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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Culture, Theory
and Critique on 21 February 2013 (online) and in Volume 55, Issue 1, 2014 (Print), available
online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/

DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2012.762617

John Grant

The End of Critique? Ideology as Replication in Adorno and Jameson

Abstract

In this article I reframe the Marxist tradition of ideology critique as it is practised by T.W.
Adorno and Fredric Jameson. I argue that the phenomena of replication is a dominant feature in
their accounts of ideology, which I demonstrate through a comparative analysis of their work.
Part one addresses Adorno’s understanding of ideological replication especially in relation to
philosophy and culture. Part two does the same for Jameson and examines his attempts to draw
limits on Adorno’s work. In the final section I begin by arguing that Jameson misreads key
Adornian themes such as the culture industry. Nevertheless, Jameson’s critique of replication
addresses important postmodern developments related to culture and multi-national capitalism. I
conclude by addressing Adorno and Jameson’s views on collective political action in the context
of Occupy Wall Street. I argue that taken together, their work offers a constellation of insights
into the utopian and ideological features of OWS.

Introduction

In a time of international economic crisis that has led, relatively speaking, to an increase

in Marx’s popularity, should not the study of ideology enjoy improved fortunes as well? What

critical resources might we rely on if our concern is not to replicate the recent past, but to exploit

a conjuncture that is open to transformation? This broad context inspires the specific aim of this

paper: to argue that the phenomenon of replication is central to the functioning of ideology,

insofar as the latter is a conservative force that aims to sustain already-existing features our

social relations. Usefully this claim can be examined in detail, which I do by comparing how

ideology and its critique are conceived by Theodor W. Adorno, and Fredric Jameson. The first
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part of the article sets out Adorno’s position on replication, especially in relation to philosophy

and culture; the second part does the same for Jameson, while also addressing his views on

Adorno; in the final section I draw together the accumulated evidence to press three claims: that

Jameson misreads Adorno’s culture industry thesis, his aesthetics, and the fortunes of ‘the

negative’, which makes Adorno seem historically outdated in the wrong places; that Jameson is

nonetheless correct to construct his critique of replication in response to the conditions of

postmodernism and multi-national capitalism; and finally, that the best way to think about

collective political action is to draw on Adorno and Jameson in a constellation of analysis.

Before turning to Adorno, it is worth offering some brief remarks about replication to

clarify and contextualize its status. Replication calls forth other prominent terms such as

duplication, repetition, and reproduction. Taken in order, duplication is the only one of the three

that is synonymous with replication. It is correct, therefore, to say that ideological replication

involves duplication and copying, so long as the proviso is added that we are as far as one can

get from the everyday impression of how a replica is a weak or substandard version of its

original. On the contrary, the repetitive character of replication tends most often to reassert,

amplify, and deepen the qualities of the subjects, objects, and ideas being replicated. This

emphasis on the conservation and perpetuation of the status quo is what separates replication

(and its repetitive nature) from Gilles Deleuze’s thesis in Difference and Repetition, in which

repetition is taken to be a source of radical difference rather than the preservation of sameness

and identity (Deleuze 2001). On the other hand, Jean Baudrillard’s influential work on

simulation (‘a real without origin or reality’) displays closer theoretical affinity to the arguments

I address below, especially in Jameson’s work (Baudrillard 2001). The last term listed above –

reproduction – is close to replication, but its meaning and etymology place considerable
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emphasis on the idea of something being reborn or created anew. This sense of something

having disappeared or gone away before returning is temporally distinct from the stress

replication places on the continuation of what exists already.

Finally, my focus on replication is not intended to diminish the value offered by other

concepts of ideology. In particular, approaches that highlight Gramscian insights about

hegemony and how it elicits consent are essential to this field of study. From the outset I want to

make it clear that I see replication as something that participates in the production of consent.

Nevertheless, addressing ideology exclusively through the lens of consent would require an

examination of figures other than Adorno and Jameson, with the result that their vast

contributions to our understanding of ideology and culture would be omitted from consideration.

Adorno: the replication of thought and culture

Like many analyses of Theodor Adorno’s work, a focus on ideology is best conducted by

taking his most concise statements, such as those in Negative Dialectics (1966), and grasping

them alongside other texts such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Throughout Negative

Dialectics, Adorno insists that ideology ‘lies in the implicit identity of concept and thing’ (1973:

40), and further that ‘[i]dentity is the primal form of ideology. We relish it as adequacy to the

thing it suppresses’ (148). Conceptual thought reinforces the dominance of what Adorno calls

the ‘identity principle’, which historically has masked all that is heterogeneous to our concepts in

order that they operate free from contradiction. The promise of rational thinking is transformed

into ideology when objects are subsumed by concepts into a predetermined identity claims. In

opposition to the types of thinking that strengthen false affirmations of identity, such as idealism,

positivism, and empiricism, Adorno employs negative dialectics to conduct an immanent critique
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of conceptual thinking: ‘It [philosophy] must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the

concept’ (15).

