Adorno and Horkheimer Presentation
Supplementary Quotations

Part I: Adorno and others on Social Theory
Part II: Adorno on Modernism, Society and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
Bibliography

Adorno and others on Social Theory

MARX: "While in the completed bourgeois system every economic
relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and
everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with
every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its
presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely
in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of
it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a
totality. The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its
process, of its development." (Marx 1857-8, 278)

ADORNO: "Mass culture is a kind of training for life when
things have gone wrong. The schema of mass culture now prevails as a
canon of synthetically produced modes of behavior. The following which
mass culture can still count on even where tedium and deception seems
almost calculated to provoke the consumers is held together by the hope
that the voice of the monopoly will tell them as they wait in line
precisely what is expected of them if they want to be clothed and fed. .
. . People give their approval to mass culture because they know or
suspect that this is where they are taught the mores they will surely
need as their passport in a monopolized life. This passport is only valid
if paid for in blood, with the surrender of life as a whole and the
impassioned obedience to a hated compulsion. This is why mass culture
proves so irresistible and not because of the supposed "stultification"
of the masses which is promoted by their enemies and lamented by their
philanthropic friends" (Adorno 1991, 78?9; 80).

ADORNO: "The once confident hope that the needs of the
people, along with the growth of productive forces, would raise the
quality of the social whole to a new and higher level has no substance
any more, ever since needs have been made subject to integration and
falsification by society. As prognosticated, needs are fulfilled once
again, but it is a spurious fulfillment that robs people of their human
rights." (Adorno 1970, 27)

ADORNO: "The organic composition of man is growing. That
which determines subjects as means of production and not as living
purposes, increases with the proportion of machines to variable capital.
The pat phrase about the "mechanization" of man is deceptive because it
thinks of him as something static which, through an "influence" from
outside, an adaptation to conditions of production external to him,
suffers certain deformations. But there is no substratum beneath such
"deformations," no ontic interior on which social mechanisms merely act
externally . . . . Only when the process that begins with the
metamorphosis of labour?power into a commodity has permeated men through
and through and objectified each of their impulses as formally
commensurable variations of the exchange relationship, is it possible for
life to reproduce itself under the prevailing relations of production.
Its consummate organization demands the coordination of people that are
dead. . . . The organic composition of man refers by no means only to his
specialized technical faculties, but--and this the usual cultural
criticism will not at any price admit--equally to their opposite, the
moments of naturalness which once themselves sprung from the social
dialectic and are now succumbing to it. Even what differs from technology
in man is now being incorporated into it as a kind of lubrication.
Psychological differentiation, originally the outcome both of the
division of labour that dissects man according to sectors of the
production process and of freedom, is finally itself entering the service
of production" (Adorno 1951, 229?230).

MARX: "The advance of capitalist production develops a
working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the
requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The
organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully
developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a
relative surplus population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour,
and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capitalÕs
valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations
sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct
extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional
cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the Ôn
atural laws of production,Õ i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence
on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves,
and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them." (Marx 1867, 889)

ADORNO: "But since as subjects men themselves still represent
the ultimate limit of reification, mass culture must try and take hold of
them again and again: the bad infinity involved in this hopeless effort
of repetition is the only trace of hope that this repetition might be in
vain, that men cannot wholly be grasped after all" (Adorno 1991, 80).

NEGRI: "This antagonism finds its origin in the relation of
scission between use value and exchange value--a relation of scission in
which the two tendencies are liberated from the forced unity to which
they had been constrained: on the one hand, exchange value is autonomised
in money and in capital, and on the other, use value is autonomised as
the working class. . . We must see in these two spaces the formation of
opposed subjectivities, opposed wills and intellects, opposed processes
of valorisation: in short, an antagonistic dynamic" (Negri 1979, 72; 93).

NEGRI: "Marx characterizes the working class as a solid
subjectivity, which is at once collective use value and necessary labor,
as an historical and social essence to which is owed on the one hand "the
replacement for wear and tear so that it can maintain itself as a class";
on the other hand, the working class is a social essence characterized by
its particular status: its use value is creative; it is the unique and
exclusive source of wealth. We are in consequence exactly at the heart of
a first definition of the dynamic of the working class, where its essence
as creator of value is engaged in a continual struggle which has as a
result on the one hand the development of capital and on the other the
intensification of the class composition, the enlargement of its needs
and of its pleasures, the elevation of the value of labor necessary for
its reproduction. And since capital finds itself constrained to repress
and to devalue this productive force of the working class, and to delimit
its impulsion into the intensification of its own composition (n.b.: the
path of the intensification of the organic composition of capital passes
by way of this repression), here then the struggle, the fundamental
antagonism which is transformed into expanded proletarian struggle,
constitutes at last a key to historical progress. . . . [T]he antagonism
alone determines the movement" (Negri 1979, 73).
 

