SO427 - week 2

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These are my notes from January 16 for SO427 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Adorno 1

I received my offer for this class ~2 hours before the seminar was scheduled to start, while I was still at home, so I had to speed through the readings which, I must say, is not really a good idea for anything written by Adorno. I finished the last few pages of the second reading on the train. Accordingly, my notes aren’t so great (mostly just quotes). I shudder to imagine what Adorno would think of that.

(Note: although it’s a 3-hour seminar, with no scheduled demarcation between “lecture” and “seminar”, the first half of the seminar consisted of the prof delivering a quasi-lecture (no slides) summarising the readings, with only a bit of class discussion, so I’ve split my notes up accordingly into the standard Lecture and Seminar sections.)

Readings

Society

From 1969. An essay on the concept of ‘society’, building on Durkheim and Weber. There’s a summary of it here.

Some good quotes and notes I thought worth saving (I need to get these into Bookmarker ASAP)

• “[…] while the notion of society may not be deduced from any individual facts, nor on the other hand be apprehended as an individual fact itself, there is nonetheless no social fact which is not determined by society as a whole. Society appears as a whole behind each concrete social situation. Conflicts such as the characteristic ones between manager and employees are not some ultimate reality that is wholly comprehensible without reference to anything outside itself. They are rather the symptoms of deeper antagonisms. Yet one cannot subsume individual conflicts under those larger phenomena as the specific to the general […]” (p145)
• the concept of wage satisfaction depends on a much larger system than what’s visible in a given factory (p145)
• “[…] Behind the reduction of men to agents and bearers of exchange value lies the domination of men over men. […] The form of the total system requires everyone to respect the law of exchange if he does not wish to be destroyed, irrespective of whether profit is his subjective motivation or not.” (p148-149)
• “[…] The older theory of imperialism already pointed out the functional relationship between the economies of the advanced capitalistic countries and those of the non-capitalistic areas, as they were then called. The two were not merely juxtaposed, each maintained the other in existence.[…]” (p149)
• “[…] technical advancement is therefore only a moment in the dialectic between the forces of production and the relations of production, and not some third thing, demonically self-sufficient […]” (p151)
• “Inasmuch as these massive social forces and institutions were once human ones, are essentially the reified work of living human beings […]” (p151)
• “[…] The culture industry sprang from the profit-making tendency of capital. It developed under the law of the market, the obligation to adapt your consumers to your goods, and then, by a dialectical reversal, ended up having the result of solidifying the existing forms of consciousness and the intellectual status quo. […]” (p152)
• “[…] Men must act in order to change the present petrified conditions of existence, but the latter have left their mark so deeply on people, have deprived them of so much of their life and individuation, that they scarcely seem capable of the spontaneity necessary to do so […]” (p153)

Is Marx obsolete?

Originally delivered in 1968 as a conference presentation titled “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (PDF). My notes are pretty scattered and I would recommend reading the original if you want the full Adorno experience in any case.

• the question he’s considering here: has industrialism, as a mode of production, changed/outmoded the concept of capitalism itself?
• falling rates of profit have led to efforts to stave of the collapse of capitalism on a system-immanent level
• conflict between class definition based on social stratification (lifestyle, income, education) and control over the means of production
• dialectical theory of society: structural laws (historical tendencies), which would include Marxist concepts like value, accumulation, and economic crises
• p2, he uses the term thema probardum which means “fact needing to be proved” (Latin I assume)
• “Reified consciousness does not end where the concept of reification has a place of honour” (p2)
  • an excellent quote on sociology being considered a science in the Soviet Union
• class consciousness has fallen and along with it any clear differences between classes
  • (my take: we’re seeing the rise of class liminality, which is a phrase I just made up and probably makes no sense, through the ever-widening “middle class”)
  • less immiseration; more bourgeois integration
  • less solidarity
  • and it’s obviously worrying because only with enough class consciousness do you have any historical agency (acc to Marx)
• on the difficulty of explaining contemporary society with theoyr
  • “the economic process continues to perpetuate domination over human beings” (p4)
  • describes Nietzsche as being “all herd and no shepherd” lol
• contemporary society is industrial according to the level of productive forces (p5), which extends into the cultural realm
  • the relations of production, on the other hand, are capitalistic
  • humans are appendages of machines
  • “use-values are tending to dissolve” (p5) (me: exchange-value has subsumed use-value?)
  • concealed visibility of poverty in advanced nations, as instead we live in an “affluent society” (I think this term is most obviously associated with Galbraith’s 1958 book but I’m not sure)
• static aspects of contemporary society
  • relations of production are now a property of the administration, not of owners of the means of productions
  • “Inside the dominant relations of production, humanity is virtually its own reserve army” (p6) holy shit
• productive forces and relations are not polar opposites; they’re delimited by each other, but also contain the other
  • productive forces are mediated/governed by relations (me: which leads to artificial scarcity? that’s when they become fetters)
  • economic crises are needed to maintain relations of production (p8)
  • an “inordinate share of the social production” is devoted to producing “means of destruction” (i.e., enforcing scarcity to maintain the distribution of power)
• on the Soviet Union
  • “out of the unfettering of the forces of production emerge renewed fetters”; “production became its own end”
• relations of production dominate human beings, and that itself necessitates new, matured forces of production
  • we can only say the relations are not fetters if the horizon is total annihilation (p8)
• on the contradictory nature of state interference: is it system-immanent or not? (unclear what he’s saying here)
  • “that which is alien to the system reveals itself to be the inner essence” (p9) (there’s also a good use of “telos” on this page)
  • “No truly total subject of society yet exists” (p10) (on the totality, or otherwise, of the exchange principle)
  • “technological veil” (p10). think about who benefits from current relations of production

