Adorno - Society

8/8/2019 Adorno - Society

1/10

feal."i4eit

SocietyBY T. W. ADORNO

THE IDEA of society confirms Nietzsche's insight that concepts "whichare basically short-hand for process" elude verbal definition. Forsociety is essentially process; its laws of movement tell more aboutit than whatever invariables might be deduced. Attempts to fix itslimits end up with the same result. If one for instance defines societysimply as mankind, including all the sub-groups into which it breaksdown, out of which it is constructed, or if one, more simply still, callsit the totality, of all human beings living in a given period, one missesthereby all the subtler implications of the concept. Such a formaldefinition presupposes that society is already a society of humanbeings, that society is itself already human, is immediately one withits subjects; as though the specifically social did not consist preciselyin the imbalance of institutions over men, the latter coming littleby little to be the incapacitated products of the former. In bygoneages, whep things were perhaps different in the stone age, for in-stance the word society would scarcely have had the site meaningas it does under advanced capitalism. Over a century ago, the legalhistorian J. C. Bluntschli characterized "society" as a "concept ofthe third estate." It is that, and not only on account of the egalitariantendencies which hays worked their way down into it, distinguishingit from the feudal or absolutistic idea of "fine" or "high" society, butalso because in its very structure this idea follows the m odel of m iddle-class society.

In particular it is . not a classificatory concept, not for instance thehighest abstracflon. of sociology under which all lesser social formswould be ranged. In this type of thinking one tends to confuse thecurrent scientific ideal of a continuous and hierarchical ordering ofcategories with the very object of knowledge itself. The object meant

Sa 1 1 4 , - , ? L,, oil , A .1 -II / /JG :1d cpt4-1

cG i Le / t` " ,' .) 4 . 4 c f t :APc6.0 rQ ( 9 7 5 - / e : r i .'' ' s-7 7 : 0 /1s i ' e ice.,,p,-, I " Thp e il.


2/10

-410cey

45

all individuals on the totality which theya totality, everyone is also dependent o n everyone else.bers fulfill. Each individual without exception must takefunction on himself in order to p rolong his existence; indeed,ile his function lasts, he is taught to express h is gratitude fo r it.It is on account of this functional structure that the notion of

f the natural sciences.ere philosophical survival. Yet such realism is itself unrealistic.

ts, nor on the other hand be app rehended as an individualelf, there is none theless no social fact which is not determ inedtuation. Conflicts such as the characteristic ones betweennot some ultimate reality that is wholly

the symptoms of deeper antagonisms. Yet one cannot

ich such conflicts are located in time andwage-satisfaction which is solar in current man agement-sociology is only ap parently relatedto the conditions in a given factory and in a given branch of pro-e l a ted to the specific branches; on the parallel forces which resultin the price system in the first place and which far exceed the strugglesbetween the various groups of entrepreneurs and workers, inasmuchas the latter have already been built into the system, and representa voter potential that does no t always corresp ond to their organiza-tional affiliation. What is decisive, in the case of wage satisfactionas well as in all others, is the power structure, whether direct orindirect, the control by the entrepreneurs over the machinery ofproduction. Without a concrete awareness of this fact, it is impos-sible adequately to understand any given individual situation with-out assigning to the part what really belongs to the whole. Just as


3/10

146T. W. ADORNsocial mediation cannot exist without that which is mediated, with-out its elemen ts: individual hum an begins, institutions, situations; inthe same way the latter cannot exist without the form er's mediation.When details com e to seem the strongest reality of all, on account oftheir tangible imm ediacy, they blind the eye to genuine perception .Because society can n either be d efined as a concept in the currentlogical sense, nor empirically demonstrated, while in the meantimesocial phenom ena continue to call out for some kind of conceptualiza-tion, the proper organ of the latter is speculative theory. Only athoroughgoing theory of society can tell us what society really is.Recently it has been objected that it is unscientific to insist on con-cepts such as that of society, inasmuch as truth and falsehood arecharacteristics of sentence s alone, and no t of ideas as a whole. Suchan ob jection confuses a self-validation concept such as that of societywith a traditional kind of definition. The former must develop asit is being understood, and cannot be fixed in arbitrary terminologyto the benefit of some supposed mental tidiness.The requirement that society must be defined through theory --a requirement, which is itself a theory of society must furtheraddress itself to the suspicion that such theory lags far behind themodel of the natural sciences, still tacitly assumed to binding on it.In the natural sciences theory represents a clear point of contactbetween well-defined concepts and repeatable experiments. A self-develop ing theory of society, how ever, need no t concern itself withthis intimidating model, given its enigmatic claim to mediation. Forthe objection measures the concept of society against the criterionof immediacy and presence, and if society is mediation, then thesecriteria have no validity for it. The next step is the ideal of knowl-edge of things from the inside: it is claimed that the theory o f societyentrenches itself behind such subjectivity. This would only serve tohinder progress in the sciences, so this argument runs, and in themost flourishing ones has been long since eliminated. Yet we must .point out that society is both kno wn and not kn own from the inside.Inasmuch as society remains a product of human activity, its livingsubjects are still able to recognize themselves in it, as from across agreat distance, in a manner radically different than is the case forthe ob jects of chem istry and physics. It is a fact that in midd le-classsociety, rational action is objectively just as "comprehensible" as it ismo tivated. This was the great lesson of the generation of M ax W eberand Dilthey. Yet their ideal of comprehension remained onesided,insofar as it preclud4 everything in society that resisted identification


