Jurgen Habermas and Theodor W. Adorno, a view from practical life
To jump straight in, I’ve always felt that in the wake of post-structuralism adopting a stance of outright nihilism is morally suspect. To embrace nihilism as a kind of intellectual posture requires a certain privilege; I think someone has to be, in many ways, insulated from the consequences of meaninglessness, to be in a position to ‘enjoy the symptom’, as it were. Perhaps this lies at the heart of postmodern irony: the capacity to play with the collapse of foundations because you are not immediately threatened by it. I’ve also thought it is an irony, too, that merely mirrors capital’s own underlying disposition: a hedonistic nihilism, pleasure and novelty in the pursuit of profit via the taking down of real resistance through repressive desublimation - entertainment. This is not to say the harnessing of reason by instrumental forces is not just as much part of capitalism’s project.
For that reason, I’ve often thought that Jurgen Habermas has been treated rather unfairly on the left. I’ve never quite understood the tendency to cast him straightforwardly as a proto-neoliberal. If anything, I think he grasped the dialectical tensions of modernity in a way not entirely unlike Theodor W. Adorno. The difference, perhaps, is that while Adorno transformed the dialectic into a radical method: Negative Dialectics or, the relentless refusal of reconciliation, Habermas sought to preserve the possibility of rational mediation through communicative reason. Adorno, of course, is a recipient of similar slurs from the left, perhaps even more so than Habermas.
So, I find it frustrating when commentators recycle the familiar cliché about Adorno and the Frankfurt School: that they merely refused to affirm culture, that their critique amounted to a kind of sterile negativity. John Ganz – a cultural and political commentator I admire – for instance, seems to repeat this line and, like many others, emphasises the pastness of their thinking. Maybe I’m being unfair? But the point of Adorno’s negativity was never simple refusal. In fact, nothing affirms quite like the negative, as I’ve discussed before. To confront the world in the rawness of its contradictions, to refuse premature reconciliation, is precisely what allows us to glimpse how things might genuinely be otherwise. Negation, properly understood, is not despair; it is the condition of possibility for critique and transformation. That meaning is contained in the form itself, to practice negation, self-conscious criticism, is to practice truth.
It seems this places me, the matter of truth, in a certain schismatic position. But I’ve come to think that the world urgently needs to be educated in the subtleties, profundity, and, yes, even the joy of negation. Hence my mission has become straightforwardly a didactic and pedagogical one. I have never really been attracted to circulating esoteric theories at the level of nuance to a community of other theorists (notwithstanding the fact I don’t have, it seems, in some places at least, the correct pedigree – which is another story). Which was not Adorno’s project either – a point most strikingly articulated in Toward a New Manifesto, among other texts. But then, who is the audience? This is not easily defined.
What I have in mind is Adorno’s notion of the non-identical: nature, along with those ‘unintended’ social practices that precede appearance, the spectacle, and convention. Like his negative dialectics, this idea functions as a methodology, though it is rarely framed in such explicit terms, meant to be practiced as a critical way of perceiving ‘the possibility of hope in the future’ (Towards a New Manifesto). Negative dialectics operates as a mode of interpretation that attends not only to what is present, but also to what is absent, lacking, or lost. Within this tension, truth emerges relationally, often in contrast to the present.
I try to remain attentive to the non-identical: to the unexpected dimensions of nature and human interaction. Even though I tend to expect the worst from humanity, I am, nonetheless, continually surprised. I sometimes think that Adorno, himself, must have experienced something similar when formulating his concept of the non-identical, working as he did within an oppressive historical context not entirely unlike the one we face today. Further, I, again, attempt to experience that which is lost and absent, and is why I have a fascination with history and redemption; that history is open and active and why the present is the same as, and different from, the past.
Regarding the question of methodolgy, we need only consider the form of Negative Dialectics itself – its constellations and critical models – to see it as a tool for political change. As I’ve just suggested, Adorno is largely circulated among theorists, especially Adorno scholars, and the question of putting his thought into practice is rarely addressed; indeed, it is often ridiculed. Adorno himself would likely be frustrated by this, though he would also defend thinking as a mode of production in its own right.
Returning to the question of audience, for me the answer lies in praxis. Community arts, in particular, could benefit profoundly from engaging with Adorno’s method, adapting it where necessary. Such an approach might even serve as an antidote to the inertia of identity politics that now so often dominates community art practice. However much Adorno is criticised, he at least leaves us with a possible way out of the conditions shaped by power and profit – unlike many of the more fashionable theorists embraced by the liberal left – Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the exception – so that we are not left indefinitely adrift in hopelessness.