“The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject..”
-Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
By R.C. Smith
A few thoughts on the problem of identity, positivism, objectivism, reductionism and the ethical questions they raise:
When Adorno discusses the notion of non-identity, his point is precisely that one should interact with a phenomenon without assuming the judgement of absolutely knowing that phenomenon. Non-identity is another way of describing the (non-conceptual) ‘moreness’ in behind our experiences[1]. It gives expression to the experience of not being able to absolutely capture or possess a phenomenon in an abstract theory or concept. This ‘moreness’ in behind our experiences, wherein each experience we have with a particular thing is always new, unfolding, dynamic and multidimensional, resides between the experiential identity of a (multidimensional) phenomenon (i.e., our ability to discern that this tree is a birch tree) and our own (inter)subjective limitations in terms of consciously orientating toward that multidimensional phenomenon (i.e., the experiential identity of a phenomenon which we can discern but which is never absolutely identical with itself).[2]
As I write in :
“Let us consider the following example. There are two phenomena that have presented themselves to me, X and Y. The noting of differences between X and Y, this ability to distinguish identity itself, is inherent in experiential thought. For instance, I may distinguish a birch tree from a willow tree; the sun from the moon; a bird from a dog. In a sense, I have discerned and distinguished in the cognitive moment of my experience, a separate identity for each of the two phenomena; and accordingly, I can therefore run through discerning the unique characteristics of both distinguishable phenomena. I can also generalize from the experiential grounds of my experiences: quite practically, in the plural, those are birch trees and those are willow trees; those are birds and those are dogs. However, and this is important, experiential generalizing is only coherent if our generalizing is in a constant, normative interacting with the particular phenomenon (with the particulars of experience); and only if the general identity does not consider, for instance, all willow trees to be absolutely like all willow trees. For such ‘bad generalizing’ would inherently violate the particular phenomena of our experience …/ it would subsume the particularity of our experience in a bad general category, which would equate to nothing other than a conscious suppression of the very realities of our present experience.”[3]
This example might be an over-simplification of Adorno’s negative dialectics in practice, but it nevertheless contextualizes in a concrete sense how his theory of negative dialectical thought is “a philosophical attempt to conceptualize the nonconceptual without subsuming the nonconceptual under a system of concepts.”[4] While there is some similarity to Kant for example, where noumena are transcendent things that forever elude our grasp, Adorno’s argument is more in line with that of Sartre: that via conscious intentionality we must forever strive toward obtaining a general understanding of the particular (i.e., to conceptualize phenomena and gain a general orientation with the world) whilst never being able to absolutely capture it.[5]
The (intersubjective) gap that separates our obtaining a general orientation with the phenomenal world and our lack of an ability to absolutely capture a particular phenomenon is not only an important epistemological point (one which both Adorno and Sartre share in common) – it is one that also carries practico-ethical implications.
It are these implications that I would like to discuss throughout the remainder of this essay. For if what inspired Adorno’s critique of identity was the systematic elimination of the Jews, wherein the subject of the Jew was reduced to an object of hate in the name of a particular identity politics – this is because Adorno sensed, I argue, that there was something profoundly important in the very epistemological context of the unspeakable barbarity at Auschwitz.
If the Jews in Europe had been exterminated in the name of “identity” – that is, if they were identified as “the Other” and systematically categorized through their yellow stars – then the epistemological question of identity thought (likewise instrumental reason and its positivistic logic) becomes one of the most urgent ethical questions of our time.[6] It is one that I believe is an integral dimension to the fundamental philosophical problem of human history, and one which I attempted to elucidate in my latest book.
If every instance of ideology possess a dimension of belief in the (false absolute and abstract) identity of a phenomenon, then Adorno was correct to suggest almost fifty years ago that the only way humanity can move on from the horrors and unspeakable atrocities of Auschwitz is to question the very status of those horrible and unspeakable atrocities from a fundamental perspective. We must look to how, in the example of the Nazi persecution of the Jew or even the nationalist persecution of the immigrant, the very negation of the individual subject as a “mere object” (i.e., the negation of the Jew as a human being on behalf of “the object of the Jew as vermin”) is tantamount to a fundamental shift from the subject-subject paradigm to the subject-object parable and is directly significant of an inherently violating structure of thought.
On my reading, it is this reduction of the Jew to the status of a ‘mere object’ to be dominated and the shift from the intimate subject-subject paradigm to the subject-object parable (i.e., what I describe as a stunting of ‘experiential coherence’ ) that ultimately forms the basis for the “coldness” that Adorno circumscribes throughout Negative Dialectics.
