Terry Eagleton, 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". 

“Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism” - Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton

This chapter of Mapping Ideology is two chapters of Eagleton’s book Ideology in which he is surveying the uses made and criticisms of the notions of ideology as well as certain other ideas which overlap with it in the thought of folks like Gramsci and Bourdieu. As this is already a summative text and I am summarizing further, I will make use a more schematic presentation in hopes of doing as much justice as I can to the wealth of detail presented here. 

György Lukács is given extensive coverage here focusing on History and Class Consciousness (1922). As Eagleton glosses his thought, Lukács’ position on sometimes the split between thought and existence is to argue that “in the act of understanding its real conditions, an oppressed group of class has begun (...) to fashion the forms of consciousness that will contribute to changing them” (180). As such the “identity [of thought and existence] is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process” (180). The other of ideology in his view is not science (not even “Marxist science”) but rather the notion of the social totality itself (181). In Lukács’ view the “self-consciousness of the proletariat” is “the commodity form coming to an awareness of itself, and in that act transcending itself” (181). Given that any knowledge that is not of the totality would be partial and hence ideological, Lukács argues that “certain forms of knowledge - notably, the self-knowledge of an exploited class - which, while thoroughly historical, are nevertheless able to lay bare the limits of other ideologies, and so to figure as an emancipatory force” (181-2). Lukács is aware that a simple contrast between ideology and totality is misleading, but he argues that “oppressed groups and classes , need to need to get some view of the social system as a whole” if they are to effect changes, thus, without “passing over at some point from the particular to the general, those interests are likely to founder” (182). But Eagleton identifies a variety of problems in Lukács’ account as well. There is a logical issue: if the proletariat is somehow the bearer of “‘true’ class consciousness, from what viewpoint is this judgment made?” (183). This claim seems unable to avoid being simply a dogmatic assertion. Lukács also develops and relies heavily upon the notion of reification, which he sees as rampant in society and conducive to “a pervasive mechanization, quantification and dehumanization of human experience” (183). Against this the proletarian, in recognizing his class consciousness performs an aufhebung, thereby uniting subject and object (what reification otherwise acts to prevent) (184). “Ideology for Lukács is thus not exactly a discourse untrue to the way things are, but one true to them only in a limited, superficial way, ignorant of their deeper tendencies” (184). Lukács’ economism is problematic for Eagleton (and many others) as well as his all-purpose answer to all problems: reification (185). This insistence betrays a species of idealism in Eagleton’s view (185). Eagleton also points to a conflicting conception of ideology at work in Lukács, on the one hand he hews close to Marx and thinks of commodity fetishism as “an objective material structure” rather than a “state of mind” but in other places he seems to imply that there is an “essence” derivable from the “collective subjectivity” of classes. Lukács then “presumes too organic and internal a relation between a ‘class subject’ and its ‘world-view’” (187). Eagleton also has some issues with Lukács notion that social classes are themselves subjects. He writes that classes “are certainly for Marxism historical agents; but they are structural, material formations as well as ‘intersubjective’ entities, and the problem is how to think these two aspects of them together” (187). “If Lukács is residually idealist in the high priority that he assigns to consciousness, so he is also in his Romantic hostility to science, logic and technology” (189). Seemingly (as with Adorno in some ways) all such discourses are inherently reifying, ergo, to be avoided. Eagleton then uncovers yet another sense of the term ideology in Lukács, that of “structurally constrained thought” (190) suggesting that, in Lukács’ view, “when we keep running up against a limit in our conceptions” that it is our social practices themselves which “pose the obstacle to the very ideas which seek to explain them” meaning that we must change the forms of our lives if we are move beyond this deadlock (190). As a final exemplification of the complexity of Lukács’ thinking about ideology, Eagleton writes that for him “Bourgeois ideology may be false from the standpoint of some putative social totality, but this does not mean that it is false to the situation as it currently is” (191). 

Karl Mannheim is next up for Eagleton’s survey, though he doesn’t fair very well as a thinking of ideology. Mannheim’s basic thesis is that ideology is partial and interested and thus lacking, it will be corrected by being “subsumed into some greater totality” which is “disinterested” according to Mannheim. Eagleton counters “[i]sn’t the interest in totality just another interest?” (194). Mannheim essentially reduces ideology to merely false statements which are produced by individuals’ psychological situation, thereby ignoring ideology as embodied material practice along the lines of commodity fetishism, etc and makes no room at all for thinking of how they are linked to power, involved in struggle, etc (194-5).

