In response to the tendency of the right wing taking over Germany in the beginning years of 1960s, the right-wing Socialist German Student Association (short as SDS, Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentenbund) took it to the streets (Sixties’ German Student Movement, Studentbewegung). Their worries were gradually confirmed by what was to come in sequence: in 1966, the Social-democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei) formed a grand coalition with the conservatives, leaving close to no left-wing opposition in the parliament (Bundestag) (884 Freyenhagen); in 1967, amidst the protest against the Shah of Persia’s visit to West Berlin, a peaceful student protester named Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by the police (Maiso 341 and Valenta 150); in 1968, the parliament passed the state of emergency legislation which further curtailed citizens’ basic civil rights (Spaulding).
The students urged the scholars from Institute for Social Research (Short as IFS, Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the Frankfurt School) whose general research and thought direction is to apply Marxism and psychoanalysis to culture and media studies (Valenta 141-142), to join their front, however with little to no success (except from Herbert Marcuse). Among the scholars who were criticised of inaction, Theodor W. Adorno as one of the IFS leading figure at the time arguably received the most acrimonious verbal lambaste, not least because he decided in 1969 to call the police to clear out the students who, at least for Adorno, was about to occupy IFS (880 Freyenhagen).
In particular, Adorno was accused of resignation (881 Freyenhagen), being “critical in theory [and] conformist in practice” (Leslie 119), betraying his own theory (Freyenhagen 868), “promoting theory for theory’s sake” and being “left alibi for bourgeois society” (“Active Strike”). These accusations were echoed by his beloved doctorate student and the leading theorist of the Student Movement Hans-Jürgen Krahl (Maiso 335-336):in his posthumously published anthology, Constitution and Class Struggle (Konstitution und Klassenkampf), he accused Adorno of inability to distinguish good and bad praxis, his theory’s inadequacy to mobilise organised resistance (292) and to incorporate elements of fundamentalist Marxism such as “historical materialism”, “class struggle” (293, 295 and 300), “wage labourer” and “productivity” (300-301) and his theory’s “class betrayal” (302).
The students were not mistaken that Adorno puts a heavy weight on praxis, since the topic of praxis constantly emerged sporadically in his works throughout the years. However, I argue that Adorno’s praxis is not the same kind of praxis that the students expected of him. Should my argument be tenable, the criticism of inaction will altogether be invalid, because they cannot blame Adorno for something he did not allege commitment.
In response to a letter from Marcuse who was the only outspoken supporter of the Student Movement among IFS scholars, Adorno interrogated Marcuse, “…you are a dialectician, aren’t you?…[M]ight not a movement, by the force of its immanent antinomies, transform itself into its opposite?” (128). From this quote, it is revealed that Adorno adopted a dialectical stance towards the Student Movement, which, as will be seen, is consistent with his conceptualisation of praxis.
Such dialectical stance, according to Freyenhagen, is that “…every organisation has an internal tendency to expend and to become divorced from the purposes for which it exists” (871). This stance was not devised ad hoc in response to the Student Movement. Rather, as early as 1944, Adorno (and Max Horkheimer) had expressed this stance in his Dialectic of Englightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung):
Ultimately, the anti-authoritarian priniciple necessarily becomes its own antithesis, the agency opposed to reason: its abolition of all absolute ties allows power to decree and manipulates any tie which suits its purpose. (73)
This dialectical trend, at least for Adorno, was also happening to the Student Movement in at least three aspects, heading himself of its tendency of sliding towards faschism that he had once lived (131-132): Firstly, the Student Movement was reducing to “pseudo-activity” (McDonald and Young 533) without clear achieving goals (Richter 17) which “…overdoses and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity, without admitting to itself to what extend it serves as a substitute satisfaction, elevating itself to an end in itself” (Adorno 291); Secondly, in the Student Movement, violence bred further violence, eventually resulting in an ever-expanding vicious circle (Adorno 268); Lastly, rather than thinking critically, the students were more favourable of drawing different political groups and inciting outrageous conflicts among them (Adorno 131).
History has proven Adorno’s fear and insight: the Student Movement ended with a internal split of the students into smaller political groups including a number of left-wing terrorist groups with many of the leading figures of the Student Movement as their members, the most famous of which is probably the notorious Red Fraction Army (Rote Fraktion Armee) (Velanta 151), that kept haunting Germany with terrorist attacks for quite some time.
On the other hand, Adorno also firmly decries the absence of praxis in favour of theory. In particular, he rejects isolated individual resistance (Adorno 263), doing nothing (Adorno 4) and merely contemplation at the couch (Adorno 289). Meanwhile, as his critics have confirmed, he seemed to have betrayed his own denial of inaction in the Student Movement. To substantiate their argument, they almost unanimously refer to the opening of Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialektik) published in the midst of the Student Movement (1966), as if it is a direct proof of Adorno’s hypocrisy on praxis:
Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes defeatism of reason after the attempt to changed the world miscarried. (Adorno 3)
For example, Freyenhagen’s interpretation of this passage is that there had been an opportunity for revolution which Adorno was supposed to take part, but it was missed (868).
