Another guest post by John C Halasz. He picks up on comments made by John Steppling in the Adorno: Art + Philosophy post about how "totalizing" tendencies are really fragmenting tendencies. Steppling says:

Adorno was never so crude as to say the "whole is false".But that the mechanisms that shape a dominated consciousness create a falsity....create illusions of authenticity. Is this actually a totalizing tendency? It would seem also a fragmenting tendency...which Heidegger sort of thought (though Im hardly all that conversent with Heidegger). That the logic of technology produced ever more rationalized modes of thought .... and production .... is what Adorno is going after when he talks of the false, or untrue.

I might add, that Steppling's emphasis on "mechanisms" conditioning consciousness/experience misses a bit the socially objective processes of rationalization that condition those conditioning mechanisms, which is perhaps an artefact of the way Adorno's own thinking is, inspite of its "intentions", nonetheless bound up in the conceptual apparatus of the traditional "philosophy of consciousness"). That is, of course, precisely the sort of "contradiction" that Adorno excels at identifying.

But I think it should be put in the context of post-epistemological philosophical thinking: there's that question of what philosophical thinking/activity should be "doing", once the basic, metaphysically rooted project of an epistemological "certification" of knowledge, as the correspondance of "final" truth with "ultimate" reality goes by the wayside. Knowledge is no longer the fulfillment of the plenitude of Being, nor the supreme justification of existence, nor the sure determinant and guide to action.

Knowledge is rather "deflated" and situated among social and natural processes and activities. But there was an additional notion attached to the project of philosophical epistemology, which was the idea that the "progress" of knowledge attached and amounted to a new "progressive" ethics, instead of there being the same old ethics attached to different truth-conditions. I think the "shock" of the rescinding of such epistemological expectations motivates Adorno's recourse to art/aesthetic experience as the "proving ground" of a post-epistemological philosophical thinking. (A similar, parallel problem is to be found with Wittgenstein's critical dissolution of epistemology, where, though three quarters of his references to "philosophy" are pejorative, the other quarter imply some contituation of philosophical thinking/activity which he never manages to explicitate and spell out).

What I want to get at is the way that Adorno reacts to the "end" of epistemology as a collapse of the notion of "Reason" itself, as "Reason" becoming multiply divided against itself, no longer "whole", renouncing and denouncing its very tendency to "totalization". Art then becomes a polarized extreme of the break-up/division of reason against itself, which peculiarly holds on to the impossible ideal of "wholeness", even as it expresses its contradictory reality/impossibility. Thus "wholeness" can be expressed only through the fragmentary, in and as the experience of fragmentation, even as that very expression amounts to an alternative "vision" of wholeness, as pluralistic and de-totalized. Art, as the acategorical uniqueness that protests against and rejects the totalizing ways of cognitive-instrumental categorical thinking and the objective processes which give rise to it and which it "expresses", becomes the "medium" of critical and counter-normative thinking. It becomes the repository that "expresses" the very deformations that categorical thinking is subject to.

That is, of course, a large cognitive burden to be imposed on art. But, still more, just as Marx saw that, while the rise of capitalism had dissolved the repressive narrowness of traditional social morality, it had rendered social morality effectively impossible, except as cant and private sentiment, such that it could only become possible once again as a fundamental transformation of the structural imperatives determining social organization, art, for Adorno, has become the refuge for the wrong life that can not be rightly lived, the hibernation abode of any conceivable social morality/ethical life. It becomes the means of retrieving not only cognitive aims, but ethical conditions from epistemological disappointment.

But the problem is not just that the Marxian project of social emancipation has become infected by the cognitive-instrumental categorical means, by which it sought to realize itself, but that those very categorical means and the social processes which generate and "reflect" them, have themselves become reflexive, such that they automatically reproduce and reflect the "conditions" that generate them. For example, not only has labor-capacity become a commodity and human uses been commodified as "subjective utility", but unemployment has become "natural", as NAIRU, and commodity prices are subject to "hedonic adjustments", and not only does the "mind" seek out those aspects of things that can render them somehow calculable, but "mind" itself is reduced to a mechanical/computational process. The formation of categories becomes itself subject to the processes that give rise to cognitive-instrumental "reason". The "problems" of epistemology are at once abandonned and compounded.

The Habermasian "solution" to what Adorno sees as the collapsed, multiply divided and contradictory condition of "reason", its fragmentation, is to emphasize in neo-neo-Kantian/Weberian fashion the modern differentiation of "spheres" of validity and to attempt a discursive resolution. But aside from its lack of any "concrete" historical prospect, any existential situatedness, any institutional embodiment, and any intrication with the very processes and conditions that would give rise to categorical thought, it fails to respond and "answer" to the natural history of the entwinement of categorical thinking and social morality that Adorno excavates by means of the history of art.

Comments

Posted by: john steppling | February 15, 2007 09:55 AM

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