Adorno’s critique of identity thinking involves a Marxist critique of capitalism, which is

evident when Adorno attacks ‘the universal domination of mankind by the exchange value’

(1973: 178). Because the exchange process is the economic equivalent of identitarian

philosophy – both arch-bourgeois in their formation – for capitalism to produce a coherent

commodity with a definite exchange value it must exclude certain characteristics of anything that

can be bought and sold (objects, services, information, time, for example). Regardless of

whether identity is serving the requirements of philosophy or the economy, it acts as the world’s

bleach by creating a false unity that strips what is different of its difference. Thus, opposition to

capitalism is also a defence of the world’s rich pluralism: ‘Indelible from the resistance to the

fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the colors of the world

to fade’ (404-5, translation slightly amended).

The strength of identity thinking combined with the dominance of capitalist social

relations is central to understanding the double meaning involved when Adorno describes

ideology as ‘a kind of glue’ (1973: 348): first, as glue that facilitates identity thinking by holding

together concepts and objects, and second, glue that bonds individuals and society. Politically,

ideology fosters conformism. On a day-to-day basis, however, one of the ways ideology is most

vigorously inculcated is by what Adorno and Horkheimer call the culture industry.

[T]he irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end

and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of

repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than

improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system. (1997: 136)

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The ideological status of the culture industry’s products are at one with Adorno’s broad

understanding of positivism as any type of thought that attempts nothing more than to replicate

the world around it, offering neutral descriptions rather than pursuing insights that put critical

distance between thought and society. Even in the 1940s, before the cultural dominance of

television, Adorno identified how the production of other cultural forms for a mass audience,

from music and film, to literature and art, had become as standardized and tedious as the hours

people spent at work. A grim bind emerged where the delights of entertainment could only

provide relief from work by also avoiding any critical content that would challenge the nature of

labour itself. ‘Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not

demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association’ (1997:

137). The use of the laugh track in television is a perfect example of how at the very moment

pleasure is offered, the need to think for oneself is revoked.

The deleterious effects of the culture industry on art is one of Adorno’s best-developed

themes. As I suggested above, Adorno thinks the critical and emancipatory potential of art is

increasingly lost as it comes to replicate the already-existing, rather than offer a sense of how the

world contains unexplored possibilities for alternative ways of being. Such potential does exist

but is repressed by the presentation of generic, mass-produced culture as highly individualized

and unique. For example, by constantly presenting new bands and songs, popular music gives

the impression that it has something distinctive for everyone, when in fact music’s most basic

component parts such as rhythm, harmony, and chord progression are ceaselessly replicated.

Even classical music tends to be packaged and consumed as mass art by being cut into radio-

friendly segments and CD favourites (‘Best of Beethoven, Volume 2’). But Adorno never

intended to condemn all culture since examples existed that were not still-born replicas of
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previous efforts. Glimmers of hope came from different fields such as film (Chaplin), art

(Kandinsky, Picasso), literature (Beckett, Kafka), and music (Berg, Schönberg). Nor is the issue

simply one of high art losing its autonomy thanks to the proliferation of low art. Both those

spheres suffer, as Adorno makes clear in his important but often neglected piece, ‘Culture

industry revisited’. The culture industry

forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The

seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of

the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance

inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. (1991: 85)

In other words, just as the rule of identity short-circuits the critical potential of

philosophy, the culture industry destroys art’s role of maintaining sufficient space between what

exists and what we think is possible. As Adorno and Horkheimer explain about culture: ‘So

completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged’ (1997: 161). Even

though culture can still be bought and sold, culture industry products scarcely shed light on one

another because there is no differentiation to be made among them: ‘What parades as progress in

the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal

sameness’ (1991: 87). Adorno knows that individuals are often suspicious about what the

culture industry offers, but thinks at the same time that ‘[a]nyone who doubts the power of

monotony is a fool. The culture industry refutes the objection made against it just as well as that

against the world which it impartially duplicates. The only choice is either to join in or to be left

behind’ (1997: 148). The power of the culture industry is at once its power of replication, of

both its products and the individuals who, by consuming them, become culture industry products

themselves.
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Adorno and Horkheimer’s presentation of ideology’s expansive historical legacy offers

important perspective about the obstacles we face. The dialectic of enlightenment is traced back

as far as Homer’s Odyssey, even to ‘the prehistory of subjectivity’ (1997: 54). Homer tells how

Odysseus manages to sail his ship past the trap of the Sirens and their irresistible song. He ties

himself to the ship’s mast and plugs the ears of his crew with wax so they cannot hear the Sirens’

sweet melodies or his own desperate pleas to change course toward them. The consequence is

thoroughly diminishing.

