“Progress means: to step out of the magic spell, even out of the spell of progress, which is itself nature, in that humanity becomes aware of its own inbred nature and brings to a halt the domination it exacts upon nature and through which domination by nature continues. In this way it could be said that progress occurs where it ends” (130).

As hinted at in that quotation, the essay concludes that every conceptualization of progress is ultimately cyclical. This allows connection to another circular concept. Progress is established as stemming from the bourgeois principal of exchange, of purporting to trade one thing for another thing of equal value. However, if exchange actually worked like this, there would be no shift of power. Nothing would change and there would be no real trade. This system is maintained, then, by “the truth of the expansion [which] feeds on the lie of the equality” (140). Thus is the bleak truth (in Adorno’s eyes) of progress today—a steady building of philosophical thought now stuck in a rhetorical loop, like an album forever skipping on its final track.
All is not lost, though. Adorno suggests that should the exchange be made even, should there be a shift away from the dominant capitalist bourgeois mode of thought, progress would then be freed to defend society from relapse. This harkens back to Adorno’s collaboration with Max Horkheimer on Dialectic of Enlightenment, specifically, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” in which they equate sacrifice to the principal of bourgeois exchange. They also use Odysseus’ cunning manipulation of that system as evidence of his status as a prototypical bourgeoisie—and also suggest that an even exchange would cause the very same system Adorno is so concerned with, that of our current “progress,” to crumble. It would dissolve like an angler fish pulled from the briny crags of the deepest seas and baptized in our liquefying air.

Adorno, Theodor. “Progress.” Can One Live After Auschwitz? Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Stanford University Press, 2003.

From the Authoritarian Personality to Negative Dialectics,

Marcuse and One Dimensional Man,

Ideology, Surplus Repression, and One-Dimensional Language,

Prospects for Emancipation: The Question of Technology

The introduction begins by explaining that Adorno and Horkheimers “gloomy diagnosis” of the inevitability of totalitarianism from rationality (in both overt and non-overt ways) was both thought out to its fullest consequence and challenged with “glimmerings of hope” by Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. Marcuse’s ability to hope stems from his commitment to emancipator, critical, dialectical reason, and his belief that it continues in the imaginative unconscious of a repressed society. Marcuse’s differentiation is optimism in scientific and moral rationality, in the ability of subject and object to coexist maintaining their integrity.

From Authoritarian Personality to Negative Dialectics: This section summarizes the work of the Frankfurt School prior to Marcuse. It includes an overview of the characteristics on the “F-scale” and posits that the as the Frankfurt school progressed, it became increasingly abstract, equating all social formations, political, economic, or ideological, as totalitarian. This abstraction is a break from Marxism, and was further marked by Adorno’s “seeking refuge in asthetic contemplation”. His attention to art formed a fixation on problems of communication that are picked up by Marcuse.

Marcuse and One-Dimensional Man: This begins by explaining the necessity of a negative dialectic understanding of subject and object rather than a positivist one. Only then can both retain their individuality. Where Adorno dealt with aesthetics and utopia, Marcuse attempts to apply this to an advanced industrial society. He explains “soft totalitarianism” as the pleasurable, consensual domination of a society, aided by anti-communist paranoia and increased standard of living that masks disparity. Sexuality is brought up as a main tool of repressive sublimation, keeping people producing and consuming waste, overworking, and dissatisfied, in a technological age that doesn’t require such unhappiness.

Ideology, Surplus Repression, and One-Dimensional Language: This line of thought is continued in Marcuse’s examination of priority, that is what are true needs of individuals, and what are false needs. Yet this analysis can only come after an individual has recognized his or her own subjugation in society. He analyzes specific ways in which the very language that is used to describe freedom and people’s needs is repressive in nature. His solution to this is outlined in a criterion for transcendent analysis of rational language.

Prospects of Emancipation: The Question of Technology: This last section deals with considering the liberating potential of technological advancement. It proposes that if technology (which is conceived neutrally) could be used apolitically to take away the need for labor (this is a return to Marxist principles) and leave people free to pursue intellectual and artistic betterment. This change could hopefully lead to a respectful interaction between subject and nature. The article closes by pointing to Habermas as the next critic to really engage these issues.