Lecture

Introduction

• the readings are deliberately open and reflexive, hard to pin down, so don’t be disappointed if you’re not quite sure what they’re saying
  • there’s an intentional confusion and uncertainty in these readings as a result of the nature of these thinkers’ critical (and sometimes contradictory) project
  • don’t be misled by a sense of false finality in secondary sources
  • don’t try to fix things or come to triumphant conclusions too early
• why do we do Adorno first, when he wasn’t necessarily the first chronologically (as Benjamin was born earlier?)
  • Adorno was the more senior figure (director of IFS), whereas Benjamin was an itinerant figure only on the margins of the Frankfurt School
  • and yet, Benjamin asked certain fundamental questions well ahead of Adorno
  • otoh, their projects are very different, and Adorno is more familiar ground for sociology students
• some key concepts for Adorno
  • society (a term he thinks problematic) & social fact
  • social mediation (basically everything is socially mediated)
  • negative dialectics (his approach to philosophy)
  • authoritarianism, especially as it intersects with capitalism (most vividly expressed in his writing on the Holocaust … his writing on astrology fits in here as well)
  • the culture industry (on the mass-production of entertainment, esp film and music. astrology fits in here too, as an example of “occultism”)
• we have to remember that the historical context in which Adorno began writing was irretrievably entwined with the rise of fascism * he had an interesting freudian take on fascist propaganda, on how leaders like hitler and mussolini portray themselves as both very strong and powerful and yet like an ordinary man
  • a lot of his writing was him trying to account for the capitalism around him in the 20s/30s in germany, which seemed like it was becoming increasingly monopolistic

Adorno and Marx

• the sociological aspect that was interesting for adorno was presence of strong authoritarian regime (strong state) as well as a sophisticated advanced media/culture industry (tv, music etc) which was not typically accounted for in standard marxist theory
• theories of the state are somewhat missing in marx (hence why lenin, rosa luxembourg focused on imperialism)
• we should keep in mind the evolution of capitalism between marx’s time and adorno’s time
  • in marx’s time, it was mostly competition-based with very little state involvement
  • as a result, marx predicted increasing centralisation of capital (via monopolistic firms)
  • simultaneously, he predicted, the working class would be more impoverished and homogeneous, as the proletariat became more immiserated and less able to differentiate based on skill due to mechanisation
• the q: is a strong state necessary for this? esp with the imperial aspect (colonising new markets—spatial fix) which marx talks about in communist manifesto
• within the Frankfurt School there was a schism: those who thought capitalism was changing so much you had to throw marx away, vs those who still believed in marx (eg adorno on is marx obsolete today, the second reading above)
• we should remember that adorno is fundamentally a marxist and sociologist, not some kind of “superannuated philosopher”
  • adorno’s worldview derives from a marxian understanding of capitalism, and never really strays from that at least on the level of theory (he wants to add to/amend marx, not disregard him)