Their [the Sirens’] temptation is neutralized and becomes a mere object of contemplation

– becomes art. The prisoner [Odysseus] is present at a concert, an inactive eavesdropper

like late concertgoers, and his spirited call for liberation fades like applause. Thus the

enjoyment of art and manual labor break apart as the world of prehistory is left behind.

(1997: 34)

For Adorno and Horkheimer the partner of ideology as identity is instrumental reason, the

dramatization of which is evident in Odysseus’s commitment to control, utility and

standardization. Instrumental reason is perhaps best captured by how it designates efficiency as

an unrivalled virtue. Together these qualities initiate a repetitive logic with a quintessentially

dialectical character: in the subject’s quest to control things not already under its command, the

more those things will command it. Enlightenment becomes entwined with myth when, for

example, the effects wrought by purposive-rational action that is deployed to coordinate and

control external nature, bring about a dialectical reversal where increasingly we are dominated

by the very nature we set out to master. The reason why the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment

remains so evocative, especially in its reading of the myth of Odysseus, is that it casts history

itself as an ongoing act of replication wrought by instrumental reason, the most highly evolved
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form of which is capitalist exchange value. Thus, ideology’s commitment to the replication of

capitalism was, for Adorno in the 1940s through the 1960s, the historically dominant mode of a

trans-historical dialectic that includes but also exceeds capitalism.

The central role of ideological replication in Adorno’s work emphasizes the replication of

the existing system, namely the bourgeois society of late capitalism. However, the nature of

Adorno’s project to overcome this state of affairs is a matter of considerable dispute. Before

turning to Jameson’s work, it is important to establish my own position on two related points of

contention among Adorno scholars. First, it is commonly held that if Adorno was able to locate

any emancipatory impulse at all, it was in the aesthetic realm (see Benhabib 1986; Pizer 1993;

and even Wellmer 1991; Cook 1996 offers a rare dissent). Second, many readers of Adorno,

including Jameson (2009: 56), have followed the lead of Habermas by interpreting negative

dialectics as nothing more than a critical acid that exhibits no intention other than to dismantle

whatever it comes into contact with. The disintegration of identity might well remain a

necessary move given the effects of ideology, yet Adorno’s insistence that we ‘think against our

thought’ (1973: 141) is politically charged in more recognizably positive ways. Significant

textual evidence is available to demonstrate that Adorno never gave up on philosophy’s critical

potential, and that he never succumbed to political quietism.

Adorno’s 1962 essay ‘Why Still Philosophy’ makes the strongest of cases for

philosophy’s role in combating ideological replication. Philosophy finds ‘its lifeblood in the

resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of

what happens to be the case’ (1998: 6). Adorno reaffirmed his position in Negative Dialectics:

‘Philosophically, it [the critique of ideology] is central: it is a critique of the constitutive

consciousness itself’ (1973: 148). The 1969 essay ‘Critique’, published the year Adorno died,
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begins by declaring the existence of an intimate connection between critique and politics (1998:

281). Russell Berman (2002) offers a thorough reminder about the extent of Adorno’s political

participation in Germany. What is more interesting for our purposes is Raymond Geuss’ (2004)

account of Adorno that is rare for taking seriously the political implications of his critical theory,

though I will bring attention to one of Adorno’s clearest statements of political intent that Geuss

leaves out. ‘Ascetic ideals constitute today a more solid bulwark against the madness of the

profit-economy than did the hedonistic life sixty years ago against liberal repression’ (1974: 97).

In places where basic physical needs are fulfilled and therefore imaginary needs have to be

created to maintain relentless economic production and consumption, asceticism is an

appropriate way to resist the pressure of consumerism. It also gives us a glimpse of Adorno’s

emancipated society: to free oneself from the pressure to consume is to feel what it might be like

to be free from the necessity of always producing.