4/10

147ke objects, should first and forem ost renounceny effort to "understand" them. He was firmly persuaded thatarily as that which is alien andgenuine reflectionrehension"fic m ethod w hich Durkheim stands for thus reg-

s thesis, in that it cannot transcend the ideathat of society's basic comprehensibility. Ye t this resistanceo rational comprehension should be understood first andationships between m en wh ich have grownstanding of againstan b eings like some different substance. It ought to b e the taskogy today to com prehend the incom prehensible, the advancebeings into the inhuman.Besides wh ich, the anti-theoretical concep ts of that older sociology

f a totality to be grasped; on ly it limitscts, to characteristic images, without any con-ion of that totality of society from wh ich the phenom enon to bets meaning. Enthusiasm for the incom pre-on the other hand , transforms ch ronic social antagonismsquaest io nes fac t i . The situation itself, unreconciled, is contem-es to be glorified: society as a mechan ism

In the sam e way, with equally significant consequences, the dom in-relationsh ips which it refuses to recognize as such on account"role" has for instanceeys to sociologynd to the understanding of human action in general. This notionved from the pure being-for-others of individual men , from thather with one another in social constraint,unreconciled, each unidentical with himself. Hum an beings find their"roles" in that structural mechanism of society which trains them to


5/10

148 T. W. ADORNOpure self-conservation at the same time that it denies them conserva-tion of their Selves. The all-powerful principle of identity itself, theabstract interchangeability of social tasks, works towards the extinctionof their personal identities. It is no accident that the notion of "role"(a notion which claims to be value-free) is derived from the theater,where actors are not in fact the identities they play at being. Thisdivergence is merely an expression of underlying social antagonisms.A genuine theory of society ought to be able to move from such im-mediate observation of phenomena towards an understanding of theirdeeper social causes: why human beings today are still sworn to theplaying of roles. The Marxist notion of character-masks, which notonly anticipates the later category but deduces and founds it socially,was able to account for this implicitly. But if the science of societycontinues to operate with such concepts, at the same time drawingback in terror from that theory which puts them in perspective andgives them their ultimate meaning, then it merely ends up in th eservice of ideology. The concept of role, lifted without analysis fromthe social facade, helps perpetuate the monstrosity of role-playingitself.

A notion of society which was not satisfied to remain at that levelwould be a critical one. It would go far beyond the trivial idea thateverything is interrelated. The emptiness and abstractness of this ideais not so much the sign of feeble thinking as it is that of a shabbypermanency in the constitution of society itself: that of the marketsystem in modern-day society. The first, objective abstraction takesplace, not so much in scientific thought, as in the universal develop-ment of the exchange system itself; which happens independently ofthe qualitative attitudes of producer and consumer, of the mode ofproduction, even of need, which the social mechanism tends to satisfyas a kind of secondary by-product. Profit comes first. A humanityfashioned into a vast network of consumers, the human beings whoactually have the needs, have been socially pre-formed beyond any-thing which one might naively imagine, and this not only by thelevel of industrial developmen t but also by the econ om ic relationshipsthemselves into which they enter, even though this is far moredifficult to observe empirically. Above and beyond all specific formsof social differentiation, the abstraction implicit in the market systemrepresents the dom ination o f the general over the p articular, of societyover its captive membership. It is not at all a socially neutral phenomenon, as the logistics of reduction, of uniformity of work time,might suggest. Behinct,he reduction of men to agents and bearers


6/10

49es the dom ination o f men o ver men. Th is remainsn spite of the difficulties with which from time to timeany of the categories of political science are con fronted. The formsystem requ ires everyone to respect the law of exchanget wish to be destroyed, irrespective of w hether profit isive motivation or n ot.This universal law of the market system is not in the least inval-idated by the survival of retrograde areas and archaic social forms invarious parts of the world. The older theory of imperialism alreadypo inted out the functional relationship b etween the econom ies of theadvan ced capitalistic countries and those of the non-cap italistic areas,as they were then called. The two were no t merely juxtaposed, eachmaintained the other in existence. When old-fashioned colonialismwas eliminated, all that was transformed into political interests andrelationships. In this context, rational economic and developmentalaid is scarcely a luxury. Within the exchange society, the p re-capital-istic remnants and enclaves are by no means something alien, mererelics of the past: they are vital necessities for the market system.Irrational institutions are useful to the stubborn irrationality of asociety wh ich is rational in its mean s but no t in its ends. An institu-tion such as the family, which finds its origins in nature and whosebinary structure escapes regulation by the equivalency of exchange,owes its relative power of resistance to the fact that without its help,as an irrational com ponent, certain specific modes of existence suchas the small peasantry would hardly be able to survive, being them-selves impossible to rationalize without the collapse of the entiremidd le-class edifice.