Next up is Antonio Gramsci who does use the term ideology but in a casual way as his own ‘load-bearing’ concept is that of hegemony. In Eagleton’s view hegemony is for Gramsci a “broader category than ideology: it includes ideology, but is not reducible to it” (195-6). What then is hegemony for Gramsci? Hegemony is the “whole range of practical strategies by which a dominant power elicits consent to its rule from those it subjugates” (198). The preceding stresses consent, and this is the dominant meaning that Gramsci seems to rely upon, though at times he does combine consent and coercion (195). But hegemony, unlike ideology in Gramsci’s view, may assert itself through political, economic, and other means whereas for him, ideology “refers specifically to the way power struggles are fought at the level of signification” (196). In a moment of potential confusion (apropos the last quotation) a page later Eagleton remarks that with Gramsci “the crucial transition is effected from ideology as ‘system of ideas’ to ideology as lived, habitual social practice” (197). Raymond Williams discusses Gramsci acknowledging “the dynamic character of hegemony, as against the potentially static connotations of ‘ideology’” (197) arguing that “hegemony is never a once-and-for-all achievement, but ‘has to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified’” (197-8). Returning to the notion of ideology in Gramsci, he distinguishes between “‘historically organic’ ideologies - meaning those necessary to a given social structure - and ideology in the sense of the arbitrary speculations of individuals” (198-9). Gramsci argues that “ideologies must be viewed as actively organizing forces that are psychologically ‘valid’, fashioning the terrain on which men and women act, struggle and acquire consciousness of their social positions” (199).

We then reach, in Eagleton’s account, Theodor Adorno (and a few passing comments on Horkheimer and Marcuse). He begins by pointing out that the notion of exchange value in Marx is also useful for thinking about ideology (200). It a pack of cigarettes and a roast beef sandwich cost the same amount, they have the same exchange value (at least at the point of sale). This abstract equivalence subordinates the real material differences between them and elides the human labor that went into them entirely. The same process can be observed, Eagleton writes, in capitalist societies where we all have “theoretical equivalence” before the law, even if “this merely obscures the way in which the law itself is ultimately on the side of the propertied” (200-1). Adorno - pace Eagleton - sees ideological thought as engaged in just such suspect equivalences (201). “Ideology for Adorno is thus a form of ‘identity-thinking’ - a covertly paranoid style of rationality which inexorably transmutes the uniqueness and plurality of things into a mere simulacrum of itself” (201). Hence, negative dialectics (as we have already seen). Adorno poses, against ideology then, heterogeneity. But “Adorno” (unlike some French post-structuralists) “neither uncritically celebrates the notion of difference nor unequivocally denounces the principle of identity” (202). Eagleton points to much the same problem here as we have already encountered, that reason is both being used and being decried as the cause of all the problems. He mentions the book with Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment wherein in his reading “[s]imply to think is to be guiltily complicit with ideological domination” (202). Og Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Eagleton remarks that it “parodies the whole notion of ideology” (202) and in his view it “simply projects the ‘extreme’ ideological universe of Fascism on to the quite different structures of liberal capitalist regimes” (203). He concludes that Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse give us a “straw target of ideology” and argues that it is “pure formalism to imagine that otherness, heterogeneity and marginality are unqualified political benefits regardless of their concrete social content” (203).