Elsewhere, despite not sharing Lukács view of the proletariat as the subject and object

of history, Adorno still maintained the necessity of overcoming capitalism by appealing to

perhaps the most basic materialist argument of all: ‘[I]f there is still starvation in a society in

which hunger could be avoided here and now in view of the available and potential wealth of

goods, then this demands the abolition of hunger through a change in the relations of production’

(1976: 62). Finally, Adorno’s dialectical sensibility of how he was living in an age ‘of both

utopian and absolutely destructive possibilities’ (1998: 143), also explains why the totality and

influence of the culture industry ‘will ultimately be broken not by an outright decree, but by the

hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is greater than itself’ (1997: 136).

To summarize, Adorno’s critique of ideology is central to his work and compelled him to

take up a Marxist position against capitalism for which he deployed his negative dialectics to
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fight the closures wrought by ‘identity’ and the culture industry. Yet the the trans-historical

thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment shows that ideology preceded capitalism and could easily

outlive it too. Nevertheless, the nature of ideology and critique has changed since Adorno’s time

according to Jameson, which is why I turn to his prescient work concerning our postmodern

condition.

Jameson: postmodern developments in replication

Like Adorno before him, Jameson’s dialectical approach allows him to construct an

account of existing social conditions that pivots between systems-level tendencies and street-

level realities. The version of Marxism that emerges has obvious debts to Adorno (not to

mention Althusser, Lukács, and Sartre) while simultaneously demonstrating how his historical

situation is not ours. This obliges us to examine how Jameson’s work approaches the critique of

ideology through Adorno, as well as according to a historical assessment of capitalism and

culture.

In Jameson’s early work Marxism and Form (1971), he concludes his chapter on Adorno

by praising the incomparable quality of his dialectical models, while at the same time declaring

that Negative Dialectics ‘is in the long run a massive failure’ (1971: 58). Jameson faults Adorno

in particular for over-emphasizing the method of negative dialectics compared to its practice,

which only contributed to the view that Adorno avoided political commitment (a position which

I suggested above is consistently exaggerated). Jameson’s important 1979 essay ‘Reification and

Utopia in Mass Culture’ confronted the culture industry thesis and began setting the stage for his

study of postmodernism. Indeed, one important way that Jameson’s work can be read is as a

new post-Adornian account of culture’s relation to the economy. In particular, he wants to show

that a diffusion of culture has taken place. Its previous existence as an autonomous sphere has
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disappeared; culture is now relentlessly commodified, while commodities are thoroughly

‘culturalized’. The title of Jameson’s 1984 essay and subsequent book, Postmodernism, or, the

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, is also its thesis, according to which the distinct stages of

capitalism (market, monopoly/imperialist, multinational/globalised) correspond to a

periodization of culture (realist, modernist, postmodernist). The fusing of culture and capital is

best imagined, Jameson claims, not as the melting away of culture, but

in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm,

to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power

to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become

‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense. (1991: 48)

A few comments will suffice to elaborate Jameson’s point about culture, beginning with

the realm of the artistic. Walter Benjamin highlighted long ago how modernism coincides with

the mechanical reproduction of art on a mass scale that initiated its commodification at ever

increasing rates. What is left for culture and capitalism to do once art has been totally

commodified? The answer: turn anything and everything into art. On this basic point there is no

difference between modernism and postmodernism. But what distinguishes Marcel Duchamp’s

Fountain (a urinal notoriously signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’) from Damien Hirst’s shark in

formaldehyde (called ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’,

1991) is that the Dadaists and Surrealists were making an anti-capitalist point by subverting the

commodification of art. After all, there is no reason to purchase art when any object is ready-

made as art and just needs to be thought of as such. Hirst’s work lacks any such critical impulse.

The prohibitive price of the famous shark is one of countless demonstrations that the market

determines the value of anything that might be art, whether or not the artist is complicit with or
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opposed to such a development in the first place. Postmodernism’s logic replaces the

commodification of art with the art of commodification. The difference between art (culture)

and commodification (capitalism) is erased, as Jameson says, because aesthetic production is

integrated into commodity production.

Art is hardly alone, however. Ethics itself has become commodified. A recent example

of this is the ‘(PRODUCT) Red’ campaign associated with corporations such as American

Express. One per cent of all transactions made using its ‘Red’ credit card go toward fighting

HIV and AIDS in Africa. To the extent that this program appears laudable, its operational logic

is as follows: increased consumer spending and consumption is given an ethical value (‘Do

Something Inc(Red)ible’ urged its advertising line), while the conscious effort to live ethically,

which always involves the hard work of confronting problems that lack transparent answers, is

transferred to a middle-man driven first and foremost by profit. In this way, commodification

takes the human out of humanitarian.1

The developments described above in the world of art and the field of charity are

themselves illustrative of a larger trend for Jameson, specifically the expansion and