In Max Pensky’s “The Trash of History,” taken from the larger Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, Walter Benjamin’s use of the objective dialectical image is viewed in juxtaposition–and unwanted collaboration -with subjective allegorical imagery. The dialectical image, where past and present interact with one another, is Benjamin’s method and subject of critical analysis. The allegorical image that has arbitrary meaning is melancholic: the passing of time is marked by sadness. The dialectic image “cannot be” (Pensky, 211), and yet it is as our history is a “catastrophic history” (Pensky, 211). This issue of imagery is one aspect of the larger subject/object problem and is how Benjamin incorporated Kabalistic elements into his criticism.

Dialectical images are fragments which create a mosaic of history. The dialectical image is critically interruptive in the same way that the “historical object” in historical materialism is. Both are monads (self-contained units) that serve to break up smooth, capitalistic conceptions of time by a sudden shock of juxtaposition. This interruptive shock, which gives us necessary distance for critical interruption, allows us to take the dialectical image “out of context” and examine it: Present and past illuminate one another in a “constellation with the Now.” (Pensky, 217).

Adorno found Benjamin’s attempt to remove the subject from his work problematic. There is always some level of subjectivity in the act of construction, even in constructing an ostensibly objective dialectical image. There are three steps to constructing a dialectical image. First, the image must be recognized from a “historical trash heap” of marginalized facts. This is similar to the prospect of engaging with the singular pain of history that is explored in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History in that there is something ignored that must be rescued, must be addressed. Next, the historical material for the image must be collected. Thirdly, the dialectical image must be constructed. The choice involved in each step–where to look, what fragments to choose, how to create the mosaic or constellation–steeps the dialectical image in subjectivity, because to choose involves some degree of arbitrariness: “what is it about the constructive moment of materialist historiography that assures the correct construction of the finely cut fragments?” (Pensky, 224) How can we be sure that this is the real interpretation, the right way of looking at things?
The dialectical image is closely linked to historical materialism as the allegorical image is tied to historicism. Allegory ensures the continuation of historicism and is marked by melancholy. Even though historicism (which is part and parcel with allegory) is the negation of singular pain, melancholy doesn’t only perpetuate historicist ideals. As Pensky posits, “the subject’s productivity will produce melancholy writing that serves as a medium for the encoding of these historical objects” (Pensky, 221). To rescue fragmented images from historicism, we must engage with melancholy: this is a history of catastrophe. The sadness inherent in history, then, permeates both allegorical as well as dialectical imagery.

In that construction involves choice and that historical objects are tinged with sadness, the dialectical image is subjective. But this is a subjectivity that is different from that of an allegorical image in that dialectical imagery’s subjectivity allows for the critical examination allegory is incapable of. There is no critical intervention possible with an allegorical image because allegory is analogous to historicism–the very process that historical materialism seeks to destroy to create the dialectical image (Pensky, 223). When the “lightening flash” (Pensky, 217) of dialectical imagery shocks us into sight, it isn’t that we can see the story of history clearly–that would be playing into historicism. We are confronted with an image that wakes us “from the dream time of capitalism,” that disrupts notions of historical progress. Instead of the “dream” of historical causality, we are presented with a fragmented mosaic that illuminates “why certain kinds of historical insight are possible under certain determinate conditions.” (223)

But again, the fine print of Benjamin’s interpretation of the subject/object problem serves to confound us. Adorno wanted theory, which is subjective, as a mediator
between Benjamin’s objectivity and the subject, but Benjamin disagreed because he wanted to get rid of the subject totally. However, without theory as “critical mediation,” Adorno viewed Benjamin’s dialectical imagery as little more than juxtaposition. Adorno wanted dialectical imagery further informed by critical thought. Benjamin did not find theory necessary because he viewed the interruptive quality of dialectical imagery as independent from secondary interpretation.

Adorno was frustrated by how Benjamin blurred the “distinction between subject and objects,” but Benjamin capitalized on the fluctuating tension between subjectivity and objectivity by turning to philosopher Gershom Scholem’s interpretation of the Kabbalah. The Kabalistic tradition is similar to the redemptive-fragmentation quality of historical materialism and the dialectical image. To create the world, God withdrew and sent His presence into the world. The vessels made to hold this holy force broke, and the shards of the vessels–analogous to fragments of the trash of history–are covered by shards of evil–analogous to historicism. It is the task of humanity to uncover these fragments and to piece them back together, thus saving God. The Kabbalah helped Benjamin work through issues of subjectivity because he could be informed by an overarching objectivity of religion.