But such interpretation is at least questionable, as I could not find any Adorno’s original passage indicating that he ever inclined to “fundamentalist Marxist” revolution. On the contrary, Adorno’s own literature reveals his doubt for fundamentalist Marxist revolution, heading that its conviction was thwarting its critique:
Those whose expectations of imminent revolution made them wish to liquidate philosophy were impatient enough with demands to lag behind philosophy even then. The apocryphal part of materialism reveals the one of high philosophy, the untruth in the sovereignty of the spirit which the reigning materialism disdains as cynically as bourgeois society used to do in secret…Materialism comes to be the very relapse into barbarism which it was supposed to prevent. To work against this is not the most irrelevant among the tasks of critical theory; otherwise the old untruth will continue with a diminished coefficient of friction and a more baneful effect. (204-205)
Instead, the ending of the paragraph which contains the quote at the very above may shed some light of what Adorno suggests is really missed:
Perhaps it was an inadequate interpretation which promised that it would be put into practice. Theory cannot prolong the moment its [critique] depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever [critical thoughts] the practical change would require. (emphasis mine) (Adorno 3)
In the last sentence, Adorno clearly suggests that the practical change would require “critical thoughts” (3). Therefore, I suggest that what was missed was not revolution but critique of philosophy in case that philosophy would reduce to “inadequate interpretation which promised that it would be put into practice” (Adorno 3). Given that this text was published in the context of the Student Movement, rather than providing proof that Adorno betrayed his own theory, the passage may actually gesture at the students, heading them the absence of critique in their actions and theories. With my interpretation, the middle sentence could be re-read: “A practice [(critique)] indefinitely delayed is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities [(student leaders)]” (additions mine) (Adorno 3).
Thus seen, Adorno did not betray his own commitment to praxis because his praxis refers to building critical theories instead of revolution. Theory, also seen to him, is drastically on the decline in face of the encroachment of positivist science and “analytical philosophy”: “[w]hile we had noted for many years that, in the operations of modern science, the major discoveries are paid for with an increasing decline of the theoretical education” (Adorno and Horkheimer 14).
In the same book, Adorno (and Horkheimer) argues that such absence of “theoretical education” (14) has been eliciting a kind of “alienated reason”: the allegiance to lingual clarity is absolute, any rejection of which is dismissed “obscure” and “convoluted” (16-17), which in fact is the means to “reinforcing the social power of language” that deems outsider ideas superfluous (17); all existing things are subjugated to logical formalism, which “…is bought with the obedient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand” (20); and finally, reason is reduced to be merely “an aid to the all-encompassing economic compass [and] a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools” which adheres only to function and serves only self-preservation (23), and ultimately differences are eliminated with “human actions and desires” treated the same as “lines, planes and bodies” (67). For Adorno (and Horkheimer), all these eventually has led to calamitous German faschism in which “…even injustice, hatred and destruction become merely operation…” (81).
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno identifies another imminent hazard of theory, a kind of “alienated philosophy”, which under the encroachment of positivist science and “analytical philosophy”, compels philosophy to become a special science (4 and 29-30) like physics or chemistry. This technicalised philosophy is only mastered by its specialists, which necessarily turns philosophy into a kind of “elitist and undemocratic” privilege in the hands of the few who acquires “a specific talent” (Adorno 40-41), which for Adorno, in effect is mediated by the specialists’ “class relationship” (42). With it, the subject’s experience is “tabooed as allegedly merely subjective” (Adorno 44) and resigned to the language and words which ideaology chooses to encompass our various and distinctive experience (Adorno 52). Under this trend, the only way to survive the “enlightened society” is to become “engineers and managers”, that is to say specialists, with any other career direction under constant threat of social denial (Adorno 117).
Having witnessed Adorno’s request to rescue reason and philosophy from their respective alienation, one is compelled to understand what kind of reason and philosophy is legitimate for Adorno in replacement of their respective alienated statuses. The direct clue is found in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944):
Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification and calculation but precisely in the determining [negation] of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such negation, mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. (emphasis mine) (Adorno 20)
In this quote, Adorno clearly advocates the fostering of a kind of “negation” to release thought that is constrained “at mere immediacy” (20). Therefore , I resort to Negative Dialectics (1966) to uncover what this “negation” (Adorno 20) refers to.
However, I should at first admit that negative dialectics, as Adorno himself admits, aims not at building a systematic philosophical theory, but its opposite, or in Adorno’s words an “anti-system” (20) whose elements are scattered around the different small sections of the book. As I try to piece together these scattered elements to approach at least my interpretation of negative dialectics, Adorno’s original intention of not forming a philosophical system is admittedly violated. However, in order to reveal the relevance between Adorno’s dialectic and his conceptualisation of praxis, I decide to make this concession.