‘sophistication’ of consumer culture. Here he can be read as following directly in Adorno’s path

by documenting how the most important cultural product of all is the perception or image that

every commodity possesses singular qualities, and thus that every consumer, too, can be a unique

person by planning their consumption accordingly. When the material qualities of commodities

change little or not at all from one iteration to the next (and lack any potentially negative

moment), the flood of signs indicating precisely the opposite is the key to maintaining and

1
For a critique of ‘marketized philanthropy’, see Nickel and Eickenberry 2009; for a defense see

Youde 2009.
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increasing overall consumption. Jameson tirelessly demonstrates how the condition of

postmodernity is saturated by particularities – countless commodities, subjectivities,

organizations, institutions, and images (the last having been best articulated by Guy Debord in

his prescient 1967 book Society of the Spectacle). This proliferation of particularities is just part

of the larger complexity of our globalised system of capitalist production that in Jameson’s view

contributes to our increased alienation and disorientation.

What seems in Jameson like a vindication of the Frankfurt School’s earlier predictions

about the fate of culture also involves some stark breaks. In his essay on mass culture, Jameson

retreats from his earlier judgement on Negative Dialectics, only to change the focus of his

criticism.

What is unsatisfactory about the Frankfurt School position is not its negative and critical

apparatus, but rather the positive value on which the latter depends, namely the

valorization of traditional modernist high art as the locus of some genuinely critical and

subversive, “autonomous” aesthetic production. (1979: 133)

Jameson insists that the system of binary values that treat high culture as autonomous, and mass

culture as debased, is ahistorical and undialectical – a withering accusation given Adorno’s own

attacks on undialectical thinkers. By the time of Jameson’s 1990 book on Adorno, Late

Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic, he saw the need to place modernist

categories of high and mass culture into dialectical tension as much less pressing because he felt

they had mostly dissolved. Jameson’s position is that we have largely forgotten our desire to

choose from – or between – high and low culture, choices which have been superseded by ‘the

technologically new as the very object of cultural consumption’ (1990: 142).

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A second objection to Adorno occurs when Jameson dismisses the talk of cooptation or

manipulation found in Dialectic of Enlightenment as ‘most inadequate’ to an historical moment

when the greatest obstacle to critique and resistance is that we can no longer achieve the

necessary distance from what we might wish to oppose. This leads, in turn, to a third and more

damning claim. According to Jameson, the culture industry chapter ‘does not involve a theory of

culture at all’ and instead is a theory of an industry (1990: 107; Szeman 2002 agrees). Thus,

‘Adorno does not conceive of culture as a realm of social life in the first place; and it is rather

this, indeed, which needs to be objected to in his theory’ (1990: 107). This claim recalls the

passage from Jameson I quoted earlier about the extraordinary expansion of the cultural realm

into all others. Historically, then, it seems that Adorno’s work on the ideology of the culture

industry cannot be mapped onto our postmodern condition. As Peter Uwe Howendahl has

pointed out, much of this has to do with Adorno having written in response to a Fordist model of

production – one where replication was more easily identified – whereas our post-Fordist, multi-

national model is decidedly and intentionally more flexible. Howendahl’s diagnosis from 1993

still applies: ‘Contemporary mass culture does not confront us as a unified system speaking with

one voice. Its obvious variety in terms of organization, recipients, styles, and formal structures,

calls for a different explanation’ (1993: 34-5).

Here it is worth summarizing, briefly, Jameson’s various positions on Adorno, which will

help us shortly to clarify the implications for the critique of ideology. Jameson affirms Adorno’s

point about the pseudo-individualist character of commodities; but he criticizes Adorno for

holding an undialectical view of high and low culture, for failing to treat culture as its own realm

of social life (not just an industry), and for over-emphasizing the extent to which subjects are

manipulated. Why present Adorno as the key Marxist to lead us out of the twentieth century and
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into this one, then? Jameson’s absolutely critical move near the beginning of Late Marxism is to

argue that everything in Adorno that falls ‘variously under the notions of difference and

heterogeneity, otherness, the qualitative, the radically new, the corporeal’ represents, as Jameson

quotes Adorno, ‘what is called in Marxian terminology use value’ (Jameson 1990: 23; Adorno

1973: 11). Jameson calls this insight ‘the decisive clue’ for grasping ‘the ultimate identity of

“identity” itself’ – ‘the economic realm of exchange and the commodity’ (1990: 23).

