Background Citations. Results Citations. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Critical Social Theory Dialectic of Enlightenment presupposes a critical social theory indebted to. Theodor W. The second thesis allows them to expose ideological and destructive tendencies within modern forces of secularization, but without denying either that these forces are progressive and enlightening or that the older conceptions they displace were themselves ideological and destructive.
A fundamental mistake in many interpretations of Dialectic of Enlightenment occurs when readers take such theses to be theoretical definitions of unchanging categories rather than critical judgments about historical tendencies.
In fact, what they find really mythical in both myth and enlightenment is the thought that fundamental change is impossible. Such resistance to change characterizes both ancient myths of fate and modern devotion to the facts. Two Hegelian concepts anchor this project, namely, determinate negation and conceptual self-reflection.
Beyond and through such determinate negation, a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection is the work of the concept as the self-reflection of thought der Begriff als Selbstbesinnung des Denkens , DE Conceptual self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere instrument of human self-preservation.
It also reveals that the goal of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and humans but to point toward reconciliation. His most comprehensive statement occurs in Negative Dialectics , which is discussed later.
Dialectic of Enlightenment presupposes a critical social theory indebted to Karl Marx. Adorno reads Marx as a Hegelian materialist whose critique of capitalism unavoidably includes a critique of the ideologies that capitalism sustains and requires. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic to capitalist production. Like ordinary producers and consumers under capitalist conditions, bourgeois economists treat the commodity as a fetish.
They treat it as if it were a neutral object, with a life of its own, that directly relates to other commodities, in independence from the human interactions that actually sustain all commodities.
Marx, by contrast, argues that whatever makes a product a commodity goes back to human needs, desires, and practices. Significant changes have occurred in the structure of capitalism since Marx's day. This requires revisions on a number of topics: the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production; the relationship between state and economy; the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the nature and function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern art and social theory, in criticizing capitalism and calling for the transformation of society as a whole.
Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions e. The root cause, Adorno says, lies in how capitalist relations of production have come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible, concentrations of wealth and power ND — Society has come to be organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of producing exchange values, which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value.
Adorno's diagnosis of the exchange society has three levels: politico-economic, social-psychological, and cultural. Politically and economically he responds to a theory of state capitalism proposed by Friedrich Pollock during the war years. An economist by training who was supposed to contribute a chapter to Dialectic of Enlightenment but never did Wiggershaus , —19 , Pollock argued that the state had acquired dominant economic power in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and New Deal America.
Rather, such exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx's day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive. The social-psychological level in Adorno's diagnosis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist exploitation.
Adorno's cultural studies show that a similar logic prevails in television, film, and the recording industries. In fact, Adorno first discovered late capitalism's structural change through his work with sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton University Radio Research Project. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts.
His main point is that culture-industrial hypercommercialization evidences a fateful shift in the structure of all commodities and therefore in the structure of capitalism itself. Philosophical and sociological studies of the arts and literature make up more than half of Adorno's collected works Gesammelte Schriften. All of his most important social-theoretical claims show up in these studies.
Adorno rejects any such separation of subject matter from methodology and all neat divisions of philosophy into specialized subdisciplines. This is one reason why academic specialists find his texts so challenging, not only musicologists and literary critics but also epistemologists and aestheticians.
All of his writings contribute to a comprehensive and interdisciplinary social philosophy Zuidervaart First published the year after Adorno died, Aesthetic Theory marks the unfinished culmination of his remarkably rich body of aesthetic reflections. It casts retrospective light on the entire corpus. It reconstructs the modern art movement from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics. It simultaneously reconstructs philosophical aesthetics, especially that of Kant and Hegel, from the perspective of modern art.
From both sides Adorno tries to elicit the sociohistorical significance of the art and philosophy discussed. Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of the modern art movement.
The book begins and ends with reflections on the social character of modern art. Two themes stand out in these reflections. One is an updated Hegelian question whether art can survive in a late capitalist world. The other is an updated Marxian question whether art can contribute to the transformation of this world.
But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel's emphasis on intellectual import geistiger Gehalt and Marx's emphasis on art's embeddedness in society as a whole. The result is a complex account of the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork's autonomy. Adorno regards authentic works of modern art as social monads. The unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which they belong.
These tensions enter the artwork through the artist's struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a whole.
Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem imminent. As commentary and criticism, Adorno's aesthetic writings are unparalleled in the subtlety and sophistication with which they trace work-internal tensions and relate them to unavoidable sociohistorical conflicts.
One gets frequent glimpses of this in Aesthetic Theory. Typically he elaborates these categories as polarities or dialectical pairs. One such polarity, and a central one in Adorno's theory of artworks as social monads, occurs between the categories of import Gehalt and function Funktion. Adorno's account of these categories distinguishes his sociology of art from both hermeneutical and empirical approaches. A hermeneutical approach would emphasize the artwork's inherent meaning or its cultural significance and downplay the artwork's political or economic functions.
An empirical approach would investigate causal connections between the artwork and various social factors without asking hermeneutical questions about its meaning or significance. Adorno, by contrast, argues that, both as categories and as phenomena, import and function need to be understood in terms of each other. On the one hand, an artwork's import and its functions in society can be diametrically opposed.
On the other hand, one cannot give a proper account of an artwork's social functions if one does not raise import-related questions about their significance. So too, an artwork's import embodies the work's social functions and has potential relevance for various social contexts. In general, however, and in line with his critiques of positivism and instrumentalized reason, Adorno gives priority to import, understood as societally mediated and socially significant meaning.
The social functions emphasized in his own commentaries and criticisms are primarily intellectual functions rather than straightforwardly political or economic functions. Because of the shift in capitalism's structure, and because of Adorno's own complex emphasis on modern art's autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art.
Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored.
The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory , are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks. To gain access to this center, one must temporarily suspend standard theories about the nature of truth whether as correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic success and allow for artistic truth to be dialectical, disclosive, and nonpropositional.
According to Adorno, each artwork has its own import Gehalt by virtue of an internal dialectic between content Inhalt and form Form. This import invites critical judgments about its truth or falsity. To do justice to the artwork and its import, such critical judgments need to grasp both the artwork's complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of the sociohistorical totality to which the artwork belongs.
The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the artwork.
But neither is it a merely human construct. It is historical but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to specific societal conditions.
Adorno's idea of artistic truth content presupposes the epistemological and metaphysical claims he works out most thoroughly in Negative Dialectics. These claims, in turn, consolidate and extend the historiographic and social-theoretical arguments already canvassed.
This occurs in four stages. Part Two ND — works out Adorno's alternative with respect to the categories he reconfigures from German idealism. Like Hegel, Adorno criticizes Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience can be neither so pure nor so separate from each other as Kant seems to claim. As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of understanding Verstand would be unintelligible if they were not already about something that is nonconceptual.
Conversely, the supposedly pure forms of space and time cannot simply be nonconceptual intuitions. Not even a transcendental philosopher would have access to them apart from concepts about them.
Hollifield, Philip L. Martin, Pia M. Introduction to Sociology. Theodor W. Description Desc. Reviews Sociology. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
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