The process of increasing social rationalization, of universal ex-tension of the market system, is not something that takes place beyondthe specific social conflicts and antagonisms, or in spite of them. Itworks through those antagonisms them selves, the latter, at the sam etime tearing society apart in the process. For in the institution ofexchange there is created and reproduced that antagonism whichcould at any time bring organized society to ultimate catastropheand destroy it. The who le business keeps creaking and groaning on,at unspeakable human cost, only on account of the profit motive andthe interiorization by individuals of the breach torn in society as awhole. Society remains class struggle, today just as in the period whenthat concept originated; the repression current in the eastern countriesshows that things are no different there either. Although the pre-diction of increasing pauperization of the proletariat has not proved


7/10

150. W. ADORNOtrue over a long period of time, the disappearance of classes as suchis mere illusion, epiphenomenon. It is quite possible that subjectiveclass consciousness has weakened in the advanced countries; inAmerica it was never very strong in the first place. But social theory i snot supposed to be predicated on subjective awareness. And as societyincreasingly controls the very forms of consciousness itself, this 'ismore and more the case. -Even the oft-touted equilibrium betweenhabits of consumption and possibilities for education is a subjectivephenomenon, part of the consciousness of the individual member ofsociety, rather than an objective social fact. And even from a sub-jective viewpoint the class relationship is not quite so easy to dismissas the ruling ideology would have us believe. The most recentempirical sociological investigation has been able to distinguish essen-tial differences in attitude between those assigned in a general statis-tical way to the upper and the lower classes. The lower classes havefewer illusions, are less "idealistic." The happy few hold such "ma-terialism" against them. As in the past, workers today still see societyas something split into an upper and a lower. It is well known thatthe formal possibility of equal education does not correspond in theleast to the actual proportion of working class children in the schoolsand universities.Screened from subjectivity, the difference between the classes growsobjectively with the increasing concentration of capital. This plays adecisive part in the existence of individuals; if it were not so, thenotion of class wou ld merely be fetishization. Even thou gh consum ers'needs are growing more standardized - for the middle class, in con-trast to the older feodality, has always been willing to moderateexpenditures over intake, except in the first period of capitalist accum -ulation - the separation of social power from social helplessness hasnever been greater than it is now. Almost everyone knows from hisown personal experience that his social existence can scarcely be saidto have resulted from his own personal initiative; rather he has hadto search for gaps, "openings," jobs from which to make a livinirrespective of what seem to him his own h um an possibilities or talents,should he indeed still have any kind of vague inkling of the latter.The profoundly social-darwinistic notion of adaptation, borrowedfrom biology and applied to the so-called sciences of man in ..a .normative manner, expresses this and is indeed its ideology. Not tospeak of the degree to which the class situation has been transposedonto the relationship between nations, between the technically de-veloped and underdeveloped countries.


8/10

.

ts (1 14o k a c A 3(4-( 451

That even so society goesion as successfully as it does is to bevtttributed to its control o r the relationship of basic social forces,which has long since been c tended to all the countries of the globe.This control necessarily reinNrces the totalitarian tendencies of thesocial order, and is a political e uivalent for and adaptation to thetotal penetration by the m arket ecothe very danger increases which such cat least on this side of the Soviet and C hifault of technical development or industrializ ..is only the image of human productivity itselputers merely being an extension of the humadvancement is therefore onl a mo

e forces o production and the relationshi of roduction an t4 . 8 some third thing, demonically self-sufficient. In the establishedcrder,IiidTiTiFiifization functions in a centralistic way; on its own, itcould function differently. Where people think they are closest tothings, as with television, delivered into their very living room, near-ness is itself mediated through social distance, through grea t concen-tration o f pow er. Nothing offers a more striking symbol for the factthat people's lives, what they hold for the closest to them and thegreatest reality, personal, maintained in being by them, actually re-ceive their concrete content in large measure from above. Private lifeis, more than we can even im agine, mere re-privatization; the realitiesto wh ich men hold have becom e unreal. "Life itself is a lifeless thing."A rational and genuinely free society could do w ithout administra-tion as little as it could do without the division of labor itself. Butall over the globe, administrations have tended under constrainttowards a greater self-sufficiency and independence from their ad-ministered subjects, reducing the latter to objects of abstractly normedbehavior. As Max Weber saw, such a tendency points back to theultimate means-ends rationality of the economy itself. Because thelatter is indifferent to its end, namely that of .a rational society, andas long as it remains indifferent to such an end, for so long will itbe irrational for its own subjects. The Expert is the rational formthat such irrationality takes. His rationality is founded on specializa-tion in technical and other processes, but has its ideological side aswell. The ever smaller units into which the work process is dividedbegin to resemble each o ther again, once m ore losing their need forspecialized qualifications.