For Jürgen Habermas ideology “is a form of communication systematically distorted by power - a discourse which has become a medium of domination” (203). And, rather than any assertion that such a situation can be remedied by clearer or better thought, he “draws attention to the possibility of an entire discursive system which is somehow deformed (...) bent out of shape by power interests” (204). And for Habermas, this is not a situation of always external power effecting language because this deformity “inscribes itself on the inside of our speech, so that ideology becomes a set of effects internal to particular discourses themselves” (204). Be this as it may, Habermas believes that as language users we all have “some idea of what an ‘authentic’ communicative act wold be like” (204) and this gives us a chance at discovering and bring to bear “a norm or regulative model for the critical assessment” of ideological discourses (205). “The opposite of ideology for Habermas is not exactly truth or knowledge, but that particular form of ‘interested’ rationality we call emancipatory critique” (207). Eagleton then (surprising me in the process) begins contrasting Freud and Habermas in a number of interesting ways. Eagleton remarks that both thinkers refuse to treat “idealized world-views” (or fantasies) as “just illusions” and says that both think that they encode “genuine human desires” (207-8). Habermas, says Eagleton, sees “psychoanalysis as a discourse which seeks to emancipate us from systematically distorted communication” and regards pathological symptoms as “roughly equivalent to ideology’s ‘performative contradictions’” (208). Habermas also, like Freud, would argue that it is not enough to decipher a text but that we must account for the forces that deformed it, what Freud would the dream work. Thus for both thinkers, the focus is on “the points where meaning and force intersect” (208) and both the speech of the neurotic and the ideological discourse are for both “doubled” texts  (209) which ought not be reduced to either manifest of latent levels as the issue is the force that brought about the doubling. Eagleton then pursues another Freudian notion’s relevance to ideology (though it is not one that Habermas mentions), that of the “compromise formation” (209). The point here is that “a neurotic symptom (...) both reveals and conceals at once” which is also true to ideology in his view (209). And, inline with analytic thinking about this, the “‘truth’ (...) lies in neither the revelation nor the concealment alone, but in the contradictory unity they compose” (209). The compromise formation, and indeed any symptom, must then be seen as “not simply expressive of some underlying problem, but (...) an active, if mystified, form of engagement with it” (210). Many consequences would seem to follow from this analytically speaking, though as Eagleton does not pursue those here, I shall not either.

The resolutely anti-humanist Louis Althusser has no interest in reification or alienation as concepts, as both betray for him their humanist presuppositions and thus both concepts would be situated before the “epistemological break” that precedes the writing of Capital (211). “Althusser holds that all thought is conducted within the terms of an unconscious ‘problematic’ which silently underpins it” (211). A problematic “is a particular organization of categories which at any given historical moment constitutes the limits of what we are able to utter and conceive” (211). The problematic of an ideology “turns around certain eloquent silences and elisions; and it is so constructed that the questions which are posable within it already presuppose certain kinds of answer” (211-2). Because of this, “ideologies give the appearance of moving forward while marching stubbornly on the spot” (212). As Althusser has already been dealt with at some length, I will focus here on what Eagleton brings to light which I did not and what criticisms he has to offer. Against some critics of Althusser, Eagleton argues that for Althusser while “historical circumstances thoroughly condition our knowledge” that this does not entail that “our truth claims are reducible to our historical interests” (212). Having already noted Althusser’s debt to Lacan, Eagleton highlights the issue of the subject that is crucial for both, saying that “[w]e become conscious agents only by virtue of a certain determinate lack, repression of omission, which no amount of critical self-reflection could repair” (213). He stresses the degree to which for Althusser, all action “is carried on within the sphere of ideology” and that “it is ideology alone which lends the human subject enough illusory, provisional coherence for it to become a practical social agent” (213). Whereas, for Althusser, from the vantage point of theory (on Eagleton’s reading) “the subject has no such autonomy or consistency at all: it is merely the ‘overdetermined’ product of this or that social structure” (213). But Eagleton has problems with Althusser as well, in that he “seems to rule out the possibility of theoretically informed practice” (213) unless that is, it occurs “through the ‘relay’ of ideology” (214). After a brief restatement of the Mirror-Phase essay, Eagleton spells out how it overlaps with Althusser’s position, saying that in “the ideological sphere (...) the human subject transcends its true state of diffuseness or decentrement and finds a consolingly coherent  image of itself reflected back in the ‘mirror’ of a dominant ideological discourse” (214). After a recapitulation of Althusser’s primary definition and some discussion of the subject-centered character of ideology, Eagleton makes the complaint that, apropos interpellation, that “the subject would have to predate its own existence” (215). He then pushes this back to the mirror-phase as well, asking “[h]ow can the subject recognize image in the mirror as itself, if it does not somehow recognize itself already?” (215). I find both these questions somewhat misplaced. In the situation of the hailing on the street, this is not the moment of the subject’s constitution out of nothing, it is a reiteration of interpellative subjectification. The issue with the mirror-phase is different from all subsequent moments of subjectification simply as it is the first one. Recall that the infans, by virtue of that word, is not yet a speaking being. It hasn’t the language to have self-consciousness in any fully-fledged state as yet. It is the moment of the mirror recognition which first gives an image to its thought, an imagine on which to hang all subsequent moments of subjectification and the place of the “I” of language. Eagleton’s problem here strikes me as a non-starter. He asks whether there is not a need for “a third, higher subject” to ground the identification (215)? There are two ways to answer this, first off the imaginary is always encompassed by the symbolic which - as the big Other - is the “third” in every language act. But in a more obvious way, there is the role of the parents, cooing away behind the infans and saying “yes, that’s my good little poopy pants, yes it is.” Which, though the child is not yet speaking, still acts as recognition on the part of the parent that the infans is on to something, i.e., that yes it is them in the mirror. Eagleton points to certain misreadings or misapplications of Lacan that Althusser is enmeshed with, the first of which is his confusion of subject with ego, and in the process losing connection to desire and producing a far more stable subject that Lacan does (216).   Althusser is also faulted for his discussion of the (capital S) Subject which Eagleton equates with the superego, but remarks that Lacan would speak of the Other (216). I left the “Subject” discussion out of my response to the ISA essay as to my mind it is part of a specific example (Christian religious ideology) and not a feature of his general theory. That said, Eagleton has a point, though in my reading Athusser’s “Subject” is not crucial to his theory and thus I saw no need to press the point. Eagleton thinks differently though and I agree with him that the Althusserian (little S) subject, voids much of the instability and the (capital S) Subject is far more determinate and authoritarian than Lacan’s Other is (its determining characteristic being the ambiguity of what it wants). Eagleton concludes (and I think quite rightly) that “Althusser’s model is a good deal too monistic, passing over the discrepant, contradictory ways ion which subjects may be ideologically accosted - partially, wholly, or not at all - by discourses which themselves form no obvious cohesive unity” (217). These are some of the issues which I had in mind when writing on the ISA essay I said that there was more to said and thought about interpellation. Ideology in Althusser becomes for Eagleton an exemplar of the expansion problem I have already written of, as it becomes “identical with lived experience” (219). He closes his discussion of Althusser with yet another definitional observation about ideology; that ideology acts as an “imaginary map” (221) for social subjects, and it is necessary because societies and social processes are simply too complex for subjects to grasp “as a whole” in their “everyday consciousness” (220).  