On social mediation and the Holocaust

• there is no epistemology divorced from the society in which one’s knowledge is produced.
  • “there is nothing under the sun, and I mean absolutely nothing, which, in being mediated through human intelligence and human thought, is not also socially mediated” (quote from Introduction to Sociology)
• the Holocaust is thus not an abberation
  • (my thoughts: it’s immanent to the society that produced it? idk if that makes sense here)
  • it can be seen as a product of the enlightenment, whose true promise was aborted due to embroilment in capitalism
  • in other words, the Holocaust was not irrational; it can be wholly consistent with rational thought
• Zygmunt Bauman (a couple of decades older than Adorno) wrote something similar on modernity and the Holocaust
  • for Bauman, it’s the archetypal feat of modernity
  • after all, it was a huge organisational endeavour that depended on modernity (management, lists, machinery, logistics, transport)
• Adorno’s reasoning is in a similar vein but less focused on the mechanics of the Holocaust
  • for Adorno, what’s more important is the “psychosocial configuration” which made genocide feel inevitable, natural, right
  • he points out that genocide was considered scientific and rational (i.e., consistent with our world system) and thus, if we want to avoid it in the future, we have to be vigilant about it, and study other societies (hence his shift to focusing on the US, though you could argue that it was less a “rational” decision and more a product of his social circumstances … there’s something recursive there but I’m not going to belabour that point)
  • (my thoughts: this fits in with of that much-maligned Slavoj Žižek quote on Hitler not being violent enough, which could certainly be interpreted as a really suspect moral judgment, which I interpreted as an entirely reasonable claim that Hitler’s whole plan was reactionary and meant to keep the system working as-is)

On rationarlity

• where Adorno might be considered to break with Marx is in Marx’s embrace of rationality
  • Marx considers his argument to be based on empirical evidence and reason
  • whereas Adorno problematises positivism and the very idea of getting material evidence
  • using reason to see through the veil, as Marx does, is a very normative way of plucking out exploitation by thinking of equality and lack of domination as ideal
  • whereas adorno abandons the rationality implicit in Marx cus it cant be trusted (see section on the Holocaust above)
  • we can’t grasp at axiomatic laws
  • he throws away the teleogical aspect of marx’s theory (the idea that capitalism leads to its own destruction in the log run) since you cant rely on “reason”
• so what you’re left, and what pervades all of Adorno’s work, is a relentless critiqe of present reality (negative dialectics)
  • building on Kant’s idea of a categorical imperative, he instead labours under a negative categorical imperative to prevent something from happening (i.e., genocide—you can see quite clearly how his own social circumstances affected his thinking)
  • copy editors would have terrible time with adorno
    • he uses double negatives all over the place (see the “nothing under the sun” quote)
    • but you can’t collapse that to a positive—it feels too trite and like everything Adorno would have wante dto avoid
    • we can see it as a literary device (essentially reading Adorno as literature, which I hadn’t really considered as a possibility before but which now seems so obvious)
    • the double negative tells us we need to constantly exercise vigilance of our thinking and interrogate what we believe. constant critique
• we’re stuck in a framework of rational thought, which is both our savior and our captor (exit of the cage are the same as the bars)

On sociology

• his definition of sociology (from the Society reading, which was originally a lecture given to a first year undergrad course, no less) is that it’s about understanding what society is vs what it ought to be
  • “It ought to be the task of sociology today to comprehend the incomprehensible, the advance of human beings into the inhuman.” (p147)
  • his view on sociology is a riff on durkheim: a critical look at what society purports to be or thinks of itself as, vs what it actually is
  • thus its job is to interrogate perceived wisdom and question representations of social reality
  • (me: does this link to baudrillard’s idea of a simulacrum, i.e., a copy depicting something that no longer or never had an original?)
• he has a quote “what is the case” (not sure from where), which links to early wittgenstein (Tractatus) and also builds on Kant
  • (site note for the wittgenstein thing that I thought was great: in the end of the preface for Tractacus, Wittgenstein writes that having discovered all the underlying laws etc of philosophy he realises how empty and pointless it all is. paraphrasing here obviously)
• so what does society purport to be?
  • one way to find out is by looking at the categories we use in everyday life, gender race etc (typification, as Simmel might say)
  • there’s an ever-present danger that the categories will become reified, and thus turn into unyielding boxes that become modes of domination/oppression/exclusion
  • Adorno’s criticism of categories is, again, easy to link to his personal historical circumstances: the idea of “the Jew” as a category is what allowed the Holocaust to occur
  • we can think of classification as a form of cognitive violence (me: imposing lines on something fluid, taking a spectrum and converting it into a binary?)
  • categories are never harmless even if they initially try to be
  • (me: they will always drift?)
  • (also me: can you abolish categories by proliferating them, with the multiplicity of categories as a vanishing mediator for the complete absence of categories? idk just a thought)
  • in Minima Moralia he talks about remaindering, symbolic violence (illustrated through horoscopes)
  • he argues we should reject the link between identity and categories—there’s a danger of “identity thinking” whereby we assume the world aligns nicely with the socially-constructed categories we use
• on contradiction and uncertainty within the field of sociology
  • there’s something fundamentally fake about trying to produce a non-contradictory picture of the world when the world itself is contradictory
• on his weird dance wih rational thought
  • adorno says we need it but cant be enlaved by it, have to resist letting it lead us where it wants

Seminar

A discussion of the readings. The second (Is Marx obsolete?) is the more straightforward one; the first, though less clear, is probably more important to the field of sociology.