Scholem had a similar view to Benjamin’s on the distinction between subject and object. Here, however, Scholem applied a differentiation between symbolic imagery versus allegorical imagery. For Scholem, the symbolic image is objective because piecing together divine fragments redeems a larger framework of objectivity. As Pensky explains, the allegorical image is arbitrary because it presents too many opportunities for interpretation. In contrast, the symbolic image–analogous to Benjamin’s dialectical image–is either understood in a flash or not at all.

But as Pensky points out, the objectivity of Benjamin’s appropriation of Kabalistic fragments into a divine whole mosaic depends on how Scholem interpreted these mystical texts. Again, there is construction at some level, and in this construction there is subjectivity and room for misinterpretation. Kabalistic techniques may not be appropriate for Benjamin’s variety of critical thinking, because Marxism is a materialist philosophy and Kabbalah is rooted in the religious. The ambiguity of this relationship suggests that “textual appropriation is simply not a sufficiently complex model to account for the ambiguity attending the dialectical image” (Pensky, 235).

But this ambiguity may work to Benjamin’s advantage. Pensky posits that in order to truly engage with Benjamin’s dialectics, the critic needs to give up his or her subjectivity, as “one either accepts it [Benjamin's dialectical imagery]” or “does not” (Pensky, 237). The problem is now ours as readers. The subject-object problem is then never solved but transferred from the text to the critic as a person–or as a subject. We can’t fully decipher the problem of subjectivity and objectivity in Benjamin because we can’t step outside of historicism and into the dialectical relation: “the question of the arbitrariness of the dialectical image is undecidable for us according to Benjamin’s own historical sensibility: itself presumably the ground for our own interpretive interest in arguing for the contemporary relevance of the dialectical image” (Pensky, 237).
We can’t go back in time to when Benjamin redeemed historical objects from “the trash heap,” we can’t pick at the same fragments, can’t create the same historical mosaic. Benjamin’s angel has been blown further away and we aren’t standing on the same ground. When we are shocked by the dialectical image’s illumination, what we see looks different than what. This complicates assessing dialectical imagery enormously. For all that dialectical imagery is to be understood in a flash, its levels of relationality inextricably link it to subjectivity: “the question concerning the arbitrariness of the dialectical image is the question of the relation of the images to melancholy” (Pensky, 239). In Benjamin’s historical trash heap, there are layers upon layers to be uncovered, just as there are subtle gradations of subject and object to be examined.

Pensky, Max. “The Trash of History.” In Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning. University of Massachusetts Press, May 2001. Pp. 211-239.

]]> http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/max-pensky-the-trash-of-history/feed/ 0 cachase1 http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/herbert-marcuse-on-science-and-phenomenology/ http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/herbert-marcuse-on-science-and-phenomenology/#comments Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:49:01 +0000 rosemackey http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/?p=34 ]]> By Ben Daly and Rose Mackey

In his essay On Science and Phenomenology Herbert Marcuse attempts to lay out the ways in which a split has occurred between the scientific and philosophical views on the world, and how this split has been detrimental to the development of human society in the west. For Marcuse this split is located in the relationship between human subjects and the concept of reason, which has been present in the discourses on science and philosophy since the ancient Greeks.

