The Inheritance of Weber and the Reception

of Lukács in Adorno’s Thought*

Michael J. Thompson

Introduction

One of the most distinctive problems to be investigated by the Frankfurt School was the way that

modern forms of reason and rationality had been transformed into vehicles for a highly efficient

and totalizing form of social domination. What they saw as particularly important was the

different ways that modern rationality was braided with new institutional forms of life that had

come to pervade mass society. Capitalism was shifting from a social form that emphasized a

crude, nineteenth-century form of industrial production to one of relative affluence based on

mass consumption. Even more, as bureaucratic forms of control and efficiency began to spread,

so too did the consciousness of subjects begin to reify and new forms of detachment from ethical

agency rooted in the eighteenth-century model of rational self-reflection and autonomy were

taking root. There is perhaps little question that today we can only see this problem increasing in

its effects and consequences. The extent to which mass, consumer society is capable of inflicting

a moral atrophy on its members is stunning. The collapse of critical autonomy as a fulcrum for

critical democratic politics is a central pathology of such societies, and because of this, Adorno’s

diagnosis of this problem remains salient for us as well.

For Adorno, the task of addressing this problem of the total reification of self and society

would be one of the most persistent themes in his development as a critical theorist. Perhaps one

of the richest strains of Adorno’s thought concerns the relationship between rationality,

*
Forthcoming in Peter Gorder, Espen Hammer and Max Pensky (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to
Adorno. (Oxford: Blackwell: forthcoming).

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consciousness and power. He reworked in creative and important ways the problematic of

rationalization and social power that was laid out by Max Weber and Georg Lukács, both of

whom were deeply influential on him in his youth. He advanced the thesis that the only real way

to escape the iron cage of modernity and the reificatory powers of capitalism is through a new

style of cognition that will be able to resist the pressures and absorption of the individual and

consciousness into the false forms of thought and reality that capitalism exudes. I think what

makes Adorno’s ideas distinctive can be explained by the way that he reworks the powerful

theoretical ideas of both Weber and Lukács – specifically their theories of the rationalization of

society and the ways that this shapes and affects individual consciousness. Adorno’s solution to

this problem is unique, even as it operates within the Hegelian-Marxist framework that makes

critical theory distinctive.

What I would like to do in this essay is trace Adorno’s reception of these ideas about

modern rationality as they were impressed on him by the work of Weber and Lukács. Adorno

develops his own distinctive understanding of western rationalism and reification – the two core

ideas that those two thinkers developed respectively. But in so doing, he also shaped a

diagnostic theory about the nature of late capitalist society as well as the kinds of resistance that

were necessary to contest it. The thesis I will present here is that Adorno is able to provide a

sophisticated diagnosis of the effects of administrative, consumer capitalism on the practical

rationality of modern subjects. Adorno is right to point to the ways that capitalist modernity

fragments, alienates and reifies modern subjectivity and co-opts agency for broader systemic

imperatives. But even though this is the case, his own solution lies in a new theory of critical

subjectivity that undermines the social and praxiological dimensions of political action and

reflection. Adorno’s latent Kantianism ends up returning to structure his ideas despite his deep

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commitment to Hegelianism. In the end, although Adorno’s ideas are deeply informed by the

problematic of subjective practical agency that Weber and Lukács saw as definitive of the

modern age, his is response is closer to Weber than Lukács.

Weber and Lukács on Instrumental Rationality and Reification

Both Weber and Lukács share a sense that modern rationality has deformative effects on the

personality of subjects as well as their capacities for moral reflection and agency. For Weber,

modernity possessed contained within it the potential for the emergence of an authentic kind of

modernity where each individual would be able to articulate his or her own sense of meaning. In

this sense, the self-reliant ethical personality (Persönlichkeit) was “an individual who acted on

purely individual values transcending sensuous existence” (Liebersohn 1988: 79). This was

occurring within the context of a distinctive shift in western rationalism that Weber saw as

effecting change in three different spheres of rationality. First was the emergence of “formal

rationality” which was a move away from substantive communal values and toward a system of

rules and law that was impersonal. Law, economy and state now operated under conditions that

that were based on universally applicable rules, irrespective of the person concerned. Next was

“practical rationality” where individuals now bring to bear forms of means-ends rationality to

solve the problems they face in the modern world. Last is “theoretical rationality” based on a

move in modern science toward rigorous experiment, the search for explanatory mechanisms,

and an exclusive focus on empirical reality for evidence.

All three of these ideal types of modern western rationalism identify a shift away from

substantive values and toward a more formalized conception of reason. Modernity was therefore

also evincing a series of developmental trends toward a new form of social cohesion that was

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based on an increasingly rationalized form of power and legitimacy. Modern forms of power

were no longer based on force or coercion (Macht) but on the premise of legal-rational forms of

authority or domination (Herrschaft) where members of a “structure of domination” or legal

order see its validity as a means to fostering expedient means to achieve some end. Hence, we

see the emergence of what critical theorists would term instrumental rationality (instrumentelle

Vernunft), or what Weber called “goal-oriented rationality,” (Zweckrationalität) where attempts

by individuals to utilize their own forms of rational reflection that do not incorporate the system

of legal-rational rules becomes marginalized. As Darrow Schecter has argued, Weber “suggests

that the rationalization process in the West culminates in strategically rational religion,

contractually rational exchange and hierarchically rational command. It is a form of

rationalization that manages to decouple reason from critique to such an extent that the ideal of

substantively rational legitimacy becomes increasingly chimerical” (Schecter 2010: 31).