Pierre Bourdieu is the last thinker to be discussed in this text. The first thing to note about him is that he does not make use of the term ideology at all. His own conceptual system rather refers to habitus, doxa and field. By habitus “he means the inculcation in men and women of a set of durable dispositions which generate particular practices” (222-3). By doxa, he refers to the ideas and lived experience of the “stable, tradition-bound social order in which power is fully naturalized and unquestioned” (223). The field(s) of which he writes would be the arenas in which a particular habitus is in effect, thus we have the literary field, the economic field, etc. Habitus is thus not that far from Gramsci and Althusser in certain ways, as Eagleton describes it here, “the very spontaneity of our habitual behavior (...) reproduce(s) certain deeply tacit norms and values; and habitus is thus the relay or transmission mechanism by which mental and social structures becomes incarnate in daily social activity” (223).  What Eagleton does not discuss, but which seems worth noting is the Bourdieu’s adaptation of capital as a concept, thus he gives us symbolic capital and cultural capital and with these innovations, reads a variety of fields as economies of a sort, replete with profits and losses and much else that one associates with the economy. While I find some of what he does in this manner interesting, even fascinating (see his book, Distinction) I have some qualms about using the capitalist economic situation as a model for all social relations as it seems, in effect, to assume that it is utterly dominant in all of them and it does not take a great deal of time to come up with examples where this manner of explanation is revealed as profoundly reductive - Emily Dickinson was a poet and had some contact with the literary field, but given how she lived her life as poet - all one might be left to do is remark on what a bad business woman she was, she ought to have been struggling to obtain more poetic capital rather than wasting so much time making her little books of poems!

Jacques Lacan, 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". 

“The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I” - Jacques Lacan

The basics of the mirror stage essay (here “mirror-phase”) are so well known that I am tempted to skip over them, but as they do have many and varied consequences for thinking about ideology, I’ll give an extemporary account here without much in the way of quotation. The human infant (infans) is not yet able to speak and suffers from the prematurity at birth that all human experience. As such, it need both care and progressive socialization. Before the infant will enter language there comes a time when it identifies with the specular image. In Lacan’s account this happens before a mirror, though it is worth noting that this is not a requirement, all that is required is that the uncoordinated infact adopts an image as its own imago in a moment of gestalt. This imago, crucially, does not reflect the lived experience of the infant - it does not render it as a body in fragments - but as a discreet, bounded being (though, if in a mirror, also reversed) which is outside the body itself. This imago then serves as support of the Ideal-I as discussed by Freud. This imago develops and changes throughout the person’s life, and is the nucleus of their ego and the support of all successive identifications that they take on. 