To highlight the manner in which this split has taken place Marcuse attempts to explain an essay written by Edmund Husserl, the famous phenomenologist. The essay that he analyzes in this piece is entitled “The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Philosophy”. In it, Husserl critiques the enlightenment and modern scientific method. For Husserl, the problem could be traced back to Socratic philosophy, where the state of human being was identified with a certain notion of human reason, meaning that a human being inherently had the ability to reflect on itself, and the world around it, and even cause changes in its surroundings. However, for Plato this relationship (which can also be seen in terms of Descrate’s famous assertion ‘I think therefore I am’) was permitted by the ability of reason to focus on ideals ant the idea that the universe is a rational system. While Marcuse and Husserl probably would not have agreed with Socrates’ definition of these ideals, they find a very important function in the fact that they exist in his philosophy. The notion of reason therefore  does not exist in and for itself. In Marcuse’s words “objectivity is necessarily correlated with subjectivity, again the subjective as well as objective structure of reason.” In this way reason can take a skeptical position towards the world, as singular, while at the same time maintaining focused on objectivity. What Marcuse is pointing to then, through Husserl, is the existence of a critical reason, which is actively used towards attaining ends, which are just as important as reason itself.
If Greek philosophy pointed towards reason as a tool that could be used, then for Marcuse the enlightenment lead toward a shift in the role reason played in human society. With the rise of a mathematical view of the world, everything became determinable in a manner that existed only in relation with other things and objects. In this manner reason and the world became detached from universal and objective concepts that were transcendental, instead functioning only on the level of the empirical. Therefore in fields such as the various sciences and medicine, which were ideally to be guided and given meaning by the field of philosophy, instead existed merely to progress for the sake of progress. Reason, removed from any critical investigation into its own ends, could merely be utilized to master and control nature, of which man is a part. What Husserl proposes in opposition to this modern scientific concept of reason is a phenomenological analysis of everyday life, which in itself is a negative process that should supposedly demystify the way in which the subject understands the fact of its existence in the world, which is the proposed goal of the projects of enlightenment, progress, and reason. For Marcuse, Husserl is giving an example of the kind of critical reason that would allow a demystification of the world to take place, while allowing the subject to exist harmoniously and, to a certain extent, with his or her natural environment. Marcuse explains that Husserl gets behind the mystifying concepts and methods of science. In the end of the essay Marcuse asks and answers his own question, “Does this conceptual metalanguage really come to grips with the constituent subjectivity? I think not.”

There is an apparent lack of unity in the field of critical theory. Beyond Horkheimer and Adorno’s collaboration on Dialectic of Enlightenment, the theoretical paths of these two thinkers diverge. Other members of the “inner-circle” at the Institute for Social Research took fundamentally different approaches but the rift between Horkheimer and Adorno was particularly stressed. Though the two pursued quite contrary goals, their differences did not surface during their joint effort in writing Dialectic of Enlightenment. The two did not juxtapose each other’s ideas in this work but instead built off one another’s concepts under the tenets of a “theoretical alliance” that presupposed a wide-reaching acceptance of certain fundamental principles that allowed for a steady academic friendship.

Jürgen Habermas sheds light on the stressed relationship between Horkheimer and Adorno in his Theory of Communicative Action. In 1931 Horkheimer gave a foundational lecture offering his conception of critical theory. In this presentation, Horkheimer seemed to offer a noteworthy advancement on “both orthodox historical materialism and the philosophical attempts to revive dialectics undertaken by Lukács and Korsch in the early 1920’s.” Horkheimer stood in opposition to empiricism and the fragmentation of fact-based research into inquiries. He was equally critical of the concrete function of philosophy permeating Western Marxism. Horkheimer’s distaste for this “hypostatization of philosophy,” stemmed from his disbelief in any immunization strategy toward Marxism; contrasting the works of Lukács, who emphasized that the validity of each individual theses by Marx was inconsequential to the impairment of the dialectical method.
Breuer’s juxtaposition of Horkheimer and Lukács reveals two starkly contrasting viewpoints toward the application of philosophy. Horkheimer’s approach to critical theory seems almost phenomenological; he felt that the institute had “to organize studies, based on current philosophical formulations of the problems, that unite philosophers, sociologists, political economists, historians, and psychologists in ongoing research groups.” Lukács presented a contrasting method in which the totality becomes a system divorced from its object of inquiry creating a dynamic based on a “value relationship.” The essential difference between these two lay in Horkheimer’s utilitarian schemata for philosophy, namely an attempt to reconcile abstract philosophical construction with empirical reality.

Though Horkheimer and Lukács pursued formally discordant goals, Horkheimer upheld historical materialism. Lukács conception of historical materialism sought to sketch the concrete and disconnected appendages of modernity back to their early human origins, in order to establish humans as the inevitable producers of all historical and current forms of life.

Though Horkheimer distanced himself from Western Marxism, Adorno surely made a more clear effort to exhibit his distaste for its intentions. Walter Benjamin and other members of the Institute influenced Adorno. In 1930 he declared that philosophy was “incapable of grasping the totality of the real by means of thought; only by way of traces and ruins can it hope to approach reality.” Adorno unambiguously oriented his thinking toward Benjamin this is evident in his replacement of Horkheimer and Lukács’s conception of totality. Instead Adorno conceived a less distinct model, based on “philosophical interpretation.”

