Participation in nature

These ideas lie in the background of Adorno’s later work. There his critique of society unfolds with a slightly different emphasis than Horkheimer’s and Marcuse’s. The difference corresponds to the emphasis placed on each of the two sources of the notion of reification in Marx. Adorno draws primarily on the theory of commodity fetishism. What most impresses him is the notion that abstract quantity replaces quality as immediate appearance throughout society. He generalizes this notion as Lukács had proposed as the universal “model” of all forms of objectivity and subjectivity. But unlike Lukács, Adorno presents this thesis programmatically as a critique of rational conceptualization. His term for his approach is “non-identity” of concept and object. This suggests an irrationalist hostility to concepts, but Adorno is not an irrationalist.¹²

A Marxist account of knowledge must begin with the fact that experience is a socially mediated relation to real objects. Adorno’s emphasis on mediation responds to the suspicion that experience has been reified by capitalism. This is one way of interpreting commodity fetishism: we no longer relate immediately to the reality—the use value—of the object but to an abstraction projected in the market. What Adorno calls “identifying thought” imagines that it has understood what it names in classifying it. In this respect it resembles commodity fetishism that reduces objects to a narrow and abstract “meaning,” i.e., price. Classification is unable to penetrate the veil of reification since it ignores the history and connections of the things classified. Overcoming immediacy is a necessary theoretical task beyond the scope of mere classification.

Lukács explains reification in terms of the form of objectivity through which he distinguishes between the rational form and lived content of experience. Although he does not employ Lukács’s terminology, Adorno’s concept of identifying thought and its material consequences in the domination of human beings and nature also describes the formal structure of reification in tension with its content. Recovering reality therefore requires recognition of that content, the “priority of the object,” relative to identifying thought.

The “non-identity” of concept and object is the difference between that aspect of the particular that can be completely subsumed under a universal and other aspects that escape simple subsumption. True understanding is not based on classifying what immediately appears but respects the intrinsic complexity of its objects. That requires many different conceptual probes that mediate the multiple aspects of the phenomena. Adorno writes, “By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking.”¹³

Adorno calls this procedure the construction of a “constellation.” This aspect of Adorno’s theory is roughly similar to the Hegelian concept of the concrete, as discussed in Chapter 4. Objects are not isolated and self-contained; they are functional components in the social totality. Their truth is revealed in assemblages of concepts that articulate their various connections with other objects. These assemblages reveal the object’s contingency, lack of unity, contradictory nature. They expose its potentialities as well as its history and thereby achieve a “rational identity” that adequately represents the object as a mediated whole. The conceptual mediations articulate real mediations constitutive of the object and driving its development. In this sense the constellation transcends the givenness of the thing. However, Adorno also asserts the transcendence of the thing, as material, with respect to its concept.

What does this puzzling insistence on the material reality of the object really mean? Adorno surely does not intend to remind us of the simple fact that things are not thoughts. This is a trivial point Dr. Johnson settled long ago.¹⁴ But he does insist that thoughts are not things in the sense that there is always more to reality than is reflected in our comprehension of it; every universal concept, indeed even every constellation of such concepts, is incomplete.

This ultimate non-identity is not trivial since it signals the methodological requirements of openness and revisability of knowledge. However, Adorno goes further than this. It is not just that things are infinitely complex, but that the relatively indeterminate character of reality is opened to us through our bodily contact with it. This is the properly materialist dimension of non-identity.

Subjects are not abstract cogitos but embodied persons to whom things are present physically and not just conceptually. Adorno thus finds himself in agreement with those passages in Marx’s Manuscripts that emphasize the sensuous, material reality of both subject and object in opposition to Hegelian idealism. As Marx says, we are real, natural entities and only as such can we have real entities as our objects. Experience is most fundamentally an encounter, not a consciousness.

Adorno conceives materiality as a preconceptual fact. While this sounds a bit like phenomenology, Adorno rejects both Husserl’s concept of consciousness and Heidegger’s ontologized version of it as “being-in-the-world.” He argues that phenomenology is a positivism of the immediate facts of consciousness. His concept of experience includes aspects slighted in one way or another by phenomenology, such as the distortion of immediacy by commodity fetishism, and the potentialities of things revealed in their constellations. Adorno’s critique is justified to the extent that phenomenology has no account of these aspects of experience.

Having rejected phenomenology, Adorno does not propose some sort of causal account of perception à la Locke. The somatic basis of perception is not reducible to naturalistic physiology. In all such accounts a meaningless object, which Adorno charges is actually an abstract posit of thought, somehow produces an effect of meaning in the subject. Rather, one must start from the actual experience that is a complex of so-called secondary qualities, meanings, and values along with direct physical interaction with the world. The experiential encounter with the concrete is not reducible to knowledge of objective facts, but is qualitative and value-laden. Adorno claims that all this is “real,” not a subjective illusion or mental projection. The contribution of the subject to experience is not a source of error but an essential constituent. Through it alone the objects of experience take on meaning. In interpreting the meaning of the object in these terms, the constellation tells us about reality and not about ourselves.