Negative dialectics seeks to reject the truth of identity, because concepts which thoughts seek to identify objects with, “…[do] not exhaust the thing exhausted” (Adorno 5). The “irrevocability” of identity between objects and their concepts is not demanded by the objects themselves, but “…[it has] come under certain conditions” (Adorno 52). In effect, the assumed “irrevocability” is an illusion produced by concepts of language “from outside” the objects (Adorno 145), is therefore unstable (Adorno 52-53) for achieving the task of identifying the objects (“[t]he concept of entity pure and simple is the mere shadow of the false concept of Being” (Adorno 138)), and eventually produces contradictions among different concept-object identities which all claim the ultimate truth to the object. In the end, these contradictions are rejected by identity thinking itself due to the law of non-contradiction (Adorno 5). However, negative dialectics does not reject contradiction but “think in contradictions, for the sake of contraditions once experienced in the [objects], and [eventually] against that contradiction” (Adorno 145). The irrationality of identity thinking is most conspicuously revealed in these irresolvable contradictions.
Unlike identity thinking populated among traditional philosophies, “[i]t is the [objects], not the organising drive of thought, that bring…us to [negative] dialectics” (Adorno 144); “[negative dialectics] seeks to say what something is, while identity thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself” (Adorno 149). Such “thinking led by objects themselves” is to constantly negate what concepts deem affirmative, leaving virtually only one positive side, i.e. the criticism of identity thinking (Adorno 158-159), which necessarily leads the cognition of objects to a “constellation” that restores “…what the concept has cut away within…” (Adorno 162).
Under the restoration of negative dialectics, a constant possibility of objects that is overlooked under the fixation of their concepts in identity thinking re-emerges that objects may develop into the opposites of their concepts with the courses of their self-transformation. This is what Adorno thinks eventually happened to the Enlightenment thinking:
If [Enlightenment] voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the service of an existing order, it involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it has espoused into something negative and destructive. (15)
In specific, Englightenment’s urge to use people’s own rationality in replacement of that of their guardians, something at the start of good intent and virtue, has given rise to the supremacy of “calculability-and-utility”-centered rationality (Adorno 3) and a tremendous fear for anything left outside its realm (Adorno 11), which in turn germinates barbarism in complicity with commodity economy and capitalist production (Adorno 25) that culminates in German faschism due to the idolisation of the alienated rationality (Adorno 92). As is said, Adorno thinks that this trend was also happening to the Student Movement.
If with the encroachment of positivist science and “analytical philosophy”, Adorno believes that the younger generation was becoming increasingly less critical, the imminent question for Adorno was to restore dialectical and critical thinking (arguably most effectively by education, considering Adorno’s career as a university instructor), which I argue is what Adorno means by praxis:
By subjecting everything particular to its discipline, it left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human beings. But [true praxis] capable of overturning the status quo depends on [theory’s refusal (in other words, “negation”)] to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify. (emphasis and addition mine) (33, similarly 202)
Such “negation” defends ourselves against the encroachment of ideaologies into our consciousness (Adorno 17 and 148; Buck-Morss 36) and allows us to return to the original appeal of the Englightenment thinking (in Adorno’s words, “the emancipation of individuality”), i.e. to use “free and autonomous” (Adorno 270; Adorno 274; Adorno and Tiedemann 120) people’s own rationality rather than blindly listening to our “guardians” and the powerful, which for Adorno has been subjected to “the compulsion of the system” (42). Such negation should be advocated because “[a] dissenter’s exact imagination can see more than a thousand eyes peering through the same pink spectacles…” (Adorno 46).
My interpretation of Adorno’s praxis is in line with his other statements concerning praxis: in an interchange with Horkheimer in 1956, Adorno claimed that “[t]heory is already praxis…[T]here is something deluded about the separation of theory and practice. Separating these two elements is actually ideaology” (107). According to my interpretation, Adorno’s praxis is to revive dialectical and critical thinking, praxis and building critical theories are therefore essentially the same for him, which is further for him in itself is politically relevant (“Resignation”).
In the same interchange, Adorno also explained to Horkheimer that “[w]hat makes theory more than a mere instrument of practice is the fact it [reflects on itself], and in doing so it rescinds itself as mere theory” (76). This quote shows that critique in Adorno’s praxis is perpetual, always with the next theory criticising the former one (reminiscent of the title of Karl Marx’s The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism (1844) (IFS is later considered as a branch of neo-Marxism)), which is also consistent with the claim that the only positive side in negative dialectics is perpetual negation (Adorno 158-159).
According to my interpretation of Adorno’s praxis, Adorno’s praxis refers to building critical theories that constantly criticises the theories before them. This conceptualisation of praxis, underlain by his negative dialectics, which in rejection of concept-object identity and admittance of contradictions inherent in objects themselves, aims at restoring the “constellations” (Adorno 158-159) that revive what is cut back by identity thinking, is proven to be consistent with his other claims concerning praxis. Therefore, the students accused Adorno wrong because praxis for the students means active political engagement. Besides, one of the possibility that is trimmed out by identity thinking is that objects tend to transform to the opposites of what their concepts suggest them, which at least for Adorno is not only how the Enlightenment thinking had transformed itself eventually into horrific faschism, but also how the Student Movement might end with the opposites of their initial good intents. Thus seen, his stance towards the Student Movement is also consistent with his conceptualisation of praxis.
Work Cited
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