and simple matter. He knows that the construction
of self-consciousness as a speculative unity between subject and object opens up
the space to think about the thing itself, since it is not relegated to the status of
mere thoughtless matter. In this sense, Adorno insists that for Hegel:

Mediation never means, as painted the most disastrous misunderstanding

since Kierkegaard, a medium between the extremes, but the mediation
occurs through the extremes and in the extremes themselves, that is the
radical aspect of Hegel, which is irreconcilable with all moderantismus.

However, this mediation through the extremes is the way that negative dialectic
itself works. This shows how misguided prospects are that differentiate between
the Hegelian dialectic and Adorno's dialectic by way of an alleged distinction
between their models of mediation. Adorno gives a name for this mediation
through the extremes and in the extremes that operates within the dialectic
between subject and object: mimesis. But Adorno brings mimesis closer to
Hegelian determinate negation, as we see in a statement like the following :

The Hegelian speculative concept saves mimesis through the self-

consciousness of Spirit: the truth is not adaequatio but affinity and the
 returning of reason to its mimetic essence is revealed by Hegel as the
human right of the Spirit.

Thus, far from being reduced to a purely projective relationship between subject
and object, the Hegelian dialectic recognizes mimetic affinities that change the
identity of the two poles. But this necessarily means recognizing that the subject
finds within himself a "core of the object", i.e. an opacity that objects to the full
apprehension of consciousness. This recognition is the way that negative
dialectic achieves a certain reconciliation, which is present every time that
Adorno speaks of the relationship between subject and object as a
"communication of the differentiated."
But, just as it is impossible to have one’s cake and eat it, it is not possible
to say at the same time that "the Hegelian subject-object is the subject" and that
"the speculative Hegelian concept saves mimesis through the self-consciousness
of Spirit." In the first case we have an un-reflexive projection, while in the second
we still have a projection, but subjected to a double reflection resulting from the
need to internalize the moment of resistance of the object to conceptual
organization.
In this sense, we recall how the Adornian mimetic thought is not a mode
of thought characterized by cognitive belief in the strength of the relationships of
similarity and analogy. Mimetic thinking is mainly understood as the transitive
ability of putting oneself in the place of another and as another. Mimesis would
be the way of overcoming the dichotomy between self and other (such
dichotomy is constructed as subject/object, conceptual/non-conceptual,
nature/culture) by identifying myself with what appears to me as the opposite .
It internalizes relations of opposition, transforming an outer limit into internal
difference. Not a mere imitation of the object, but the assimilation of the object
itself. Therefore, Adorno describe mimesis as a system of mediation through the
extremes and as the extremes themselves. Mediation is able to build a model of
reconciliation that Adorno would call a "communication of the differentiated".
If Adorno argues that Hegel's speculative concept saves mimesis, which
presupposes the idea that there is a strong relationship between mimetic
rationality and conceptual rationality, it is because of statements (by Hegel) like
the following: "The I is the content of the relationship and the relationship itself,
it faces the Other and at the same time overcomes him, and the Other, for the I, is
the I itself" This can not simply mean the submission of the subject-object
relation to the projective structure of the subject. If the I is both the form and
content of the relation that is the case because the opacity that comes from the
content is already internal to the I. This mediation through the extremes of form
and content is already an internal mediation in the I. This involves
internalization of otherness to the core of the I.
That's how we can read a statement like: "The self-consciousness is the
reflection from the being of the sensible and perceived world, it is essentially the
return from being-Other." We can understand this passage from the being of the
sensible and perceived world to self-consciousness, with his subsequent return,
by taking into account how, in sense-certainty and perception, consciousness had
the experience of the object's resistance to the concept. In the field of experience,
consciousness has been confronted with something that denied the concept,
having the experience of a difference with the concept, a difference coming from
the object. To return from your being-Other is to internalize this difference, re-
directing not only the relationship to the object, but also the relations to myself.
Such self-recognition of what is opaque in the object seems to me a
central operation in Hegel's strategy , since it leads us to the final chapter of the
Phenomenology. In this central moment of reconciliation Hegel presents an
infinite judgment [unendliches Urteil] able to produce the synthesis of the
dialectic between subject and object. This is the statement: "the being of the I is a
thing [das Sein des Ichs ist ein Ding], and precisely a sensory and immediate thing
[ein unmittelbares sinnliches Ding]". This statement is followed by a comment:
"This judgment, taken immediately as it sounds , is lacking - of - spirit" because if
we understand the sensory thing as a simple predication of the I, then the I
disappears in the thing - the predicate posits the subject: "but concerning its
concept, this judgment is indeed the richest - of - spirit." This shows us that, at
least in the Phenomenology, the end of the speculative path is only given by the
judgment: "the being of the self is a thing." Here the recognition takes place that
"self-consciousness is precisely the pure concept being -there, just empirically
perceptible [empirisch wahrnehmbar]" But it is a form of recognition that can
only be effective when the subject finds in itself a core of the object . This is not a
simple subsumption of the object, but the recognition of the rationality proper to
the movement of the Spirit that continually integrates what initially appears as
opaque to the determinations of meaning. Such ideas should be taken into
account in order to better understand the movement proper to Hegelian totality.
Adorno himself recognizes its relevance when he states:

Even if nothing can be predicated of an individual without determinacy

and, thus, without universality, the moment of something particular,
opaque, to which this predication relates, does not perish. This moment
stands amid the constellation, otherwise the dialectic hypostatizes
mediation without preserving the moments of immediacy, as indeed
Hegel never wanted .

Musical reconciliation

If we accept this interpretation, we must ask if Adorno believes in the existence

of some space in social life in which we can see these experiences of totality as
continuous process that transcends the static identity of individuals, and not as a
strong and determined normative meta-stable system. If we want a positive
answer to this question, we must turn our eyes toward the musical aesthetic.
This should not surprise us, since Adorno asserts that the idea of totality as an
identity mediated by non-identity is a law of artistic form transposed to
philosophy.
For some people, such a use of musical aesthetics may seem strange.
However, Adorno never shared the philosophical disqualification of artistic
praxis or the definition of art as a simple " compensatory " sphere for a time
unable to carry out major structural changes. For him, art was, rather, a
fundamental sphere of social praxis, with strong inductive force in the fields of
morality, theory of knowledge and politics. That is to say, Adornian philosophy
requires a broader understanding of social praxis, in which aesthetic production
can be recognized in its power to transform ways of life. Actually, this entails
turning Hegelian thought, with his diagnosis of the end of art, just upside down.
This philosophical appeal to art is a constant in the intellectual experience
of Adorno. We see here that art is not used as an alibi for abandoning the concept
in favor of some kind of immanence with a pre-conceptual intuition, of pre-
reflexive affinity between subject and nature or some kind of hypostasis of the
ineffable, the archaic and the original. Rather, such a privileged resource simply
means that we need to support new ways of formalizing and ordering that don’t
produce the repression of the experience of non-identity. That is, new ways that
in certain historical situations make their first appearance in arts, and
afterwards unfold in other spheres of social life. This was the core that animated
the Adornian intellectual experience: to think from the vantage point of the
promises of a new order brought by the most advanced artistic production of his
time . Let's say this was the positive ground of his negative dialectics .
In this sense, it is not without interest to recall how Hegel appears on the
horizon of Adornian musical aesthetics, even if the Hegelian aesthetic, due to its
anti-romanticism, does not put music in a very good light. For example, by
insisting on the comparisons between the construction processes of Beethoven
and the project of the Science of Logic, Hegel eventually becomes an important
reference for Adorno's thinking about the nature of totality in musical works.
Having the Hegelian problem of totality in mind, Adorno understands the
function of aesthetic form, so well performed by Beethoven, in terms of: "a
mediation as a relationship of parts to each other and to the totality, that is to say
as a completing development [Durchbildung] of details". This will be even more
clear when Adorno defines the function of form as a " musical synthesis " or
when he sees the musical form as: "the totality in which a musical thread (
Zusammenhang ) acquires the character of authenticity."
However , Adorno insists that the functional totality of musical works can
not be thought anymore as the subsumption of the particular moments to
ground formal structures. In a later text he will search, for example, for a notion
of thematic work no longer linked to the classical notion of clearly identified
themes worked through repetitions and modulations. This would result in
another kind of thematic work :

Complexes of relative independence that forms a unit that, thanks to their

character and the way they relate to each other , is presented as
necessary, without themes reappearing through the work under the same
or different forms .