Adorno’s project, especially in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, involves saving

particularity from its domination by the general (e.g. reified concepts) or the system itself (e.g.

administered life, capitalist exchange relations). It is equally true that Adorno pursued totalizing

theory as a means to understand how the smallest development in social life connects to the

whole, such as in Minima Moralia when the way a door closes becomes an object lesson on

subjectivity, technology and fascism (1974: 40). Indeed, one of Adorno’s most important

methodological statements demonstrating his dialectical approach is that ‘[u]niversal history

must be construed and denied’ (1973: 320). Where Adorno never had any trouble invoking the

existence of a system, total society, or simply the totality, Jameson presents our postmodern

burden as one where we have lost the capacity to name and represent the larger system in which

the fragments of social life fit. We are confronted by

. . . a postmodern situation in which it seems possible to read particulars one by one

without any transcendent universal or totality from which they derive their meaning; and

in which we also harbor the deep suspicion that such universals as may still survive are in

reality stereotypes that include no new information content. (1990: 31)

Further, our metropolitan cities – to say nothing of a globalised world – are ‘space[s] in which

people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which
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they find themselves’ (1991: 51; also 44). Essentially Jameson contends we have undergone a

double loss: we have forgotten Adorno’s lesson that identity is nothing more than capitalist

exchange relations, while to the extent that some rare individuals stumble onto this insight, they

can hardly conjure up a proper representational figure documenting their place in the totality

itself.

Jameson’s description of what the critique of ideology requires in our postmodern setting

reflects how the two-way dialectical traffic enjoyed by Adorno has been cut-off: only the

particular remains accessible, but even then in a diminished fashion because we have, apparently,

lost the ability to represent our own circumstances. Accordingly for Jameson:

This is the point at which the very notion of a system comes to the rescue: or perhaps I

should say, the system, for in the long run there is only one, a totality that includes

everything. Ideological analysis today consists in revealing the traces of that system in a

given text . . . in demonstrating the patterns and the functions or operations of the system

as it is replicated in all the multitudinous subsystems that make up post-modern life today

everywhere. (2009: 359, original italics)

The totality is nothing other than the mode of production in Jameson’s view (1991: 403), which

relies on the function of replication for its own success. The system must be replicated in

countless smaller and even miniature ways that have their collective provenance in globalised

capitalism obscured – this is the ideological moment par excellence for Jameson. Again, it

remains entirely true that ‘totalizing’ theory was as central to Adorno’s work as to Jameson’s;

what I am suggesting is that Jameson sees a decisive qualitative change in historical conditions,

such that Adorno’s ability to identity and name the system is something we no longer enjoy and

must learn to do again. It is in this sense that Jameson refers to ‘a simultaneous leap forward
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both mass-culturally and technologically’, where the emergence of ‘the new media-oriented

culture’ means that we have ‘to replace Dialectic of Enlightenment in a historical perspective and

to read it as something which has become historical, whatever other claims its arguments may

have on us’ (1990: 141, original italics).

Assembling Adorno and Jameson

What is to be made of Jameson’s reading of Adorno, and where are we led when it comes

to the critique of ideology and even politics itself? Perry Anderson has suggested that Jameson’s

work leaves behind the ‘historical pessimism’ that is prominent in so much of Western Marxism

(1998: 76). There is certainly truth to Anderson’s claim, which I explore more below, but taken

on its own such a viewpoint would be altogether misguided. For example, Jameson argues that

compared to Adorno’s time, ‘social homogenization is far more complete, the past has been more

definitively disposed of . . .’ (1990: 72). In fact, in the very book that presents Adorno as

indispensible to Marxism’s cannon and future, Jameson goes so far as to argue that the

dialectical tension Adorno registered between subjects and the social totality was a modernist

one that is alien to ‘an intellectual landscape in which the negative, or “critical theory”, will have

definitively become a thing of the past’ (1990: 245). Thus, strangely, Jameson appears to be

recommending to us a thinker whose primary critical tool is no longer available.

There are two ways to approach the critique of ideology at this point. The first is to

salvage key features of Adorno’s work from Jameson’s critique; the second is to position Adorno

and Jameson together to pursue exactly those negative moments that may hold more positive

possibilities for collective action. One place to begin is with Jameson’s disappointment that

Adorno offered such a circumscribed vision of culture qua culture industry. In fact, Adorno was

explicit that ‘the expression “industry” is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the
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standardization of the thing itself . . . and to the rationalization of the distribution techniques, but

not strictly to the production process’ (1991: 87). Because Jameson interprets the ‘culture

industry’ all too literally and narrowly, he misses Adorno’s insight – from the 1940s – into how

the merger of the cultural and the economic was already well under way. Similarly, Jameson’s

concern with Adorno’s supposed dedication to a binary of high and low culture occludes some of

his most perceptive statements about the historical changes to come, or which had already come

to pass. When Adorno writes about how ‘[t]he commercial character of culture causes the

difference between culture and practical life to disappear’ (1991: 53), J.M. Bernstein has

suggested that Adorno, without knowing it, grasped ‘the controlling movement of

postmodernism’ (Bernstein 1991: 10; 22). Adorno responded to the new unity of culture and

practical life by searching incessantly for the negative, anything that would produce a break in

present conditions, whereas Jameson responds by suggesting that the negative is no longer

available. What might account for such a difference?

