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".
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| Peter Dews |
Dews’ article is instigated by his noting how many scholars have been comparing Adorno’s negative dialectics with Derridean deconstruction and positioning Adorno as precursor to Derrida. He acknowledges many similar preoccupations between Adorno and post-structuralism generally; subject’s delusory autonomy, modernist radical aesthetics, and the “oppressive functioning of scientific and technological reason” (46). Then specific to deconstruction and negative dialectics he notes a similar focus upon “the lability and historicity of language” and anti-foundationalist attitude, and a “torturous love-hate relation to Hegel” but he argues that to suggest that Adorno is a deconstructor avant la lettre is a serious misunderstanding of Adorno’s thought. The reason for this is that Adorno remains committed to “the materialist emphases of Marxism” and, presaging the criticism of Derrida that will come later says “it is precisely this lack of a materialist counterweight” (47) which shows the one-sidedness of his thought which leads him, like many other French post-structuralists, to embody a “self-destructively indiscriminate, and politically ambiguous, assault on the structures of rationality and modernity in toto” (48). Before returning to Derrida, Dews tours through Lyotard, Delueze and Foucault arguing in each case (and with some limitations, such as the late work of Foucault) that each, being indebted to Neitzsche (and averse to Hegel), has focused on one aspect of Neitzsche’s thought without attending to the counterpoints which would challenge it. This discussion will unfold around the notion of identity. In Dews’ account, Neitzsche’s maxim “Knowledge and Becoming exclude one another” (53) has been taken as his most crucial position as regards identity, ignoring comments like “distinct from every perspective kind of outlook or sensual-spiritual appropriation, something exists, an ‘in-itself’” (52). Dews’ argues that these divergent points in Neitzsche do not support a wholesale devotion to flux and becoming and repudiation of concepts and disciplines and that his denial of “epistemological criteria” drives his thought “toward an idealism which argues that the structures of knowledge are entirely constitutive of the object” while a contrary pull in his thinking (perspectivism) pushes him to a “reinstatement of the distinction between appearance and reality” (53). He turns then to Adorno’s critique of “Identity-thinking” by beginning with the claim that Adorno is unsatisfied with the “Neitzschean-Freudian, naturalistic critique of consciousness” (54) and that he “takes up the discovery of the early German Romantics that the philosophy of pure consciousness is internally incoherent” (54). Dews has Fichte in mind here, from whom Adorno is said to have arrived at the conviction that “the structure of contradiction (...) both splits and constitutes the subject” and yet does not “call for the abolition of the subjective principle” which Dews sees the aforementioned post-structuralists as engaged in. (Here I must interrupt momentarily to point that nothing said here would be unacceptable to Lacan who also has no interest in abolishing the subject, and though Dews does not mention Lacan in this text, his earlier book The Logics of Disintegration, is a sustained polemic against Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and others forwards a critique broadly similar to this one and persistently gets Lacan wrong - usually assimilating him to Derrida or to Derridean concepts in one way or another.) Adorno agrees in broad stroke with Neitzsche about the imposed and imprecise nature of concepts vis-a-vis objects but is interested in “moving beyond the split between bare facticity ad conceptual determination, through an experience of the contradiction which that split itself implies” (56). And here he is not that far away from Hegel, as Dews notes, “He agrees with Hegel that, as a unity imposed upon particulars, the abstract universal enters into contradiction with its own concept” but he diverges from Hegel’s answer to this situation of “an immanent, self-realizing universal” arguing that this fails to critique universality itself (57). What then is identity-thinking for Adorno? As Hegel’s solution of the “self-realizing universal” is purportedly an example of such thinking, let’s try to see what the problem is for Adorno? The claim is that this solution reduces “what is non-identical in the object to itself” (58). Adorno wants to preserve the non-identical and to see this as crucial to identity rather than a contradiction of it. Here again, a reader well versed in Derrida will not find this an especially challenging thought, Adorno’s identity-thinking is not that distant from logocentrism in this account, be that as it may, identity-thinking always assumes the concept’s priority to efface the non-identical (or “difference”). But contrary to Derrida, Adorno sees “no necessary antagonism between conceptual thought and reality, no inevitable mutual exclusion of Knowledge and Becoming” (58). These particulars which remain non-identical are organizing relationally to form a “constellation” from which is derived an “openness to that non-identity of the thing itself which would be ‘the thing’s own identity against its identifications’” (58). As such, for Adorno, “the compulsive features of identity are inseparable from its own internal contradictions: identity can become adequate to its concept only by acknowledging its own moment of non-identity” (58). In Dews’ perspective it is this “logical dimension” that is missing from the French thinkers discussed here. Derrida’s failure in Dews’ account is his inability to provide “an account of the natural-historical genesis of the self” (59). Dews then contrasts Adorno and Derrida’s readings Husserl, pointing out that “Adorno, as a materialist, argues for the anchoring of consciousness in nature” (59). Looking at Adorno’s critiques of Heidegger, Dews attempts to provide a critique of Derridean différance, arguing that “While it is true that nature and culture, signified and signifier, object and subject would be nothing without the difference between them, this is not sufficient to ensure the logical priority of non-identity over identity which is crucial to Derrida’s whole philosophical stance” (60-1). The concluding section of this paper revolves around the notion of the “spell” as metaphor. The post-structuralist, as we have been told, are all engaged in a “self-defeating dynamic of a blunt prioritization of particularity, diversity and non-identity” and the “dissolution of the reflective unity of the self” all of which leads to “the indifference of boundless flux” (61). In Adorno’s view, “non-identity cannot be respected by abandoning completely the principle of identity” (61). The idea of the spell emerges in Adorno because he recognizes we can become “enchanted” by illusions of autonomy while nonetheless being all the while subjects. Aodrno wrote “The spell is the subjective form of the world spirit, the internal reinforcement of its primacy over the external processes of life” (62) which in Dews’ view “captures both the repressive and enabling features of processes of socialization” (62). His refashioning of the notion of identity is a response to this issue. Adorno wrote that the “supposition of identity is indeed the ideological element of pure thought (...) but hidden in it is also the truth moment of ideology” (61-2). “Accordingly” as Dews sums up, selfhood “is an illusion which could, in principle, be reflectively broken through by the subject which it generates - although the full realization of this process would be inseparable from a transformation of os social relations” (63). Should this occur, says Dews (and clearly he thinks Adorno would agree) the result would not be the non-subject of becoming and flux beloved by French Neitzscheans, “but rather true identity (...) which would be permeable to the non-identical moment” (63).
I am of two minds about this text. I see much here that I am swayed by in Dews account of Adorno on identity as dependent upon non-identity (and vice versa), but while I enjoy, at a pathological level, his polemic intent, I cannot help but to think that his criticism of Derrida fails to really land and that much of what he uncovers in Adorno (whom he says derived it from Fichte) is not absent from Hegel and that Lacan’s positions on the subject, the symbolic order, the real as remainder, the notion of extimacy, and his thoughts on identification provide a far broader theoretical framework for thinking all of these issues with much greater nuance.
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