What Adorno seeks here is a notion of " non- totalizing " synthesis and unity that
is capable of preserving the heterogeneity of the elements that compose it . This
becomes even clearer when he asserts about his programmatic concept of
informal music: "impulses and relationships of an informal music presupposes
no rule which it would be submitted in advance, even as a principle of
thematism". There is thematic writing (in the sense that Adorno wants to
defend) only where the whole is formed from independent elements that would
relate to each other not a priori , but through a "becoming " in which the whole is
the result of a continuous process. Adorno wants to preserve the structure that
binds elements together but by applying the structure to elements that remain
heterogeneous. Adorno tries to explain this better by invoking, and this is
somewhat surprising, Hegel :

The Hegelian idea that, even if all immediacy is mediated, is dependent on

its opposite, the very concept of an immediate element as the result of a
becoming does not simply disappear in mediation - this idea is fruitful for
music theory. However, such an element of immediacy in music, would
not be the sound itself, but the figure detail apprehended alone where it
appears as a relatively plastic, separate unit contrasting with the entire
development.

A statement like this shows, first, that Adorno recognizes that the totality in
Hegel should not be confused with absolute systematicity. He knows that the
immediate moment does not simply disappear in mediation. This could not be
otherwise since the relationship between the concept and the non-conceptual is
decisive both in Adorno's and in Hegel’s concept of mediation. This is something
Adorno stresses sometimes, stating, for example, that :

The unlimited expansion of the subject to the absolute spirit in Hegel has
as its consequence that, as an inherent moment of Spirit, not only the
subject but also the object appears as substance and claims its own being.
Thus, the much admired material richness of Hegel’s work is itself a
function of speculative thought.

Second, such a concept of totality could be present in the experience of

musical form. Lets think about how musical detail in certain works is not only a
moment in a cont’rast structure (with the type antecedent/consequent), it is not
an element in the inexorable sequence of a motivic development or in a serial
extended thought. In this sense, grasping the musical detail as a "relatively
plastic unit" means searching for the source of its dynamic development not in
the submission to a scheme (whether the notion of the formal series or set of
tonal musical language), but in the irreducible conflict between form and
material - conflict that finds its primordial form in Beethoven's late style.
This non-identity between form and material isn’t, however , the denial of
dialectic in favor of a primary irreducibility of the "element of immediacy." If that
were the case, we would have works of art that would be just juxtapositions, and
not works that internalize their own principle of destabilization in a further
construction effort (for Adorno, “Erwartung” by Schoenberg, or “String Quartet”
by Berg .Here we see the aesthetical consequence of ideas as:

Hegel bends everywhere to the very essence of the object, everywhere the
object is immediately anew, but even this subordination to the discipline
of the thing requires the most extreme stress of concepts. The discipline
of the thing triumphs at the moment that the subject's intentions are
undone in the object.

We note how this statement goes against Adorno's critique of the subject-object
dialectic in Hegel. We can only say that the subject undoes its intentions in the
object when it recognizes the material’s internal tendencies as itself. When the
subject recognizes this it necessarily produces mediations, but now leading the
concept to the extreme. Adorno called mimesis this way of understanding
mediation through the effort of undoing the intentions of the subject in the
resistance to the object. The defense of the irreducibility of mimesis in more
advanced works of art serves to Adorno as a way of thinking constructions that
aren’t deduced from the regularity of formal determinations, but are capable of
accepting a principle of development strange to the autonomy of pure form.
Through this problem related to mimesis, Adorno can show that "philosophy is
similar to art to the extent that they would safeguard mimesis within the
concept, the same concept that repressed mimesis ."
Thus, we can see how philosophical thought would use aesthetic to think
what is forbidden in other spheres of social life. By reflecting on musical form,
Adorno can think about philosophical problems that could induce social change,
as the possibility of a totality that is not simply the reinforcement of the principle
of identity. This should not surprise us , since :

What the liberation of form as all genuine art authentically wants, is

above all the mark of the liberation of society because the form, the
aesthetic cohesion [ästhetischer Zusammenhang] of all singular beings
[Einzelnen] represents social relations, since, the establishment is
scandalized by the liberated form [befreite Form].

One should remember this issue when assessing the relationship between
Adorno and Hegel, as well as their concepts of dialectic. One cannot understand it
in all its extension by amputating the meaning of philosophical appeal to
aesthetics, with its strategic references to Hegel. Anyway, we should not be
surprised by the fact that a key figure of reconciliation comes, paradoxically,
from that kind of art that refuses any possible reconciliation.

Lecture given at ICI – Berlin (Institut für Contemporary Inquiry),

19/11/2013.