ND Part II / Self-Reflection Of Thought (Part 1)
Adorno has just said that critique of ideology implies a philosophically fundamental critique of identity and thus a critique of consciousness itself. Then:
The power of consciousness reaches all the way into its own deception. It is rationally cognizable, where a detached rationality which has run away with itself becomes false, turns truly into mythology.
Consciousness has the power to rationally cognize its own false way of operating, namely when detached rationality lack self-awareness and thereby becomes false. Thinking, which proceeds according to identity, must not get too carried away with its identifications, i.e., its determinations—that way lies myth.
The ratio recoils into irrationality as soon as [it] mistakes, in its necessary course, the fact that the disappearance of its substrate, be it ever so diluted, is the handiwork of its abstraction.
I’ve inserted the “it” that Redmond forgot, but the sentence is still difficult to parse. If we substitute “fails to recognize” for “mistakes”, we get something more comprehensible:
The ratio recoils into irrationality as soon as it fails to recognize, in its necessary course, the fact that the disappearance of its substrate, be it ever so diluted, is the handiwork of its abstraction.
The basic point is: when rational thought fails to recognize the fact that its act of abstraction makes the concrete material disappear—this is when it becomes irrational.
But notice: “in its necessary course”. Adorno is not saying that we have to avoid doing this abstraction. It is just the way reason works, so it cannot be avoided. The only thing we can do is be aware of it.
If thinking follows its laws of motion unconsciously, it turns against its own meaning, that which is thought by thinking, which commands the flight of subjective intentions to halt.
When thinking proceeds unreflectively, following its own momentum, it works against the very thing that gives it meaning, i.e., its object, the something actually being thought about. This something has the role of arresting the free, self-generated movement of subjective thought. Without that check, thinking no longer answers to anything outside itself.
The dictate of its autarky damns thinking to nullity; this becomes in the end, subjectively, stupidity and primitivity.
“Its autarky” refers to the autarky of thinking, when it is unreflective.
The next paragraph makes the point that “Non-identity is secretly the telos of the identification”. Identity-thinking aims to grasp the thing in its thisness, the thisness that is always missed and is thereby non-identical.
Thinking comes to see the non-identical by applying identity-thinking and noticing how it fails. But this, the heart of the negative dialectic, has its positive moment too:
The cognition of the non-identical is dialectical too, in the sense that it identifies more, and identifies differently, than identity-thinking. It wishes to say what something would be, while identity-thinking says what it falls under, what it is an example or representative of, what it consequently is not itself.
The negative moment is when thinking comes to see the non-identical by applying identity-thinking and noticing how it fails. The positive is the substance of reflective thinking (as opposed to the un-self-aware thinking he has been criticizing), namely a different kind of identity-thinking: thinking what the thing would be.
But what does “what something would be” mean? It is not so much “what the thing really is, more adequately observed,” so much as a Utopian vision: what the thing would be if it were not degraded and reduced by the ideology and the bad existent.
He is trying to more precisely describe the difference—I almost want to say the practical difference—between identity-thinking and the cognition of the non-identical that comprises negative dialectics, given the unavoidable fact that the latter is identity-thinking too. So far what he has said is that it’s about self-awareness, and now he tells us that this self-awareness means you can reach for the thing, trying to do justice to it (in the spirit of identity), but do it without turning it into a mere instance of a universal, a species of a genus or member of a class, a mere representative.
It is hubris … that the thing-in-itself would correspond to its concept. But its ideal is not to be simply thrown away: in the reproach that the thing would not be identical with the concept lives too the longing that it would like to be so. In this form the consciousness of non-identity contains identity.
So, a simple correspondence between concept and thing remains the goal of thinking, even in its negative dialectical form. And this supposition, that such a correspondence is the goal, underlies even the most neutral-seeming identities of formal logic (A = A):
Indeed, the supposition of this, all the way down to formal logic, is the ideological moment in pure thinking.
It is ideological because it assumes that the correspondence, the identity, is achievable or unproblematic. But there’s a moment of truth in this: the hope of reconciliation, where the identification really works, producing no contradictions:
In it however the moment of truth of ideology is also hidden, the injunction that no contradiction, no antagonism ought to be. In the simple identifying judgement, the pragmatic element which controls nature is already conjoined to a utopian one. “A” is supposed to be, what it is not yet. Such hope is contradictorily tied to that which breaks through the predicative identity.
Then, this is the gist:
Utopia would be beyond identity and beyond the contradiction, a togetherness of what is divergent.
I’ll post something about the remainder of this section in a day or two.