Escaping Adorno’s iron cage, the impossibility of Godless critical theory

Adorno’s The Culture Industry and  is one of the most influential texts of critical theory, illustrating how capitalist society instramentalizes reason enslaving mass-produced man fed into a totalizing system of control.

Adorno is stuffed with essential insights into modernity, and I agree with a great deal of his assessment….but he has his critics,  stuck in a marxist materialistic determinism, as Gillian Rose has astutely noted, Adorno’s thought ‘is haunted by a ghostly missing agency’.

He both denies the efficacy of the subject, due to its implication in commodity culture and instrumental rationality, while at the same time making the subject the agent of an attentive eschatological reserve.This attempt – in the words of Espen Hammer – to ‘affirm the subject in its moment of involuntary annihilation’ is ambitious, to say the least.

Habermas argues that Adorno cuts off the limb he is standing on, commit- ting a ‘performative contradiction’ that employs reason and the subject in a circular and groundless critique. 

But here I’d like to ask, does Adorno’s own system of thought escape his own critique ? How can he justify his own conception of truth, his particular values, or, especially, his unique, and problematic, anthropology ?

 David M Wilmington revisits his thesis HERE, noting

“…the theory of the culture industry itself proceeds from and is guided by certain anthropological assumptions.”

The basics of Adorno’s critique.

The basics, Wilmington says, is that, 

“…the modern enlightenment intentionally set itself against myth in an attempt to sever ties with anything that kept humanity linked to nature. Reason, reduced to instrumental thinking that grasps at control and mastery, became a self-protecting totality, and enlightenment came to be defined by whatever functions of reason ensured the separation from myth and the progress of control Adorno’s invocation of the Kantian “schema,” which categorizes raw data for processing by human reason. 

In this key passage, Adorno identifies the germ of the culture industry’s enforced sameness as that which has taken the place of Kant’s “secret mechanism within the psyche” that preforms “immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason.”

 Where this Kantian notion of an inner schematization is still active, in that the subject itself relates the data to concepts, the influence of the culture industry preempts

all classification by the consumer herself by pre-classifying everything. This is not merely a question of broadcasting or enforcing a system of classification. In some way, “the schematicism of production” itself pre-classifies all products of the culture industry. The schema, the classification, somehow inheres in the products because they have been created under the material conditions of industrial capitalism. This manipulated and manipulating schema is a modern mechanism which preempts the work of the relatively active mechanism posited by Kantian epistemology.

At its root in the schema, however, it is the preformation of epistemology into easily commodifiable units. Here is the fundamental for which the culture industry is a faithful overtone: thought is starved of anything not reduced to the quanta of the marketplace. The character of this data is governed by “the iron law that the information in question shall never touch the essential, shall never degenerate into thought.”

(Pseudo) Knowledge Is (Enslaving) Power

"Where the supply and promotion of traditional commodities might delude people into assuming that value inhered in an object, the system Adorno attempts to diagnose limits people to finding value only in the pre-commodfied information, whose standards of “accuracy” (itself a category imposed for the purposes of control) can be manipulated to oppose any thought.

 The information allowed by the system informs us only about mass culture itself: it is “a system of signals that signals itself.”

Since the system holding the reins of every aspect of society is the system of industrial capitalism, it is no surprise to find an endless desire for information - spurred on even at the self-identified “popular level” by the social need to be in-the-know, to gain the prestige of being “well-informed.”

Once information is defined solely as data, as “facts” that can be easily arranged in order to be grasped quickly, as that which can be “recognized, subsumed and verified,” everything in tension with that schema must—by definition—be rejected “as idiocy or ideology, as subjective in the derogatory sense.”

OK.

Now, Adorno, Williamton notes, "examines everything in terms of its attentiveness to, or mediation of, material historical conditions”, using negative dialectics to confront and read idols, discussing their falseness, while true dialectic being its own check on its own power, and the result is truth.

However, Williamston says, “we must ask which truth will necessarily wind up as the recipient of dialectic’s power.”

“It seems that the material conditions out of which this dialectic emerges would, in fact, predetermine what it recognizes as the truth to which it would hand over power.

