Theodor W. Adorno, from MAPPING IDEOLOGY

Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx". 

“Messages in a Bottle” - Theodor W. Adorno

This selection gives us 10 passages from Adorno on a wide variety of topics. They read like caustic theoretico-prose poems. I will highlight only a few lines which bear most closely on the overarching focus of the book. 

In “Key People” Adorno tells us that our society has effected “the universal objectification of egotism” but at the same time that to the extent that a social subject feels fully identified with a social role “doctor’s wife, a member of a faculty. a chairman of a committee” that in such subjects “become once again in consciousness” what they are in their being (35). And, that “compared to the illusion of the self-sufficient personality existing independently in the commodity society, such consciousness is truth” (35). In “Legalities” Adorno decries the creation of the word “genocide” as by that coinage “the unspeakable was made, for the sake of protest, commensurable (...) its possibility is virtually recognized” (35). In “Freedom as they know it” he writes that the idea of “freedom” has come to mean the right of the stronger to take from the weak but that the “objective spirit of language knows better” concluding that “there is no freedom as long as everything has its price, an in reified society things exempted from the price mechanism exist only as pitiful rudiments” (36). The next several sections all focus in one way or another on issues of love. In “Les Adieux” he gripes about the inability that he perceives in contemporary relationships to maintain love long distance and sees the tendency as the onset of the “inhuman” (37). In “Gentlemen’s honor” we are treated to the commonplace that the male-authored notions of Women’s honor and lack of promiscuity is a means of control, but he also thinks that the rule of “discretion” imposed upon men allows women, especially the upper class woman, many opportunities to lie and deceive (underwhelming conclusions given the tone of the passage). In “Post-festum” we learn that those who are heart-broken were actually only in love only with themselves at those moments when they thought they had forgotten themselves totally in their feeling (38-9). In “Come closer” he discusses one way that “the dominance of exchange value” invades the realm of intimacy due to the “split between inner and outer” (39). His case seems to be that exchange value acts as a third (a bit like the big Other) which implicitly objectifies both parties in a romantic connection. That love does not fair well is his conclusion because in “the realm of utility” - the outcome it appears of the intrusion of exchange value into intimacy - “every relationship relationship worthy of human beings takes on an aspect of luxury. No one can really afford it” (39). In his view exchange value’s spread into this realm is effecting a “cleansing of human beings of the murk and impotence of affects” (40). In “Depreciation” he moves back to theory more explicitly arguing first that “the only true ideas are those which transcend their own thesis” (41). He brings up the notion of the idée fixe which he aligns with a paranoia fixation, both warning against it as dangerous and at the same time claiming that “Thinkers  lacking in the paranoid element (...) have no impact or are soon forgotten” (41). Utterly non-paranoid truth would then be “impotent and in conflict with itself” (41). As such, “Flight from the idée fixe becomes a flight from thought” (41). “Procrustes” is an attack on empiricism when used to “sabotage” dialectical or speculative thought. Demands for evidence, if met with a lack cannot in his view consign all philosophical thought which lacks it to “vain and idle speculation” (41). Why? Adorno’s answer is that such methods of thought as criticized here are themselves reifying of our lives and that it is philosophy’s task to show the “immanent contradiction” of such methods. This section, for all its snarky tone about researchers and scientists, is profoundly unsatisfying even as I wholeheartedly agree that empiricism alone gets us nowhere of much interest. The final section here, “Imaginative excesses” discusses the fear or reluctance of dialectical thinkers to “indulge in positive images of the proper society” as all such “social utopias” in his view “merge in a dismal resemblance to what they were devised against” (43). This feels like a micro-statement of his well know theses such that ‘the enlightenment project’ contained within itself as a sort of logical entailment, the terror, the holocaust, etc. this being a prominent example of the broader “short circuit” (to use a phrase Zizek is find of) whereby any thinker who dares to try to think totality is somehow also totalitarian. That said, the passage as a whole seems to call for those who would like change to be willing to sacrifice their “individual interests” and “better insight” (43). He then tours through a criticism of intellectual leftists before reversing, given his feeling about contemporary American culture, and claim that as the “masses no longer mistrust intellectuals because they betray the revolution, but because they might want it, and thereby reveal how great is their own need of intellectuals” (45). 

I have been impressed with Adorno’s thinking in other texts, and I admit to some aesthetic appreciation of these passages (which evoke both Neitzsche and Ambrose Beirce), I cannot but wonder at the logic of selecting this work for this collection. In spite of his erudition and flashes of insight, I cannot help but to suspect an unexamined dependence upon notions of romantic love which are themselves ideological. Further, while there is much insight here, the formal characteristics of these passages seems to mitigate against their being elaborated more fully as theory and to instead pose them closer to rants or gripes.