The basic epistemic conditions that form the basis of this “coldness” can be described in how the ‘self’ relates to the Other in an instrumental way. In Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason we read how the Other, the individual reduced to the status of mere ‘object’, is manipulated to serve the self. As a result, I claim that the individual undergoes a series of disassociations or what I occasionally describe as ‘experiential stunting’. One example of disassociation or experiential stunting can be found in how the Nazi guard at Auschwitz almost compartmentalized his ‘self’ in two ways (Lifton, 1986). In the morning the guard could sit at home with his family, listening to Beethoven and playing affectionately with his children. Yet, only hours later, he could go from playing with his children to overseeing the death of hundreds of human beings and without necessarily experiencing the reality of the violence as such.
Another example can be found in a completely different ‘everyday’ context, wherein a man or woman becomes angry at another man or woman and begins to act violently. According to Adorno’s negative dialectics, the very reality of one acting violently toward another person isn’t necessarily reflected upon within oneself because it is the objectivity in behind the subject, the reducing of the other person to an object of hate, that opens up the possibility for a moment of barbarity. In an overly simplistic sense, I argue that this state of psychic division, disassociation and reductionism is what Adorno meant in his dissection of the problematic status of the (modern) subject:
“what transmits the facts is not so much the subjective mechanism of their pre-formation and comprehension as it is the objectivity heteronomous to the subject, the objectivity behind that which the subject can experience. This objectivity is denied to the primary realm of subjectivity experience …/ The superiority of objectification in the subjects not only keeps them from becoming subjects; it equally prevents a cognition of objectivity …/ It is now subjectivity rather than objectivity that is indirect.”[7]
This account of a critique of the epistemic foundation of violence (i.e., epistemic violence) very much aligns, on my reading, with Max Horkheimer’s account of the historical genesis of “bourgeois subjectivity”, which we should note is also a central theme in Dialectic of Enlightenment. (It is also a significant part of what I frequently refer to as the ‘transhistorical ideology of domination’). This historical genesis can be made even more concrete, however, if we consider what I have argued in several other places that, what primarily tends to set this process of hardened subjectivity in motion is ultimately a very existential reality. In other words, similar to what Adorno and Horkheimer allude in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the original existential impulse to dominate over internal and external nature, which is a sort of irreducible existential dimension to unfurling violence, is ultimately rooted in the most basic experiential dimensions of human experience. (I discuss these existential underpinnings extensively in ).
Nevertheless, the point that I would like to strike here is that the anti-Semite’s predilection to “level the world of the Jew as Other” is not so different to the white supremacist of the 20th Century who leveled the world of the black man as an object of hate, or the modern anti-immigrant Right who today levels the world of the diverse “Other” as the culprit to be blamed for the crises of capitalism.
In either case I argue that all three parties are an example of the extreme heights of “bourgeois subjectivity”, because the universalizing propensity inherent in each of these examples is a direct expression of a type of thought (systemically speaking) that has deep roots in the historical (ideological) traditions of Western society.[8] These traditions of thought – or better yet, this (ideological) analytic structure – reside at the very heart of modern ideological society and how we perceive, interpret and interact with the phenomenal world, ourselves and each other.[9]
But if there is one profoundly simple lesson as a result of this analysis, it is that the epistemic foundations of violence almost entirely concern how one does not honour the particularity their experience whilst keeping open to the revealing generality of phenomena (i.e., what Adorno describes as ‘honoring the object’).
For example, I illustrate in Consciousness and Revolt how as a result of one’s conscious evasion the general-particular relation becomes severed. It does so due to the fact that, according to the principles of identitarian thought, the particular gets subsumed by a false general (i.e., absolute, abstract identity).[10] It is on the basis of this false generality that distortions begin to overwhelm one’s experience and epistemic violence begins to unfold in the name of false universality (i.e., all people of a certain colour are ‘vermin’, or all people of a certain class are ‘uncouth’).
But it is also important to point out that this process of experiential distortion is not limited to the grounds of subjectivity. It also has systemic qualities. If the very processes of historical society are a culmination of certain epistemologically distorted structures of thought (i.e., a distorted analytic structure), the systemic distortions of the historic unfolding of capitalism’s institutional structures express a direct link to the social and historical emergence of the authoritarian personality, which is inherently epistemologically violent. (It is interesting to note that anthropologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus entertain a similar thesis in their book The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire (2012).