Modern forms of law therefore constitute a nexus of rules and regulations that are

abstract and established intentionally by persons (cf. Weber 1972a: 122ff). But this system of

abstract rules is in tension with the individual’s search for substantive values that can ground his

autonomy as the system becomes increasingly permeated by strategic rationality (see Schluchter

1981: 107ff). An “iron cage” of modern society begins to emerge when, although liberated from

the traditional forms of belief, morality and political domination, individuals are thrown into a

heteronomous sphere of action and rules toward which rational obedience is expected and is in

many ways internalized as legitimate in nature. Weber’s view is ultimately tragic in that his own

ethical aspirations for an authentic modernity wither as the narrowing of the individual’s powers

of practical reason and a new form of conformism – of what he refers to as “stereotyping” – sets

in. As a result, the scope of the subject’s powers to shape his own life diminishes as the social

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nexus of formal rules and norms increases in its formal-rational powers (cf. Weber 1972a:

439ff). Weber’s tragic vision of the “iron cage” of modernity is itself reflected in the concern

that critical theorists had in the problem of the “administered world” of modern capitalism (see

Greisman and Ritzer 1981 as well as Mitzman 1984).

The young Lukács was also deeply impacted by this tragic vision of modernity. As a

student of both Weber and Georg Simmel, his youthful writings are replete with a tragic vision

of modern culture where the individual confronts a world that has lost cohesive forms of

meaning and purpose. After his turn to Marxism, Lukács takes the problem of instrumental

reason and the deformation of individual consciousness to a different level in his theory of

reification. Weber had recognized the problem of the spread of formal rationality throughout

modern society and its negative effects on the individual’s practical reason. Simmel, too, had

seen the impact of the separation between what he termed “subjective” and “objective” culture.

Where the former represented the capacities and products that any given individual possessed or

could cultivate, the latter concept referred to the shared communal products of the society as a

whole. As societies modernized, however, objective culture begins to expand and to overwhelm

the individual. Objective culture now begins to grow at the expense of subjective culture and

result is a kind of alienation of the modern self from his own powers.

Lukács’s thesis is that the commodity form under capitalism needs to be seen as the

central concept that both Weber and Simmel had missed. For Lukács, the commodity form

begins to shape the consciousness of individuals and they begin to take on thing-like

characteristics. This he derives from Marx’s theory of the commodity form and its capacity to

impinge its logic onto human activities. For Marx, the commodity form under capitalism hides

from consciousness the practical activities and relations that constitute it from consciousness.

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Lukács took from Weber, even after his turn to Marxism, the idea that a formal rationality was

being imposed on subjects (see Dannemann 1987: 83ff). But he sees it historically as the

product of a totalizing system of commodity production and consumption, as situated by the

logic of the productive forces of capitalist society. The problem that reification diagnoses is that

defective form of consciousness and cognition that is unable to reconcile subject and object. It is

a mode of consciousness that is blocked from conceiving the true nature of the social world: one

where collective human praxis (labor) is the fundamentally constitutive process of all social life.

Reification hides this from view by saturating consciousness with the fetish character of the

commodity form. We see the social world in immediate terms – in terms based on means-ends

rationality rather than in terms of the totality. Reification renders the object of consciousness as

a mere “thing” (Ding) which, in Kantian terms, implies that consciousness is no longer able to

render it as a proper object of cognition. Instrumental reason, quantification of the lifeworld

through regimentation of time structured by the work day, and the fetish character of the world

of commodity production all have the collective impact of reifying consciousness and

undermining the potential for radical political agency.

Unlike Weber and Simmel, however, the Lukács of 1923 argues that the problem of

reification can be overcome. Indeed, for Lukács, the central problem for Weber and Simmel,

what disabled them from being able to solve the problem of the tragic vision of modernity, was

that they were unable to locate an agent of transformation. For Lukács, this falls to the

proletariat: that force within modern society that remains the creative, reproductive energy that

creates and maintains the modern world. Once workers were able to grasp their historical role in

consciousness, then they would see themselves as the “subject-object of history”; they would, in

short, come to see themselves as the active agents of society and of history and leave behind their

6
defective view of themselves as mere aspects of the system of the capitalist production process.

The social whole would thereby be un-inverted, and a new sociality established. Reification

therefore undermines the capacity of participants within the capitalist system to know the system

of which they are constitutive members. Reification was therefore a product of the kind of

formal rationality that was impressed on subjective consciousness, but a formal rationality that

was embedded in the nature of commodity production. The quantification of time, the rational

mechanization, the isolation of workers from their product, and so on, all entail a reflex in

consciousness that turns our self-understanding from being active, cooperative social beings, to

atomized, reified beings: “This atomization of the individual is therefore only the reflex of

consciousness of this: that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover

every manifestation of life in society” (Lukács 1923: 103).