Adorno on MODERNISM, SOCIETY and the DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

"Implied here is the idea that every work of art
spontaneously aims at being identical with itself, just as in the world
outside a fake identity is forcibly imposed on objects by the insatiable
subject. Aesthetic identity is different, in one important respect: it is
meant to assist the non-identical in its struggle against the repressive
identification compulsion that rules the outside world. . . . Art negates
the conceptualization foistered on the real world and yet harbours in its
own substance elements of the empirically existent. . . . [T]he dialectic
of art resembles the social dialectic without consciously imitating it.
The productive force of useful labour and that of art are the same."
(Adorno 1970, 6)

"Whereas in the real world all particulars are fungible, art
protests against fungibility by holding up images of what reality itself
might look like, if it were emancipated from the patterns of
identification imposed on it. By the same token, art--the imago of the
unexchangable--verges on ideology because it makes us believe there are
things in the world that are not for exchange. On behalf of the
unexchangable, art must awaken a critical consciousness toward the world
of exchangable things."
(Adorno 1970, 122-3)

"The new wills non-identity but, by willing, inevitably wills
identity. To put it differently, modern art is constantly practising the
impossible trick of trying to identify the non-identical." (Adorno 1970,
33)

"The new in art is the aesthetic counterpart to the expanding
reproduction of capital in society. Both hold out the promise of
undiminished plenitude. BaudelaireÕs poetry was the first to express the
fact that art in a fully developed commodity society can do nothing
except look on powerlessly as that society drifts along. The only way in
which art can henceforth transcend the heteronomy of capitalist society
is by suffusing its own autonomy with the imagery of that society. The
modernity of art lies in its mimetic relation to a petrified and
alienated reality." (Adorno 1970, 31)

"To the degree to which art corresponds to a need present in
society, it has largely become a business enterprise operated for profit.
As business, art will continue as long as it pays and as long as its
smooth functioning lulls everybody into believing that art is still
alive." (Adorno 1970, 26)

"[M]odernism is not a positive slogan." (Adorno 1970, 30)

"[M]odernism negates tradition itself. In so doing, it
extends the sway of the bourgeois principle of progress to the field of
art. The abstractness of that principle is tied up with the commodity
character of art. . . . In art, direct protest is reactionary. Even
critical art has to surrender itself to that which it opposes." (Adorno
1970, 31)

"Nor does modern art merely want to duplicate the fa*ade of
reality. On the contrary, true modern art makes an uncompromising reprint
of reality while at the same time avoiding being contaminated by it.
KafkaÕs power as a writer, for example, is due to this negative sense of
reality." (Adorno 1970, 28)

"Modern art is as abstract as the real relations among men. .
. . In this specific sense even Beckett is a realist. . . . Between
poetic euphemisms and discursive barbarity there is indeed precious
little room for true art. It is this small in-between space that is
BeckettÕs terrain." (Adorno 1970, 47)

"Art is truly modern when it has the capacity to absorb the
results of industrialization under capitalist relations of production,
while following its own experimental mode and at the same time giving
expression to the crisis of experience." (Adorno 1970, 50)

"Walter Benjamin gave a description of the phenomenon of
aesthetic aura that is at once nostalgic and critical. In the meantime,
the aura of art works has gone from bad to worse because it often tends
to be artificially superimposed and therefore false, the commercial film
being an example of this." (Adorno 1970, 66)

"Just as all art is secularized transcendence, so all art
participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has faced the
challenge of this dialectic by developing the concept of anti-art. From
now on, no art will be conceivable without the moment of anti-art. This
means no less than that art has to go beyond its own concept in order to
remain faithful to itself. Hence, even the idea of the abolition of art
is respectful of art because it takes the truth claim of art seriously.
The survival of disintegrated art is more than a phenomenon of cultural
lag or, in Marxist terms, an overly tardy dislocation of the
superstructure. Art draws its power of resistance from the fact that the
realization of materialism would also be the abolition of materialism,
that is, of the domination of material interests. Weak as it may be, art
anticipates a spirit that would step forth at that point. To this
corresponds an objective need or, better, neediness of the world, which
is the opposite of the subjective-ideological needs people presently have
for art. Art has its footing in that objective need alone." (Adorno 1970,
43)
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 

Adorno, Theodor W. 1951. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a
Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974.

---. 1966. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London:
Routledge, 1990.

---. 1970. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann, Trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.

---. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture. Ed. J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge.
 

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 1944. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, 1979.
 

Marx, Karl. 1857-58. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique
of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin--New
Left Review, 1973.

---. 1867. Capital: A Critique of Political Ecomony. Volume
One. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin--New Left Review, 1976.
 

Negri, Antonio. 1979. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the
Grundrisse. Ed. Jim Fleming. Trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, Maurizio
Viano. London: Pluto?Autonomedia, 1991.

---. 1989. "Postmodern." The Politics of Subversion: A
Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Trans. James Newell. Oxford:
Polity. 200-207.