Adorno’s Endgame

Abstract

Fredric Jameson, observing in Late Marxism that Adorno adopts Marx's view about abstract character of all historical forms of exchange, adds that abstractions characteristic of exchange profoundly affect because they extend across whole range of distinct human activities (from production to law, from culture to political forms, and not excluding psyche and more obscure 'equivalents' of unconscious desire).1 Indeed, Adorno examines negative effects of abstract exchange relations on both individuals and natural world in much of his work. Yet, even as he argues that society's law of motion has been abstracting from its individual subjects, degrading them to mere executors, mere partners in social wealth and social struggle for thousands of years,2 Adorno recognizes that a in which exchange is merely episodic and fragmentary (a barter society, for example) must be distinguished from late capitalist where abstract exchange relations insinuate themselves into nearly every aspect of social life while commodifying virtually all nature. Today, concentration of capital has reached such a size that capitalism appears to be institution, an expression of entire society. Now pervading society, the old fetish character of commodities, which reflects human relations as though they were relations between things, ends in socially totalitarian aspect of capital.3 Following Marx, then, Adorno also adopts view that commodity exchange has taken on a life of its own to which human life is now completely subordinate. To emphasize this point, he compares real total movement of society to Hegel's world spirit: like Weltgeist, Western has effectively dissociated itself from actions of living individuals whose labour reproduces it and continues to sustain it, thereby rendering them virtually powerless to change it (ND, 304). Individuals do not just depend on for their material survival; they are also entwined in society. The individual owes its existence in most literal sense because its entire content comes from society.4 By reducing individuals to agents and bearers of exchange value, late capitalist has adversely affected process of individuation. Viewing individuation as a positive achievement, Adorno criticizes our current subordination to exchange relations because it compromises our potentially emancipatory powers of critical self-reflection and seriously undermines prospects for changing our destructive and self-destructive relationship to nature. In fact, Adorno predicted catastrophic annihilation of nature under capitalism. Following a discussion of Adorno's views about individuation and individual's practical relationship to nature in labour, I shall outline his criticisms of damage this relationship continues to inflict on natural world, and explore his ideas about socio-economic conditions that might make possible a more salutary relationship to nature. I shall end with a discussion of Adorno's criticisms of collective action while explaining why he thought that some individuals may play a crucial role in effecting a radical change in our relationship to nature. The Rise and Fall of Individual5 Adorno devoted much his work to examining tremulous process of individuation, as well as waning prospects for self-determination and self-actualization in West. Championing individual as a potentially resistive and critical force, Adorno complained in Dialectic of Enlightenment that individuation has never been fully achieved because instinct for self-preservation continues to maintain us at level of mere species being.6 Odysseus represents one of first attempts to shake off primal mud of species being, but this attempt backfired. To survive in face of hostile forces of nature, Odysseus eviscerated very self he was trying to preserve by suppressing his instincts and defining himself over and against nature in order to dominate it. …