Endnotes:

1: Breuer, Stefan. “The Long Friendship: Theoretical Differences Between Horkheimer and Adorno.” On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. Comp. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John J. McCole. Boston: MIT P, 1993. 257-279. (See endnote 1)

2: Sozialphilosophische Studien. Aufsätze, Reden und Vorträge 1930-1972, edited by Werner Brede (Frankfurt, 1972) Page 41.

3: Breuer, Stefan. “The Long Friendship: Theoretical Differences Between Horkheimer and Adorno.” On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. Comp. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John J. McCole. Boston: MIT P, 1993. 257-279. (Cited From Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften Volume 1, Page 326)

4: Ibid (See endnote 5)

Ziarek begins by citing the stakes of this essay, in short, to establish the nature of the unique language of art as it stands in difference from the language of critique. For Ziarek, art becomes a more powerful tool then critique through its ability to make flexible and work beyond the constraints of traditional critical language. He cites “art’s distinctive capacity to outsrip and undermine critique, that is, to void, or perhaps even to transform the very parameters within which critique operates and becomes recognizable as critique, and which critique also, by default, reconfirms and petrifies.” (107) Referencing the work of the avant-garde, Ziarek reveals how the de-aestheticization of art, the making of art into an event that subverts traditional and empirical expectations of art serves to expand it’s capabilities. After the avant-garde, there is a certain responsibility to re-evaluate what art can do, what is its job, and what kind of power does it wield?

Ziarek continues to discuss Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory which addresses the constraints and ultimately the strength of art. For Adorno, art is somewhat problematic because, like critique, it works within established schemes of representation and socially recognizable forms. It is, to a certain extent, a negation of itself, “the paradox of the necessity and the impossibility of critique” (109). Art cannot seperate itself from the language of critique and from its own forms of representation which play into dichotomies of power, but its “immanent character of being an act” (109, Adorno) has, in a sense, given art a kind of “intensity” (110). This intensity is easily disregarded; Adorno emphasizes that art is not understood as powerful or effective, its’ medium is one that is understood and valued in an aesthetic sense. When we view a work of art, we are essentially possessing it, it is open to our interpretation and oppression of its messages. Therein lies its’ effectivity for Adorno; art is a subversion. We do not expect it to speak critically away from what we bring to it, it is a “‘discourse’ whose radicality cosists in undermining power’s pervasive hold on contemporary reality” (110). In this way, art works more critically then critique itself because it has, intrinsic to its medium, an acute sense of what it is to be oppressed.

Ziarek goes on to discuss the place of art in Heidegger’s thought in relation to Adorno’s claims about the radical power of art. Adorno understands Heidegger’s notion of critique as “the concept and the object, an opposition in which the conceptual moment becomes fulfilled in the object while, in the same gesture, the object is shown to correspond to the concept.” (111) Ziarek complicates this understanding by introducing Heidegger’s emphasis on the event, Ereiginis, “the opening up of space” in which difference emerges continuously in opposition to the static difference and meditation that Adorno addresses. Heidegger then, understands the force of art, of poiesis, as one that ‘lets be’ rather than “rendering available” (113). Heidegger understands rendering available in terms of his ideas of technicity and enframing. Essentially, there is a kind of unworlding effect in light of the prominence of technology in modernity. Everything in the world, indeed the word itself neccessarily must have a distinct purpose, an instrumentality. Art, for Heidegger, evades this in its’ letting be. This allows the power of art to be characteristically antithetical to mechanisms of power which seek to control. The power of art is one of openness, of continuous folding and meditation rather than the stagnant force of traditional critique.