Society

• highlights the contrast between a positivist sociology, which objectifies society, and a critical sociolgy which treats it as subject
• he’s building on weber, who gives more credence to an agent-centered approach (individuals can understand the world)
  • whereas Durkheim is more structural? (not sure, haven’t read Durkheim yet)
  • in this piece, Adorno is navigating in between their views
• a sidebar in which we discuss the difficulty of this text (and Adorno’s texts in general)
  • prof: we can think of a text as if it’s a political regime (a fascinating idea to which we can connect an anecdote from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx in which he suggests that the best translation of perestroika is, in fact, deconstruction)
  • Adorno’s texts are hermetic, resist classification, and avoid giving you easy answers or a feeling of satisfaction
  • Adorno would loathes the idea that anyone would read a text simply for insight, attempting to gleam knowledge in an untroubled and pure manner
  • the idea that you can “get” something with any certainty (knowing wink), with a sense of finality and conclusion and comfort in knowing that you’ve gotten to the bottom of something
  • (my thought: he’s saying that with social theory, the only accurate map is the territory?)
• quote from p145: “The whole survives only through the unity of the functions which its members fulfill. Each individual without exception must take some function on himself in order to prolong his existence; indeed, while his function lasts, he is taught to express his gratitude for it.”
  • in other words: you must take on some socially proscribed role in order to just not die, and you must be grateful for it
  • on weber and durkheim: the fact that sociology cant reconcile them is symbolic of irreconciliability immanent to society as a whole
    • it’s not just a scholarly/academic debate
    • relates to structural agency dilemma
    • the theory problem is an epiphemonenon of a problem within society, manifestation of a deeper tension within social existence
• another sidebar on the build-up of sentences within Adorno
  • each individual sentence makes sense but when you consider a set of sentences together, it becomes oblique
  • we can once again read this as literature and treat this phenomenon as reflective of society
  • you can’t just look at the individual sentences in unison; the whole is more than the sum of its parts
  • and what’s more, there is no proferred whole; you have to build it yourself (Adorno’s not just going to give you an easy answer)
  • he frequently omits the expected logical connectors between sentences, which we can read in light of his critique of logic as a principle
  • social reality is fraught with contradictions, tensions, (me: and aporiae! feels apt here), so why resolve that on the page?
  • you end up with a much more profound and meaningful reading experience which may not be time-efficient but it’s good for your soul

Is Marx obsolete?

• he differentiates between industrialism (at the level of productive forces) and capitalism (referring to the relations of production)
• he was writing at at time when class consciousness was low
  • it’s worse now, but even at the time of writing, people were starting to identify more as consumers than as labourers
• technology would produce affluence for everyone through producing more material goods, beyond subsistence level (Marcuse says this, kinda contrasts with adorno)
• recall the subtext of this piece: it was written at a time of massive student protests in Germany which Adorno deliberately eschewed association with; here, he’s basically saying that he’s still an orthodox marxist etc
• what we should take away from adorno: why he thought it was dangerous to reach a positive solution, conclusion about what we should do
• what is so bad about capitalism? why is it such a misery?
  • (me: the “means of destruction” quote is part of it, it’s inefficient and wasteful)
  • perhaps more importantly to adorno: it leaves you powerless and dependent on the structures that reinforce that
    • not only are we victims of a society that forces us to do things we dont want to do, but we’ve been persuaded into thinking that we consent, willing slaves
    • (me: the prof used the term “willing slaves”, which I mostly know as part of the title for Frédéric Lordon’s book Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. not sure if “willing slaves” is a common phrase that I just don’t know the source for or if Spinoza is actually relevant to Adorno’s thinking. didn’t get a chance to ask unfortunately).
    • we use things like horoscopes to convince ourselves that there’s a greater world, false hope (I always find the thing about horoscopes funny, given the outsized place they occupy in his thinking—another instance of socially mediated epistemology I guess, since he was in LA at the time)
• another thing to remember: adorno has no faith in social revolution
  • if he believes that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, it’s only on the level of productive forces
  • protests, sit-ins etc, which may make you feel good—and they do—dont actually make a difference, according to Adorno
  • this is where he veers away from Marx
  • remember that he’s writing at a time when the shadow of the Soviet Union is hanging over the Marxist academic world
  • in that context, his constant mention of “left fascism” etc makes more sense
  • quote from adorno: the culture industry works like psychoanalysis in reverse?? not sure what this is supposed to mean. inculculating psychological hang-ups and beliefs into us?
• the overwhelming bleakness and lack of optimism within Adorno
  • there are moments when the spell (of society) can be broken, when we are shown glimpses of a baser reality, but these are only ever fleeting moments
  • and the prof would not characterise those as optimism

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