ND Part II / On The Dialectics of Identity
I enjoyed this section.
His first point is that critique is reciprocal: a concept fails to do justice to its object, but an object can fail to live up to its concept. These are not merely two descriptions of the same thing, because they have different normative force:
- The concept fails to do justice to the object → keep on thinking
- The object fails to live up to the concept → change the object
To change the object, holding it to the promise of the concept, is politics.
This helps us understand what he is saying about exchange in this section. The promise contained in the liberal-capitalist concept of exchange is of a free and equal interdependence. Our politics, Adorno suggests, must be to make such freedom and equality real.
But exchange is not a mere example of identity-thinking. He gets to exchange in this section directly from a consideration of the meaning of identity:
The exchange-principle, the reduction of human labor to an abstract general concept of average labor-time, is Ur-related to the identification-principle. It has its social model in exchange, and it would not be without the latter, through which non-identical particular essences and achievements become commensurable, identical.
In other words, identity is the thought-form of a particular society-form, that of the exchange of commodities in markets.
Crucially though, it’s no good just saying “down with reducing the particular products of human labour to equivalent values!”:
If the principle meanwhile was abstractly negated; if it was proclaimed as an ideal that, for the greater honor of the irreducibly qualitative, things should no longer go according to like for like, this would create an excuse for regressing into age-old injustice.
This is no good because the simple negation of the purported equality would allow naked inequality to take its place:
If one simply annulled the measurement-category of comparability, then what would step into the place of the rationality, which was indeed ideological yet also inherent as a promise in the exchange-principle, is immediate expropriation, violence, nowadays: the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques.
Instead, social relations must be held to the promise of the exchange principle:
What the critique of the exchange-principle as the identifying one of thought wishes, is that the ideal of free and fair exchange, until today a mere pretext, would be realized.
And this of course has political force:
the critique of the inequality in the equality aims towards equality
But all of this means that negative dialectics is itself inescapably dependent on identity-thinking:
The totality is to be opposed by convicting it of the non-identity with itself, which it denies according to its own concept. Negative dialectics is thereby tied, at its starting-point, to the highest categories of identity-philosophy. To this extent it also remains false, identity-logical, itself that which it is being thought against.
Its only advantage is that it is aware of this, so that it can
correct itself in its critical course
But continual correction means avoiding the slide into dogmatism:
It is one thing if thinking, sealed off by the necessity of every inescapable form, adapts in principle in order to immanently repudiate the claim of traditional philosophy to the conclusive structure – it is quite another to spur on that form of conclusiveness by itself, with the intention of making itself into what is first.
The former is good, the latter is bad. The former is using the philosophical system to repudiate itself, the latter is setting up one’s repudiation of the system as a rival system. But this difference can only be made apparent in ongoing, repeated correction.
The will to identity labors in every synthesis; as an a priori task of thinking, immanent to it, it appears positive and desirable: through this, the substrate of the synthesis would be reconciled with the I and for that reason good. This promptly permits the moral desiderata that the subject, by virtue of the insight into how much the thing is its very own, ought to bow to what is heterogenous to it.
Once that which is heteregeneous to thought, or that which is the aim or object of thought, is conceived as part of thought after all, it is seen to be worthy of respect (by philosophy/idealism/identity-thinking). What presents itself as humility and fidelity in the face of the other is nothing of the sort if the other has already been subsumed into the subject.
Adorno’s point is that this kind of philosophy is ideology: in the guise of profound insight and the grasping of truth it preaches acceptance of the existent.
The last paragraph starts out with some brilliant speechifying, but then:
Ideology owes its power of resistance against the Enlightenment to complicity with identifying thought: indeed, with thinking at large.
Ideology, as a form of identity-thinking, has a power of resistance against the demystifying forces of the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenment is the province of reason, i.e., thinking and especially identity-thinking, par excellence. The Enlightenment replaces authority with reason, following blindly with thinking for oneself. Therefore reason escapes the Enlightenment’s demystifying impulse.
It demonstrates therein its ideological side, that it never makes good on the assertion, that the non-I would in the end be the I; the more the I grasps it, the more completely the I finds itself downgraded to an object.
Idealism never entirely succeeds. If it did, the subject would rule over all it surveyed, in other words it would be at home in the world. But the reality is that the more the subject exerts itself to subsume everything, the more the subject is reduced to a thing, because the subject is one particular among others, all of which are targeted by identity and thereby reduced to instances of universals:
Identity becomes the authority of a doctrine of adjustment, wherein the object, according to which the subject would be directed, pays back to the latter what the subject inflicted on it.
His conclusion is that since ideology operates through the basic form of identity-thinking, the critique of ideology is not a matter of correcting false beliefs one-by-one but is a central philosophical task: to critique thought itself:
That is why the critique of ideology is not something peripheral and intra-scientific, something limited to the objective Spirit and the products of the subjective one, but philosophically central: the critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.