'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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Adorno, identity thinking, particularity
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June 23, 2008
In The Splinter in Your Ear: Noise as the Semblance of Critique in Culture, Theory & Critique, (2005) Nick Smith gives a good account of Adorno's argument about identity thinking.
He says that for Adorno, all cultural analysis must begin with an account of abstract identification, which specifies an individual thing in the world, picks it out as a member of a group, and places it under a concept. Regardless of whether I understand the thing as an instantiation of a Platonic form or an example of a scientific class, what matters is that the object is no longer a unique and strange thing but is rather a member of a category that makes sense to me. He adds:
This process, which Adorno names ‘identity thinking’, causes a belief that concepts fully capture the objects to which they refer ...When we consistently disregard particularity while reinforcing similarity, we forget the notion of something genuinely concrete, particular, unique, non-fungible, or incommensurable. The material world is made to fit the abstract idea and actual things are seen as nothing more than exemplars of their concepts. Abstract classifications do not, however, inhere in objects but, rather, are artefacts of intellectual organization. My classifications are merely constructs of convenience.
Because identity thinking pretends that concepts exhaust their objects, the particularity of things will remain overlooked and in reason’s blind spot. When Adorno claims that the ‘splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass’, the splinter marks precisely this blindness to particularity.....The notion of aura, which Adorno shares with Walter Benjamin, preserves concrete particularity against identity thinking and its practical apotheosis in universal commodification.
As our most basic form of understanding, identity thinking is born not in the search for objective truth but rather in egoistic instrumentality. With cognition bound in this way to use, a direct causal relationship can be traced between conceptualisation, instrumentalisation, commodification and domination. So we have the
degradation of reason into identity thinking.
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This account is not quite correct. Classifications are not merely "constructs of convenience", (which is, in fact, the positivist-nominalist view), nor is "identity thinking" simply a matter of "egoistic instrumentality" which disclaims any aim at "objective truth". Rather the ego of cognition is itself formed and structured by "identity thinking", whereby it becomes "transcendental", and thereby covers over and undermines its own aim at "objective truth". And it is not as if our classifications and concepts could somehow be stripped away from our understanding to get at the unmediated "truth" of the object in its irreducible particularity, since they form the disclosive means of access to objects and the experience and understanding of them, (by which they elude our grasp as irreducible particulars.) Rather our concepts and classifications are rooted in the compulsions arise from the very context of material reality to which the object in its particularity belongs and is inscribed. If the concept is the reification of the "thing" under the sway or reign of "identity thinking", ( and there is a touch of tautology there, making a thing out of a thing), then the compulsion toward such reification arises from the conditions, structures, and pressures of extant material reality. That is the "preponderance of the the object" that Adorno's "materialist" hermeneutics seeks to excavate, which at once gives rise to and is denied by the metaphysical subjectivism of "identity thinking". And the releasement of the object in its particularity and otherness from its subsumption under the "spell" of the concept as the "non-identical" prefigures, as well, the releasement of the subject(s) from their own compulsive subordination to the "universal", by which their own irreducible particularity and difference is occluded and denied. (It is here that Levinas' insistence on the irreducible, acategorical particularity of the (human) other at once cross-sects with Adorno's concerns, and perhaps provides some alternate and better (pre-)conceptual means for excavating and articulating the point).
Interestingly, Adorno's position and problematic seems to abut upon that "unlimited semiosis" which Derrida was to proclaim. But I suspect that Adorno would have seen such "unlimited semiosis" and its boundless proliferations of interpretations, which the elusive, ungraspable particularity of the object at once provokes and buries, as precisely symptomatic of that excess of subjectivism that he criticized and sought to undo, in the very "name" of the non-identity of the object as the locus of "truth". It's that buried objectivity configured into our world that Adorno seeks to retrieve in his "emphatic concept of truth", as the marker for the distortions and afflictions that we have done to that world and each other. The drive toward the objectivity of "truth" is not something that Adorno forswears, but rather the rooted ways in which it misses its mark. Still, it might be wondered whether Adorno's account still contains a residue or hankering after the illusion or phantasy of some full transparency in our relation to the world and to others in it, and whether the notion of the object in its non-identity can set a limit to and bestill the projection of possibilities in that world. But then the real issue and "object" of the critique is not the objects of possible cognition, but the worldly configurations, in which they are embedded and mediated, which structure both their possible interpretations and the compulsions and compensations that motivate them. The "non-identical" is the imageless image of a transfiguration of the objects of cognition through the possible reconfigurations of that worldly context, which is also a transformation of the motives of cognition and the compulsion to fill in the world through its endless interpretation, whereby knowledge and its meaning would no longer be the false mastery of an alienated subject over an alienating world. (By analogy, "psychoanalysis comes to an end, when the patient realizes it could go on forever").