ND Part II / Logic of Disassembly (Part 1)
As fiendishly difficult as these sections might be at times, I feel like light is dawning over the landscape of negative dialectics where before I was stumbling around with a torch.
The first paragraph here forces me to revisit my earlier struggle with the status of contradictions, in my posts about LND Lecture 1. There, Adorno distinguishes the “dual character of contradiction”:
the fact that on the one hand we have a contradiction in the realm of ideas and concepts, and on the other that the world itself is antagonistic in its objective form
LND p.9
I struggled to understand the way in which contradictions reside not only between concepts and things but within things. Now it is becoming clear that he never meant that things are contradictory in themselves, in the naive realist sense of the thing. He always meant the thing in its dual character: as reciprocally constituting and constituted by the subject, and as the preponderant non-identical non-conceptual pole of thought.
So the thing is not a naive realist lump lying outside of thought, and it isn’t a mere construct of thought either—it’s both at once (or both are moments). And that’s how there can be contradiction in the thing: it both is and is not what its concept makes of it.
In the lectures, he wanted to emphasize the objective side of contradiction against the positivist objection that he’s just talking about subjective confusions that can be ironed out with better logic. Here in ND, he is emphasizing the other side of it: that a contradiction…
is a reflection-category, the thinking confrontation of concept and thing
The end of the first paragraph is compressed and difficult:
Dialectics as a procedure means, to think for the sake of what was once experienced in the thing as a contradiction and against it in contradictions. A contradiction in reality, it is a contradiction against these.
To “think for the sake of what was once experienced in the thing as a contradiction” is to do justice to the contradictory in experience—and this could refer not only to intellectual experience but something like the experience of freedom in capitalist society, in which one is free to choose any job at all but at the same time compelled by necessity etc.
These contradictions are experienced as being in the thing, even though the thing is not some naive-realist in-itself. But dialectics is also at the same time to think against the bad existent, meaning to oppose the contradictory reality, by thinking in a sense along with this real contradiction such that it is not resolved. This is dialectics as a righteous weapon.
A contradiction in reality, it is a contradiction against these.
The “it” refers to “dialectics as a procedure” from the previous sentence. So this sentence is saying that dialectics is a contradiction in reality and a contradiction against such real contradictions. But that still needs unpacking…
- Dialectics is a contradiction in reality. This can be split into two moves.
- The same as in the lecture: emphasizing that contradiction is not a mere matter of a subjective logic applied to reality, but is something in reality.
- Dialectical thought is itself one of these contradictions in reality. Dialectical thought is part of social reality and an event in objective history. And it is a contradiction in the sense that it goes against what exists, refusing identity.
- Dialectics is a contradiction against real contradictions. In going against what exists, it goes against the real contradictions. This makes it special among the real contradictions: it’s the one that goes against all the others.
I have a lot of tolerance for Adorno but these last few sentences of the first paragraph are way too Ouroboric.