Ziarek also pays particular attention to Hediegger’s notion of nihilation as opposed to negation. Nihilation in this sense, enables being, it is not a negation or a destruction but an opening up (lichtung) into possibilities and difference through the letting be and fluidity of its action. “The otherness enabled by nihilation cannot be subsumed into negation or opposition but marks instead the differentiation intrinsic to the event. This differentiation is ‘grounded’ not simply in difference but in the futurity kept open by nihilation. Furthermore, otherness here is not a matter of identity and difference, since it is inscribed not just on the ontic level of beings and entities, but on the level of the ontological” (119). Here we understand that nihilation provides a kind of motion that does not seek to qualify on the ontic, average-everyday level. It will not simply provide an identity or explain or critique another explanation, but rather reach in some sense, through its insistence on difference, an existence that evades and exploits power a power that effects rather than allows for an opening up. Art’s responsibility then, is in a kind of taking-care. Heidegger understands being as informed by other beings. However, in order to approach those beings without oppressing them or using them on an instrumental level we must approach those beings as-they-are-in-themselves. This is the letting be that allows for a futurity of power in art that is antioppressive. On the contrary, art becomes an event that, in its openness, is transformative and newly critical.

Adorno wrote seven critical essays on jazz during his lifetime from 1930’s to the early 1950’s: three in the thirties, two in the forties, and two in the fifties. According to the author of the essay, “ The portrait was never flattering and was highly idiosyncratic.” In the 1930’s Adorno’s jazz criticism initiated a negative critical moment in “what can be described as his dialectical embrace of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This negative critical moment endures as a polemic against technology throughout Adorno’s subsequent writings on jazz. Scholars have noted that as far back as the thirties, Adorno was outlining his critical project on popular music that was “sensitive to both its reified dimensions and its utopian dimensions”. However, even a partial glance at Adorno’s jazz writings, confirms Adorno’s lasting interest in those “reified dimensions” of jazz, as opposed to the “utopian dimensions”. Scholars have contented that Adorno’s jazz criticism are characterized by a fantastical rigidity and tend to “ flatten out the dynamic contradictions of popular music” (Jay 122). Here, the essay identifies two dominant tendencies that reduce or “flatten out” surface in Adorno scholarship on jazz: “those who criticize Adorno the strongest examine neither all of his essays on jazz nor the historical context of his arguments, and those who sympathize with Adorno ignore the vast amount of research that is at their disposal” (98). In both cases, jazz is read one dimensionally, as a “homogenous collective entity”(98). This approach intentionally obscures or negates the internal dynamics of jazz and renders jazz ahistorical.
From this point, the author of the essay attempts to complicate Adorno’s criticisms of jazz by situating them within “ a social history that considers the internal (dynamic) tensions within the jazz tradition”, that is, comparing Adorno’s jazz criticism with representations of jazz within Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). The purpose of such a critical complication is to situate Adorno’s place within the history of jazz criticism and to place emphasis on the importance of a historical grounding to the debate concerning Adorno, jazz, and the “reified dimensions” of popular music.
The first critique the author of the essay has against Adorno’s jazz criticism is his focus on the jazz of the 1930’s-1950’s (including the tradition of swing). By grounding his critique in that specific historical period, “his (Adorno) arguments precede what been called the second half of jazz history” (100). Here the author’s contention is important, by primarily focusing on the first half of jazz history, Adorno ignores the radically different aesthetic and political formations of the post-bop history of jazz.

Rose claims that Adorno’s concept of reification is an original to his thought, and based in large part off of Marx’s distinction of use-value and exchange-value. Rose first speaks of the difference between the concept and object, a difference with which reification is intimately concerned. It is important to note that the German Begriff, translated as “concept,” has a second and equally prominent meaning that is the equivalent of the English idea of “property” in the sense of having a particular property. Adorno divides conceptual thinking into three forms: identity thinking, rational identity thinking, and non-identity thinking. Identity thinking consists of using a concept to pick out particulars in an object, and is the sort of thinking employed when one uses instrumental reason. Adorno is largely unconcerned with this form of thinking when he is speaking about reification. Rational identity thinking assumes that an object possesses all the properties of its concept, and therefore the object is idealized without examining its particulars. Adorno claims that society generally thinks of objects as being identical to their concepts. Non-identity thinking is practiced when it is realized that there is an unavoidable gulf between the object and the concept. The concept is taken as referring to what the object “would like to be,” its Platonic ideal, roughly. In example, the concept of an enlightened world does not include barbarity, but the real object, the actuality of the present enlightened world, does. This does mean that it is inaccurate to call our society an enlightened society, but instead that it is necessary to acknowledge the gap between concept and the object. Adorno says that an important tool of critical theory is to confront the object as it is with the concept of what it should be, instead of merely assuming the identity of object and concept.