The most convincing way to answer this question is to return to Jameson’s foundational

claim that Adorno’s term ‘identity’ refers exclusively to exchange value, while ‘non-identity’

and its synonyms (the negative, otherness, etc.) denote use value, or that which refuses to be

assimilated to exchange/identity. Peter Osborne has already made the most obvious point –

which is no less serious for it – that positing ‘a simple identity of identity and exchange’ as

Jameson does, hardly lives up to Adorno’s thought (Osborne 1992: 180). Given Jameson’s

intentions, it is little wonder that he dismisses as a ‘false problem’ the question of whether

Dialectical of Enlightenment ‘is to be thought of as espousing “essentially” Nietzschean

positions, or Marxian ones, or in fact Weberian ideas and principles’ (1990: 99). But this cannot

be a false problem if Jameson’s whole point is ‘to reassert the essential Marxism of this thinker’
 19

(230). For if the problem was false, then why not pursue Adorno’s undeniable affinities with

Nietzsche (Bauer 1999), or even portray the Marxist features in Adorno’s thought as being

‘highly selective’ (Hammer 2006: 179)? Jameson’s take on Adorno as fundamentally Marxist

can be seen, finally, as producing a paradoxical result: it is what assures Adorno’s ongoing

relevance for Jameson, but also what consigns the culture industry thesis, and much of Dialectic

of Enlightenment more broadly, to history, precisely because Jameson undervalues certain of its

indispensible themes.

What I want to argue, then, is that while the historical development of multinational

capitalism requires us to rethink aspects of the culture industry, the latter remains, along with

other key themes in Adorno such as Weberian instrumental reason and Nietzschean will to

domination, central to any critique of ideology as replication. In short, Adorno’s critique of

identity and search for moments of negativity remain just as relevant as the tendencies they

oppose remain dominant. But any critique of ideology should, I believe, be able to say

something too about politics and the possibility of collective action. And here Jameson’s work

may well be preferable to Adorno’s. I disagree with Lambert Zuidervaart’s depiction of Jameson

as someone whose devotion to making sense of the ideological and utopian components in all

phenomena does not extend to an assessment of their political merits (Zuidervaart 1989: 214).

On the contrary, the ideological and the utopian are already political categories, something that is

abundantly evident in those moments where Jameson relates the utopian to ‘the ineradicable

drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no matter how faintly and feebly, in the most

degraded works of mass culture just as surely as in the classics of modernism’ (1979: 148).

At the end of Late Marxism, Jameson suggests that radical politics can rely on much

more than a faint or feeble drive.

 20

No future is conceivable, however, from which the deeper ideological commitment to

politics – that is to say, left politics – is absent. . . . and even a fully postmodernized First

World society will not lack young people whose temperament and values are genuinely

left ones and embrace visions of radical social change repressed by the norms of business

society. (1990: 251)

It is vital to compare Jameson’s last two statements to Adorno, for whom ‘the collective as a

blind fury of activity’ (1974: 156) strikes at the heart of the communist vision of society, but also

at those rallying calls for immediate action that diminish the need to keep thinking.

Notwithstanding his claim that there can be ‘[n]o emancipation without that of society’ (1974:

173) Adorno restricts the utopian to moments of determinate negation without any sense of a

transcending collectivity.

Following Jameson’s optimistic statement about the continuation of left-wing politics, it

is worth concluding this paper by considering how he and Adorno might analyze and respond to

the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, with the aim of using their contributions as a joint

demonstration of ideology critique. The Adornian perspective would, I think, focus on the

conditions of possibility for OWS as a simultaneous enactment of his ‘constellation’ method of

thinking. On what grounds did OWS emerge, and how do we make sense of the critique – the

negative moment – that has propelled OWS to become the most significant Left mass movement

in America since 1968? Immediate factors include the inspiration of the Arab Spring, the

persistence of high unemployment, house foreclosures, and neo-liberal governments placing a

greater burden on those people who are less equipped to cope. Add to this the disorienting

spectacle of bailouts for banks and financial corporations, followed closely by the Supreme

Court’s ‘Citizens United’ decision that unleashed the bank accounts of these same organizations
 21

for the purposes of political speech. Finally, we may also see in OWS a longer-term reaction to

decades of war and especially increasing class division.