This account is pertinent to the concept of ideology in a variety of ways. First, though in Lacan’s view there are nothing but identifications (and no subject ever arrives at a secure “identity”) to the extent that these are attached to the ego, that is, to an imago whose meaning is only found in the Other, while we have no real choice but to adopt such an imago, the ego will always be “an alienating identity, which will stamp with the rigidity of its structure the whole of the subject’s mental development” (96). All identifications are thus bought at a price, and as fundamentally imaginary in Lacan’s sense of that term, they are prone to rivalry and tensions forevermore. That one’s ego, even in everyday speech, can be saids to be hurt or weakened, etc all point to that “price” and the way that as ego we depend on an identity as something virtually ontologically guaranteed, and yet what we have are identifications which can ever only be partial and subject to change. Secondly, This systematic misrecognition of ourselves and others is sustained by a faith in the big Other’s substantiality. That is, that somewhere, out there, the meaning, not of partial and fleeting identifications, but of our identities is secured, and against which both ourselves and others can be judged. The big Other, though nowhere mentioned explicitly in the Mirror-Phase essay is surely pertinent to a consideration of ideology in-itself, for-itself or both in-and-for-itself as our coerced but nonetheless habituated belief in it is what allows us believe that meaning is already established for being and thus to effectively deny that the world must be made to mean. As such, the dehistoriczing gestures of ideology in-itself depend upon the big Other, the material embodiments of ideology (ISAs) masquerade as evidence of its substantiality, and the ‘spontaneous’ judgements about people and things in the world which fall under the in-and-for-itself of ideology - such as the commodity form -  are only sustainable by a belief in the big Other. Though the big Other is not mentioned in the essay, the role of the parents is obviously constitutive and Lacan is quite clear on the social relevance of the mirror stage or “the deflection of the mirror I into the social I” and that this process is dependent upon a “cultural go-between” which Lacan names as the Oedipus complex, but which must also be seen as a structuration of the subject by the symbolic order. Zizek will discuss fantasy in the closing article of this collection and the Mirror-Phase essay does not reach that point, I shall leave this aside for now. 

It is perhaps worth noting that while the imago of the specular image initially appeals to the infans by virtue of its seeming refutation of the body in fragments (that is, that it negates their lived experience), that analysis, when it begins to take effect, often “encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration” which results very often in dreams and fantasies that return the subject to the fragmented body. We might see this as a unsettling of the analysand’s ideological grasp of their self-as-ego, and thus see psychoanalysis as a tool for combatting the sway of ideology. Here we might also compare this analytic situation to Dews’ summation of Adorno’s analysis of identity-based selfhood, that it “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 social relations” (63).

Seyla Benhabib, 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". 