In this regard, we can determine that authoritarianism in all its forms is implicitly and explicitly violent, because we can trace the roots of this violence back to the psychic and relational structures of the authoritarian personality and a certain analytic structure (as well as their historic genesis or culmination).
In other words, the subject that plays out the authoritarian personality does so according to certain specific objective conditions. These conditions, which are epistemologically violent, manifest socially in inherently violent ways: i.e., as hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitative social/relational dynamics of power and coercion, which are both “contradictorily recognitive” and instrumental.
To put it another way, ignited by existential anxiety in a world which does not offer ‘ultimate security or certainty’, the distorted epistemology deeply engrained in the ideology of historic and modern society promotes implicit and explicit forms of violence that are both institutionally prescribed and socially legitimated. In this way, if the anti-Semitic phenomenon is the climax of the historical and social processes of modernism, this is because, as Adorno would say, the anti-Semite is a culmination of the authoritarian personality which is born from out of the epistemological conditions of these processes, whose drive for domination is motivated by a certain specific false universalizing propensity, which I consider as being rooted in existential anxiety.
On the basis of this understanding, the link between the social culmination of the barbarity of Auschwitz and the typical authoritarian methods of everyday society is exposed.[11] This link is expressed in the outburst of many different forms of socially violent activity, which, as I claim in Consciousness and Revolt are rooted in the ‘transhistorical ideology of domination’.
Take for instance the recent massacre in Norway. Rather than responding to the Norwegian tragedy with an identitarian politic equal to that which drove Anders Behring Breivik to reduce the Norwegian public to political objects ripe for domination in the first place, we need to challenge the social and epistemological origins of violence in society by looking at the inherently violating trends that operate on a fundamental level, as well as demonstrate a foundational and multidimensional understanding of distorted social collective dynamics that help fosters these trends.
We must respond to the tragedy of Norway by not limiting our judgements to the psychotic state of one man, but to the greater social, economic, political and epistemological processes and conditions behind the very social culmination of the insane ideology of that man.
Let us be clear: the indescribable violence and horror that unfolded in Norway is not solely limited to what Thomas Kvilhaug recently described as a murderous rampage which flowed directly from a fascist politics. Indeed, there is an obvious element of fascist politics behind Breivik’s ideology. But we must not limit ourselves to laying all the blame on his fascist political motives. We must come to understand the origins of the authoritarian and fascist phenomenon on a foundational level, and look to the very roots of his fascist politics as a symptom of a far greater contemporary social problematic (systemically speaking); because the fact is that fascism itself is a social phenomenon rooted in the context of ongoing social processes.
By beginning on the epistemological level and working all the way toward socioeconomic-political critique of violence, we should strive to establish a general historical outline or model of social violence in the context of the historic unfolding of capitalism’s institutional structures and the fundamentally violent (implicitly and explicitly) element that resides in the very way we conceive (epistemologically) of human organization and social collective practice in the midst of those structures (and in the very way we conceive of our fundamental relationship with the world).
Building off of this analysis, the final result intended would be to present not only a multidimensional understanding of violence from a foundational perspective, but also to con-tribute to a social philosophy that promotes a fundamental critical theory of society and which works toward understand-ing further the social, historical, economic, political, relational, psychological, epistemological and anthropological processes that result in the climax of social barbarity. For me, the aim of this social philosophy should ultimately be about formulating alternatives: a form of reconciliation which, I argue, relies on a transhistorical account and is contingent on the realisation of alternative social structures and systems rooted in a shift from contradictory recognition (subject-object) to mutual recogni-tion (subject-subject relations), as well as in an alternative anthropology, epistemology and cosmology and a phenomenological (‘lived’) ethics.
Notes and references
[1] David Sherman, The Dialectics of Subjectivity: Sartre and Adorno (New York: SUNY Press, 2007).
[2] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1992).
[3] R.C. Smith, Consciousness and Revolt: An Exploration toward Reconciliation (Holt: Heathwood Press, 2011)
[4] Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[5] David Sherman, The Dialectics of Subjectivity: Sartre and Adorno (New York: SUNY Press, 2007).
[6] Dr. Jeanne Willette, Theodor W. Adorno and Identity (www.arthistoryunstuffed.com, 2012).
[7] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1992).
[8] Theodor W. Adorno (with Max Horkheimer), Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1991).
[9] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1992).
[10] Ibid.
[11] Theodor W. Adorno (with Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford), The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982).
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R.C. Smith
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