Rational identity thinking and reified thinking are the same, because they make unlike objects the same. Adorno sees commodity exchange as involving the same principles. The only values naturally in things are their use-values. Their exchange-values, which often appear in our capitalist society as actually occurring in objects, are not truly within the object, but instead are part of a social relationship between people. This extends to labor, as well, which is a social relationship objectified by the reification of exchange. However, exchange-value is the only way that the relative value of an object can be expressed in a market economy. To say that something is reified is to say that the social relation appears as a property of the object, rather than something societal (and thus essentially arbitrary) that has no particular allegiance to the object itself. The object appears to have exchange-value because the labor used to produce it seems reified in the object. “Reified concepts describe social phenomena, the appearance of society, as if it has the properties to which the concepts refer” (47). A non-reified object is one in which the concept and the object are truly identical, an object that is considered as the sum of its properties without the incorporation of relationships external to the object. Adorno claims that the use-value of an object is non-reified. It is therefore the commodification of objects that reifies them.

Adorno’s distinction between different modes of thought is not an empirical one. If it were, it would itself be identity thinking. It is instead a formation based on the gap which it perceives. Adorno states that, “To want substance in cognition is to want Utopia.” The substance offered by rational identity thinking is the illusion that one thinks of the actual object, when one can only largely only conceptualize objects. It is only when a real object is viewed rigorously in relation to its concept that one can gain a view of it that possesses anything, because to not acknowledge the gap between an object’s rational identity and its actuality is to imply the intersection of the two, and thus misunderstand the nature of the object.

The heart of the essay begins when Jay employs Peter Bürger’s controversial distinction between modernism and the avant-garde. Jay uses dichotomy as linchpin throughout his piece to help contrast the views of Horkheimer and Kracuer. That is, Horkheimer sides with modernism because in its most esoteric forms it supposedly works outside of the marketplace, thus offering a sort of utopian oasis from mass culture. Conversely, Kracuer sides with exoteric avant-gardism because it works within mass culture hopefully galvanizing revolution. After establishing this dichotomy, Jay unpacks and clarifies these two views focusing first on Horkheimer and then Kracuer.

Jay associates Horkheimer with esoteric modernism in large part because of his remarks on the writing of Joyce and paintings like Picasso’s Guernica: “[They] abandon the idea that real community exists; they are monuments of a solitary and despairing life that finds no bridge to any other or even to its own consciousness” (372). Or, put another way, Horkheimer wants art to negate culture and communication and in this negation escape mass culture. With this in mind, we can understand why Horkheimer rejected film as an art form –– it was too real, too easy, and consequently always under the tent of mass culture (372 – 373).

The analysis of Kracuer offered by Jay associates him with the exoterically avant-garde because for Kracuer –– and the following is something very quirky for a member of the Frankfurt of School –– mass culture was not bad, but rather a necessary stage in a larger process of rationalization (i.e., the end of class struggle). So where Horkheimer wanted to break bridges of communication in art Kracuer wanted to create them to invoke revolution. Kracuer, then, like Benjamin, celebrates the avant-garde filmmakers Pudovkin and Eisenstein for their collective calling of the body politic to organize and revolutionize. Kracuer did not care if such films were superficial for in he thought in a certain regard his era was one were “we cannot gain access to the elusive essentials of life we see assimilate the seemingly non-essential…” (374). This is all evidenced his discussion of the Tiller Girls were he argued that they were a “mass ornament” whose “aesthetic reflex” was inspired by the rationality of capitalism, like Taylor modes of organization. This rationality, of course, was obscured but it was less obscured than myth and thus marked a movement in the right direction. It was, in one of Jay’s more memorable phrases, “a way station towards a rational future” (380).

The difference between Horkheimer and Kracueris’s views on the potential of art, then, is the difference between solitary and solidarity, isolation and community. But as different as their views might be, they in the end both realized neither esotericism nor exotericism could redeem mass culture. Horkheimer realized that even the most esoteric art would be absorbed into the market (387). And Kracuer later lost his radical leanings deeming any revolution in art or elsewhere impossible (379). For this reason, Jay concludes with an ambiguous cynicism: “the sobering lessons provided by their very different attempts to harness art for radical purposes make it difficult not wonder if its end may be near” (381).