“The Critique of Instrumental Reason” - Seyla Benhabib

Seyla Benhabib

Benhabib’s primary interest in this text is to explore the problems which the shift in the work of the Frankfurt School toward the notion of instrumental reason causes for the critical project itself. To demonstrate the stakes, she first spends a bit of time elaborating the critical project as understood in an earlier phase of the school’s development, where critique had three primary modalities; immanent critique (of political economy); defestishizing critique; crisis diagnosis. So we first must grasp just what these are. Benhabib, quoting Adorno, offers this explanation of the transformative task of immanent critique effects “‘the concepts, which it brings, as it were, from the outside, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is. It must dissolve the rigidity of the temporally and spatially fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real’” (80). This approach is parallel to Marx’s procedure of show how the concepts by which political economy had hitherto comprehended its own functioning turn around into their opposites when scrutinized. It also maps on to Hegel’s dialectic of essence and appearance. The “dissolving” that Adorno writes of is intended to allow us to comprehend the “unity of essence and appearance as actuality” (80).  Defetishizing critique bases itself in Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and their illustration of the ways in which socio-historical processes are reified as natural. Crisis diagnosis was centered on the analysis of crises of whatever sort and tying these to political economy and the contradiction inherent in production against a backdrop of Marx’s analyses (70, 83-4).  These modalities of the critical project - circa 1937 - undergo substantial modification after Horkheimer and Adorno write Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), in which the notion of instrumental reason makes its appearance. Benhabib gives a very patient reading of this book, but for my purposes here, only a few of its central aims and contentions (per her analysis) will be detailed. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that “the promise of the Enlightenment to free man (...) cannot be attained via reason that is a mere instrument of self-preservation” (75). The reason why, in their view is that reason itself operates on the basis of the subject’s “eternally self-identical ‘I think’” which they read as entailing a “fear of the other” which can only resolve itself by “domination of the other”, an other “identified with nature” and with an internalization of the other as “victim” (75). This process is describes by a “mimesis - unto death” (76). Reason, now totally engulfed by its new designation as instrumental reason “the deep structure of Western reason” (78) has led to the domination of positivism and “the development toward total integration” - “total integration” here being roughly equivalent to the “wholly administered society” in Adorno’s other work or the Marcuse’s notion of “one-dimensionality” (77). The sole remaining note of hope in this otherwise unremitting pessimism is the “Utopian principle of non-identity logic” which the critique “must deny as soon as it would articulate it discursively” (78). [Here we might note a few parallels, 1^st to Laclau’s notion of the universal as universal only when unoccupied by any positive content (thus the need for an “empty signifier”), or Zizek’s discussion in the introduction of the “antinomy of critico-ideological reason” (17).] This “genealogy of reason” that Adorno and Horkheimer carry out has the additional effect of transforming both the object and the logic of critique in paradoxical ways. When immanent critique becomes negative dialectics Adorno thereby “undermine[s] identity of concept and object, essence and appearance, possibility and necessity” derived from Hegel and arguably still constitutive for Marx (81). Political economy is not longer the object here but instrumental reason itself (the authors recognized that there was a paradox in making use of reason incessantly in their critique of reason, but they never found any solution to this problem). What has been lost here, in spite of the aforementioned utopian principle, is any emancipatory dimension to the “immanent logic of the actual” (81) and thus, arguably, its grounding in marxism as such (though Benhabib does not draw that point out as much as one might wish). When a defetishizing critique is transformed into the critique of culture it is done because Horkheimer and Adorno have lost their faith in the continued pertinence of Marx’s analysis, they counter (in Benhabib’s words) that “the increasing rationalization of the productive sphere and the increasing integration of production and exchange, monopoly capitalism begins to develop into a social reality where all contrasts disappear and alternative to the present become inconceivable” (82) they also feel that in contrast to the past “exchange value is marketable in so far as it can present itself as the carrier of an unmediated use value, into the enjoyment of whose ‘spontaneous’ qualities the advertising industry seduces us” (83). These changes to the way that capitalism function in their view all serve to “manipulate the revolt of repressed nature into submission, oblivion, and pseudo-happiness” (83). [This shift has some interesting components, many of which are also available through Lacan’s notion of the commanded enjoyment, but Horkheimer and Adorno also insist on the “decline of the ego” as an aspect of this shift in the capital form and I find this hard to credit, if anything it seems to me that ideological capture is ever more potent to the extent that it feeds an ego and assists its denials and disavowals of subjection and of the unconscious.] Given the reversals and outright abandonment of political economy and the commodity form as the objects of critique, the whole notion of crisis diagnosis is lost. Instead we are given what Behabib calls a “Retrospective Philosophy of History with Utopian Intent” whose analysis of the present is that the “ethical substance” of the social bond is lost, which “in industrial-technological civilization dries up the cultural sources of group revolt which had hitherto been carried out in the name of the memories of past rebellions” (84). Benhabib tells how Marcuse extends this line of thinking  to propose a notion of “redemptive memory” though it “cannot be reactivated within the continuum of history, precisely because history now unfolds in such a ay as to deny its own past, its own history” (85). Another paradoxical consequence of this entire line of thinking is that critical theory itself, is in its own understanding, now “outside the historical continuum” (85). 

Horkheimer & Adorno

It would seem that with these theorizations and retheorizations that the Frankfurt school had reached a crisis of its own. Its critiques remain dependent upon ‘reason’ and yet are ostensibly against it in all such forms. It proposes a logic of non-identity which it can only delineate in the terms of that which it purportedly is meant to challenge. By its, to my mind far from conclusive, dismissal of the commodity form and the centrality of political economy as well as any hope that collective labor might have emancipatory potential that the Frankfurt school of this period hadn’t just painting itself into a corner but walled itself up in a room. There are many interesting propositions and insights to be found in these works, but used as theoretical weapons they seem almost sure to turn against the critic.

Peter Dews, 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". 

“Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity” - Peter Dews

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. 

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.