Inasmuch as these m assive social forces and institutions were on cehum an ones, are essentially the reified work o f living hum an beings,

my . With this control, however,trols are designed to prevent,ese empires. It is not theon as such. The lattercybernetics and corn-n senses: lechrilsAllectic between

II I


9/10

152A P. W. ADORNOthis appearance of self-sufficiency and independence in them wouldseem to be something ideological, a socially necessary mirage whichone ought to be able to break through, to change. Yet such pureappearance is the ens realissimum in the immediate life of men. Theforce of gravity of social relationships serves only to strengthen thatappearance more and more. In sharp contrast to the period around1848, when the class struggle revealed itself as a conflict between agroup immanent to society, the middle class, and one which was halfoutside it, the proletariat, Spencer's notion of integration, the veryground law of increasing social rationalization itself, has begun toseize on the very minds of those who are to be integrated into society.Both automatically and deliberately, subjects are hindered from com-ing to consciouness of themselves as subjects. The supply of goodsthat floods across them has that result, as does the industry of cultureand countless other direct and indirect mechanisms of intellectualcontrol. The culture industry sprang from the profit-making tendencyof capital. It developed under the law of the market, the obligationto adapt your consumers to your goods, and then, by a dialecticalreversal, ended up having the result of solidifying the existing formsof consciousness and the intellectual status quo. Society needs thistireless intellectual reduplication of everything that is, because with-out this praise of the monotonously alike and with waning efforts tojustify that which exists on the grounds of its mere existence, menwould ultimately do away with this state of things in impatience.

Integration goes even further than this. That adaptation of mento social relationships and processes which constitutes history andwithout which it would have been difficult for the human race tosurvive has left its mark on them such that the very possibility ofbreaking free without terrible instinctual conflicts even breakingfree mentally has come to seem a feeble and a distant one. Menhave come to be triumph of integration! identified. in theirinnermost behavior patterns with their fate in modern society. Ina mockery of all the hopes of philosophy, subject and object haveattained ultimate reconciliation. The process is fed by the fact thatmen owe their life to what is being done to them. The affective re-arrangement of industry, the mass appeal of sports, the fetishizationof consum ers' goods, are all symptom s of this trend. The cement whichonce ideologies supplied is now furnished by these phenomena, whichhold the massive social institutions together on the one hand, thepsychological constitution of human beings on the other. If we werelooking for an ideological justification of a situation in which men


10/10

Soc ie ty 153are little better than cogs to their own machines, we might claimwithout much exaggeration that present-day human beings serve assuch an ideology in their own existence, for they seek of their ownfree will to perpetuate what is obviously a perversion of real life.So we come full circle. Men must act in order to change the presentpetrified conditions of existence, but the latter have left their markso deeply on people, have deprived them of so much of their life andindividuation, that they scarcely seem capable of the spontaneitynecessary to do so. From this, apologists for the existing order drawnew power for their argument that humanity is not yet ripe. Evento point the vicious circle out breaks a taboo of the integral society.Just as it hardly tolerates anything radically different, so also it keepsan eye out to make sure that anything which is thought or saidserves some specific change or has, as they put it, something positiveto offer. Though t is subjected to the subtlest censorship of the terminusad quern: whenever it appears critically, it has to indicate the positivesteps desired. If such positive goals turn out to be inaccessible topresent thinking, why then thought itself ought to com e across resigned -and tired, as though such obstruction were its own fault and not thesignature of the thing itself. That is the point at which society canbe recognized as a universal block, both within men and outside themat the same time. Concrete and positive suggestions for change merelystrengthen this hindrance, either as ways of administrating the un-administrable, or by calling down repression from the monstroustotality itself. The concept and the theory of society are legitimateonly when they do not allow themselves to be attracted by either ofthese solutions, when they merely hold in negative fashion to thebasic possibility inherent in them: that of expressing the fact thatsuch possibility is threatened with suffocation. Such awareness, with-out any preconceptions as to where it might lead, would be the firstcondition for an ultimate break in society's omnipotence.

Translated by F. R. Jameson

Documents

Adorno - Society