Adorno’s strategy is to construct constellations of concepts and arguments rather than

relying on them individually. ‘Constellation is not system. Everything does not become

resolved . . . rather, one moment sheds light on the other, and the figures that the individual

moments form together are specific signs and a legible script’ (1993: 109). If we imagine as a

constellation the conditions of possibility listed above, it becomes possible to grasp how an

immanent critique of neoliberal capitalism emerged, bringing with it the negative moment that

Jameson feared was lost. Adorno’s materialism reminds us as well that he thought the most

potent negations would issue from experience: ‘We are not to philosophize about concrete

things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things’ (1973: 33). In fact, Adorno thinks that

true experience should call forth his critique of constitutive subjectivity, which itself verifies the

strongest collective insights of OWS: that consumers drive capitalism but, even more, are driven

by it; that, by and large, the state is a client of capital; that the political class runs democracy

according to the instrumental reason of its own self-replication. OWS is a moment of non-

identity where the replication of the system, by its own nature, has produced a motivating flash

of negative insight: that despite the reassurances of President Obama and Prime Minister

Cameron in the U.K., we are not ‘all in this together’, neither ordinarily nor in a time of crisis.

Hence the strength of the slogan ‘We are the 99 Percent’, which has shifted discourse

back toward issues of justice and class and away from identity. The slogan also calls forth a new

collectivity – and a large one at that – while simultaneously identifying the main site of

antagonism, namely the pooling of vast wealth rendered unavailable to the majority thanks to a

broken political and economic system. As Jodi Dean (2011) has pointed out, if the system was
 22

not viewed as broken, people would not be occupying. Moving temporarily from Adorno to

Jameson, has the power of a negative moment allowed for a collective approximation of the

system and where people fit in? Jameson warns that radical critics increasingly are folded back

into the ideology they seek to escape. ‘[T]he replication of the system of late capitalism even

within the thoughts and projects that seek to challenge, let alone to overthrow, it can alone today

furnish the clue to current ideology and offer some chance at the intermittent approximation of

the Real’ (2009: 363). Ironically, Jameson’s suggested political strategy of rallying to defend the

welfare state risks making the very replication he fears a foregone conclusion (2009: 299, 470).

This aside, his indispensible approach would be to pursuit the ideological and utopian features in

a movement like OWS.

The utopian, transcendent possibility of OWS lies in its double determination, to turn

democracy back into a collective endeavour from its current oligarchical manifestation (see

Winters and Page 2009; Grant 2011), and to subordinate the economy to people’s shared needs,

not vice-versa. The ideological displacement of these goals is ever present, however. Excessive

emphasis on policy goals such as restraining CEO bonuses, increasing capitalization at banks, or

implementing recall mechanisms for elected officials fit perfectly into existing political

narratives. Even a focus on capitalism and liberal democracy as systems becomes ideological

when it separates them hierarchically. Changes to democracy alone will not solve OWS

grievances, but neither can capitalism be truly replaced without reordering democracy. The

‘Real’ is not only capitalism but also its anchor – liberal democracy. In sum, three futures for

OWS can be imagined: first, no future; it fades to nothing. Second, it helps to win some

economic and political reforms; the system is not replicated as such, but it continues more or less

as before. Third, the collective impulse imagined by Jameson becomes radically effective,
 23

without violating Adorno’s concern about the subsumption of individual identity to the

collective; the system is not replicated, but rebuilt as something different. Both Adorno and

Jameson would consider OWS’s prospects for radical change unlikely. But then the very

existence of OWS reaffirms Adorno’s brilliant modification of Marx, of which Jameson is so

fond as well: ‘Not only theory, but also its absence, becomes a material force when it seizes the

masses’ (Adorno 1976: 84; Jameson 1990: 40).

Conclusion

This article offers an account of ideological replication and its critique across the work of

two thinkers who are indispensible to the Marxist tradition. I have tried to show that Adorno and

Jameson privilege different domains and features of replication, in no small part as a response to

their respective historical conditions. Replication and critique were addressed in relation to

culture, philosophy, and politics, with Jameson often emerging as a critic of Adorno. I offered a

competing vision of Adorno’s work, one that asserts a different contemporary relevance for him

than Jameson would accept. By negotiating this account of Adorno alongside Jameson’s

important account of replication, the outcome is a fusion of critical insights rather than

unnecessary opposition between them. This kaleidoscope of ideological analysis is especially

appropriate for the postmodern times that Jameson describes.

Word Count: 7006

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