But this interpretation of non-identity pushes the problem back a step; for now, to make sense of his claim that we are material things interacting with other material things, we must understand what Adorno means by a “material thing.” Unfortunately, this aspect of his theory is underdeveloped. Scholars have suggested a variety of interpretations of his implicit ontology. For example, Brian O’Connor argues that despite significant differences, Adorno’s theory has much in common with phenomenology, while J. M. Bernstein relates it to the concept of material inference.¹⁵ But whatever their interpretation, the commentators reaffirm the basic structure of philosophy of praxis: a deeper unity of subject and object underlies the historically evolved split due to the reifying dynamics of capitalism and exemplified by the philosophical tradition. A thinking that restores those suppressed dimensions can also claim to be rational in a different sense from instrumentalism. Instrumental rationality arises through abstraction and reduction of this richer original experience. Its objects come to it with a history and with connections to other objects that it strips away to arrive at a quantitative, manipulable remainder. Adorno’s “anthropomorphic” concept of experience prescinds from the effective disenchantment of the world by modern scientific-technical thinking.¹⁶

However, here the story gets complicated. Although the truth of sensation is the mutual mediation and interdependence of subject and object as revealed in the unreduced experience, this truth is ever less accessible in modern society. The prevailing instrumentalism is not merely theoretical but affects experience itself. The diminished experience available in this society constitutes a particularly pernicious real abstraction, one that endangers rationality itself by reducing it to its purely instrumental aspect. From this reduction spring the various antinomies of philosophy, the split between subject and object, value and fact, and so on. The unity (if not identity) of subject and object in experience is blocked by a social phenomenon, the disenchantment process, and can thus only be recovered through social change. The pattern established in this analysis of experience is the familiar one of philosophy of praxis: desublimation of the philosophical categories, transposition of their relations in idealist philosophy to their desublimated surrogates, and resolution of the antinomies in history.

Adorno’s critique of the overextension of instrumental rationality appears similar to Habermas’s colonization thesis. Like the colonization thesis, this argument depends on a notion of appropriate balance between different world relations, lost in the course of capitalist development. But Adorno anticipates Habermas’s formulation and rejects it in advance. In “On Subject and Object” he criticizes as “shameful” the concept of communication as “imparting information between subjects … because it betrays what is best—the potential for agreement between human beings and things.” This is a peculiar phrase: in what sense can human beings and things “agree”? Adorno goes on to explain that “Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other.”¹⁷

These passages occur in a speculative ellipsis Adorno “allows” himself exceptionally. He quickly moves on to other subjects without explaining properly what he means. When scattered passages throughout his work are compared, certain ideas come through that help to interpret his intent. Nature and history are not independent of each other, but must be understood in their inseparable connection. In modern societies a historically sedimented “second nature” of dead conventions and institutions occupies the place of mythic fate that unmastered nature once signified for primitive peoples. Natural beauty, especially where human artifacts have been harmoniously integrated into it, prefigures a redemptive future in which the “wounds” of nature will heal and life will flourish in peace, i.e., mutual participation of “differentiated” human and natural being. Nature, in one of Adorno’s interpretations, thus holds a utopian promise.¹⁸

That promise is the deepest connection between the Frankfurt School and the philosophy of praxis. What is this harmonious relation to nature if not the transcendence of the antinomy of subject and object in which that philosophy culminates? The connection to the early Marx is obvious. It is true that at points the Manuscripts affirm the unlimited transformative power of labor, yet there are other passages in Marx’s text that emphasize less the humanization of nature by man than the participation of man in nature.¹⁹

The notion of participatory identity makes room for the sheer naturalness of nature in a way the theory of the humanization of nature through labor does not. In claiming that human needs are correlated with their objects ontologically, Marx asserts an ultimate harmony joining the human being as a natural being with the nature in which its human nature is fulfilled. Nature is not merely the object of the subject because the subject is itself a natural object. The consubstantiality of subject and object supersedes the contingent relation between them assumed by modern philosophy since Descartes. The existing scientific-technical rationality, based on the most extreme separation of subject and object, is condemned as an alienated expression of rationality. Human beings participate in the world in other ways that are less reductive and more firmly based in concrete experience.

But for Adorno, the participation of the differentiated is not identity. He explains that “it would be impossible to conceive that state as either undifferentiated unity of subject and object or their hostile antithesis; rather, it would be communication of what is differentiated.”²⁰ But Adorno holds back at the decisive moment. He famously argued that the world is properly understood in the light of redemption but that ultimate prospect serves only to devalue the given. Redemption does not actually enter history as he conceives it.