*Despite the claim that no absolute idea stands behind his critique of the culture industry’s representations, Adorno’s definitions (of human flourishing and telos  , especially) and understanding of human dynamics (epistemology, for example) are clearly guided by standards or ideals supplied to him by his own fundamental commitments: the definitions and dynamics of Marxist thought.
The nature of Adorno’s “truth” is such that it is simply not a part of, nor can it be recognized in or engage with, the capitalist society of the modern west for Adorno, the goal of all critique—even a critique of Marxian materialism itself —is to serve a focus on “concrete social reality and the emancipatory goals of Marxism.”

So historical materialism, the primacy of the socio-economic/political material conditions, is the given standard.

While this does not cause a problem  in itself —every critique must have its normative standpoints—Adorno applies his standard in such a way that only something completely outside the industrial capitalist “current conditions” could even allow the possibility of true thought and freedom. 

In effect, Adorno surreptitiously advocates for his ideal— as much as he rejects the charge of utopianism—by “pathologizing” the alternative that was already winning the day by the mid-1940s.

Mere Shades: Life as death

"The anthropology underlying Adorno’s analysis and critique provides him with mere shades as humans: the non-incarnate and bloodthirsty simulacra of humans Odysseus encounters in the Land of the Dead. Homer imagined this as the state of the masses of the dead; Adorno accepts this half- or non-life as the state of the masses of the living.

Without a conceptually coherent account of transcendence, Adorno is trapped in a hermeneutical spiral—an infernal vision where even genuinely utopic hopes cannot escape, on the one hand, the potential for evil (seen in whichever genius demons assembled and maintain the conditions for capitalism), and on the other hand, the soulless, imago-less sheep that make up the vast masses of humanity.

*The reason for his entrapment helps us see the most important limitation in Adorno’s critique: because of his definition of humanity and of truth, and his commitment to a brand of materialism as the standard against which he judges everything, he must see key elements of human flourishing, and even of human thought, as completely contingent upon a social order.
This is not a question of identifying better or worse social orders — for Adorno, the material conditions under capitalism create a system under which human flourishing and life itself are not possible.

Although he refuses to adequately describe an alternative social order, the standards against which he judges and condemns “current conditions”adhere within rigid parameters.

*Where he rightly diagnoses a strain of anti-mythological enlightenment thinking that reduces truth to the quanta of mathematics, he cannot escape the quanta of his own preordered formulae —a system of categories and dynamics in which human life is utterly bound to the material realities of economic and political power.

 Himself afraid of the “myth” of the non-material transcendent, Adorno binds truth to the earth and explains away any account of genuinely transcendent truth as another system-underwriting cog in the machine.

Although more of the truth may one day be revealed under the right (economic/political) conditions, it is already—and has always been—present, susceptible to discovery in material reality.

The materialist schema at the core of his epistemology and anthropology is at least as effective a jail-keeper as industrial capitalism: it makes humans entirely responsible for freeing up the truth (or at least more of it) because there is no truth that is beyond humanity.

Ultimately, Adorno cannot trust the human because he cannot give an account of human life that includes anything other than the already-present. All that can possibly change (within Adorno’s anti-transcendent materialist cosmology) is only what already is within humanity.

Thus the boundaries to Adorno’s undefined eschaton are purely human: capitalism, industry, class, etc.

In the absence of something like the Christian claim of Incarnational transcendence —something that is both materially present in history and really transcendent of all human experience and language — he is left with a notion of life enslaved to the materially present.

He must hinge his critique of the closed system of the culture industry upon a standard of truth, excellence, freedom, etc., that exists in a place Totally Other than anything within the system.

But since even this Totally Other must already be entirely (and paradoxically) contained within the human, the Other must be merely the unrealized potential of the human. In other words, Adorno’s “Totally Other” is merely a future and developed part of the “Same.”

When the Apostle Paul can cry out from within his own “closed system” of doing what he does not want to do and failing to do what he wants, he can give an account of why the standard against which he judges himself is good: the standard is not human. Similarly, when he cries out, much as Adorno tries to cry out, “Who can deliver me from this body of death?”

Paul does so with both real despair and real hope- the question is, after all, “rhetorical” and directed at the transcendent source of the standard.

