ND Part II / Objectivity of the Contradiction (part 2)
The second paragraph starts with a sentence full of ambiguity:
Experience refuses to settle whatever would appear in what is contradictory in the unity of consciousness.
Here is a better translation of the original German, which I got by comparing and combining a few AI translations:
Experience refuses to allow whatever contradictory elements may arise to be smoothed over within the unity of consciousness.
Experience, honestly undergone and considered, gives the lie to any attempted resolution or unity.
He gives an example of such a contradiction:
like that between the determination, which the individual knows as its own, and that which society imposes on it, if it wishes to keep itself alive, that of the “role”
In other words, the contradiction between your self-conception and the role imposed on you by society. This contradiction …
is not to be reduced to any sort of unity without manipulation, without the fine-tuning of impoverished master concepts, which cause the essential differences to disappear
We can fine-tune our concepts to accommodate the contradiction, but this is merely falsification. For example, we might explain it away by thinking of the individual as a well-rounded personality. But this is a delusion—experience will continue to be felt as something unreconciled and antagonistic to the core.
He gives another example, which I think has come up before in the group:
the exchange-principle, which increases the productive-forces in existing society, simultaneously threatens these to an increasing degree with annihilation
At this point, it’s reasonable to be sceptical, and to think once again as follows: hold on: how is that more than an antagonism, or a self-undermining dynamic, which appears as a contradiction only if we fail to fine-tune the concepts? If we lazily say that capitalism is progressive and leads to eternal growth, then there’s a contradiction. But we can resolve it: if we say that capitalism has a dynamic towards productive expansion and at the same time another dynamic toward destruction, owing to a blindness or lack of x, y, and z, then the contradiction appears not to be objective after all. “Contradiction”, then, would be akin to familiar Marxist rhetoric.
I think Adorno would say that the lazy description expresses an important truth, that capitalism has a single dynamic. There are not two opposing, separable forces—to say so is to impose formal logic on reality, since it cannot accommodate a self-negating dynamic—but rather a single internally contradictory one.
The remaining question is how these examples relate to the abstract and theoretical contradictions elucidated in the first paragraph. It’s clear that Adorno thinks they are the same kind of thing, and intimately related. We might be tempted to say that the basic contradiction in the object under judgement is the basis for the contradictions of the self and of capitalism, but we’ve seen already that Adorno often puts it the other way: identity-thinking is the exchange principle in the medium of thought. So in the end, the two are the same abstraction, with neither being a ground for the other.
I won’t write much about the third paragraph, which is just advocating for dialectics again, but this bit reinforces what I’ve been saying:
The dialectical contradiction “is” not purely and simply
Although the contradiction is objective, that doesn’t mean it’s a self-standing metaphysical object, an existent just sitting out there.