By limiting himself to the merely material, Adorno destroys the human by limiting it to the merely human. By limiting himself to the merely human, Adorno destroys the hope he seeks to stimulate.

Where Christians must begin an anthropology from the recognition of a transcendent Creator in whose image humanity was created, Adorno cannot allow for any real transcendence at any point.

It is therefore ironic that the only theology Adorno wants (eventually) is an empty “transcendence” that he must have to get out of the closed system he serves (the mere possibility of which is denied by his own presuppositions) —a moment of the possibly-other that comes from nowhere (a filthy past which should preclude its existence), arises in a cesspool (in which it could never be recognized) and points to nowhere and no-One that is not already materially present in humans and their material social conditions.”

Adorno and theology

Now, Adorno, from his interpretation of Kantian philosophy, is motivated by the following concern in his take on religion, he says: 

“Certainly a ratio that does not wantonly absolutize itself as a rigid means of domination requires self-reflection, some of which is expressed in the need for religion today. But this self-reflection cannot stop at the mere negation of thought by thought itself, a kind of mystical sacrifice, and cannot realize itself through a ‘leap’: that would all too closely resemble the politics of catastrophe.”

Christopher Craig Brittain explains,

“In this statement, Adorno locates the contemporary ‘need for religion’ in the effort of reason to resist absolutizing itself. He suggests that theology is related to reason’s critique of itself. Furthermore, he connects it with a determination to resist the ‘negation of thought by thought itself’ – i.e. to a rejection of nihilism. It is also clear in these words that Adorno associates religion with what he calls ‘metaphysical experience’.

However, Adorno would equally see religion  even as a manifestation of rational thought pushing beyond itself, if conceptualized would be just as much an idol as any scientific fact.

This is because the ‘metaphysical moment’ in thought does not amount to a positive grasp of something directly ‘in-itself ’. Here one can see that Adorno is indeed a student of Kant. For him, metaphysics is not an intuition into the ‘true nature of things’; neither does it lead to the sense of some sort of meaning in life."

So….what’s the alternative ? Well, it’s still religion. Milbank offers a different account of getting past such Kantian prison schemas.

Brittian says, 

“Milbank’s counterproposal is to suggest that ‘to reason truly one must be already illumined by God’, for only virtuously ordered desire and reason resolve the ‘nihilistic contradictions of philosophy’.

Milbank responds to the Kantian block by arguing that it remains ‘haunted by this question of ontological depth “behind” finite phenomena’.This suggests to him that knowledge is only truly achieved through faith, and that this involves some form of revelation received from outside the finite.

 In his critique of the Kantian sublime, which resides at the limits of conceptuality and thus cannot be represented, he argues that Kant fails to recognize that the unknown ‘is not simply that which cannot be represented, but is also that which arrives’.

He continues:‘only if reality itself is regarded as “given” from some beyond does it become possible to trust that what is communicated and circulated may assume new meanings’.

One can escape the empty formalism of Kantian liberal political theory, Milbank says, only through ‘a kind of collective supra-rational devotion’.

 The point of human life, he suggests, is to be educated into this kind of devotion. Thus, ‘freedom . . . must first of all be the generous imparting of what one has learned’.

Contrary to the empty formalism he sees in Kant, Milbank argues that any moral theory in which freedom and reconciliation are more than a generalized formal principle is only possible in an unfounded particular praxis - that of  Jesus of Nazareth.

He argues that ‘a claim to know truly, a claim to know at all, as Plato argued, only makes sense within the frame- work of meathexis  (participation)’.

Until one accepts the Christian metanarrative (as Milbank understands it), one is chained to the wall of Plato’s cave.

He advocates for the ‘Platonic view that reason, to be reason, in some sense knows before it knows’.Thus,‘reason, to be reason, must therefore also be faith’. It is ‘only through assent to the realm of eternal unchanging forms, or of the ideas in the mind of God’ that one encounters where the ‘actual abides’.

Only those initiated into the true order of reality hidden behind sense experience might leave the shadows of the cave and enter into the sunlight of reality: ‘to reason truly one must be already illumined by God.”