Reification therefore emerges, for Lukács, as a critical category insofar as it “becomes

the basis for a critique of capitalist rationality as a worldview and a system logic threatened by

its inability to grasp the material substratum of its own formalistic categories and institutional

structures” (Feenberg 2014: 69). The formal rationality of Weber is now turned into the

“rational objectification” (rationell Objektivierung) of all things. The commodity form therefore

hides the use-value of things beneath the cover of exchange value – commodities therefore

acquire a “new objectivity” (cf. Lukács 1923: 104ff). Lukács’s thesis is therefore that the

commodity form not only hides its practical constitution from view, it also generates false

categories for the apprehension of society and social phenomena as a whole. In this sense, the

radicalness of his thesis of reification is that it shows itself to be the result of a conceptual

scheme that is generated by the commodity form and its power to subjugate use-values by

exchange values and thereby push the cognition of subjects from a dialectical to an analytical

7
mode of thought and consciousness. Capitalism therefore generates categories that allow it to

persist as an objective entity or “thing” that operates external to its participants.

In many ways, Adorno’s most provocative ideas really stem from a reaction to both of

these ideas by Weber and Lukács. From Weber, he holds to the thesis of rationalization of

society and the permeation of all domains of life by a means-ends rationality. From Lukács, he

takes the thesis of reification seriously, but departs significantly from Lukács’ own argument by

seeing the process of reification as too totalizing to allow for a collective subject to emerge to

overcome capitalism (cf. Dahms 1997). For Adorno, the process of reification is far too

extensive and far too embracing to be overcome through an “expressive totality.” A new, more

pernicious theory about the totality now emerges as one that is an almost total process. The only

way out will become a reconstruction of critical subjectivity, and this will require a critical re-

thinking of the properties and powers of reason itself.

Adorno’s Critique of the Enlightenment

As I have said, many of Adorno’s critical ideas about modernity and the regress of modern

culture develop within the context of the theories put forward by Weber and Lukács. He sees as

one of the great pathologies of the modern age the dilemma of the individual. Adorno shares a

similar concern with the problem of instrumental reason with Weber and Lukács, but his

differences with both thinkers makes his own ideas distinct. For Adorno, the problem with

modern forms of rationality was their embeddedness in the social formation of capitalism which

consists of the emergence of a false forms of life generated by the production of exchange value.

This is an important point since, for Adorno, the origins of his critique of Enlightenment reason

should be read in the context of his reading of Marx’s critical theory of society more generally

8
and his theory of value more specifically. Marx’s theory of value holds that under capitalism,

the use-values of objects take on a new form, that of exchange value generated by the logic of

market exchange. As capitalism as a mode of production widens its influence, people come to

see the world around them constituted by exchange values, by the quantified values that market

exchanges place on them rather than their use for human life. In this sense, Adorno sees a

crucial overlap between Weber’s thesis about the rationalization of society on the one hand and

the spread of exchange value on the other. Both are two faces of the self-same process of

Enlightenment rationalization.

Adorno and Horkheimer therefore seek, as Weber had before them, an enlightened,

rational confrontation with this kind of modernity. But what they insightfully point to – and

what Adorno will continue to develop as one of his core critiques of modernity – is the way that

modern reason has taken the form of a technical, instrumental kind of rationality. What the

Enlightenment sought and was successful in providing was a form of knowledge where

“technology” (Technik) is central. This has roots in Adorno’s own reading of Weberian and

Marxian ideas. From Weber the idea of a formal rationality that emphasized goal-oriented

activity or goal-oriented rationality (Zweckrationalität) is turned into a more insidious form of

social rationality that serves increasingly as the basis of all other forms of social rationality. One

reason for this is the spread of technology, but also the displacement of use value by that of

exchange value and its capacity to radiate a “means-ends rationality” (Zweck-Mittel-Denken) that

permeates all aspects of society, culture, and the self. From Marx’s distinction between use

value and exchange value Adorno and Horkheimer take up the thesis that all forms of value – not

only economic, but aesthetic, moral, and so on – embody the logic of exchange value. The idea

here is that all that was once substantive, qualitative, different and human is becoming forma,

9
quantitative, standardized and inhumane. Enlightenment reason was responsible for a shift in

reason itself, and the standardization of instrumental reason (instrumentelle Vernunft) enables a

new form of administrative society where power over nature and objects is equally power over

people. In this sense, “technology is equally available, useful, and manipulable by businessmen

and politicians, by all those in positions of power” (Kracauer 1998: 21 and passim).

In this sense, Adorno and Horkheimer are extending the ideas of Weber into a much

broader domain than Marx or Lukács. They posit that this form of rationality is such that it is not

only formal and not only used for the purposes of economic exploitation. It is a form of

rationality that penetrates all forms of life, that reorders the social totality into a totally

administered world. They do not, therefore, cynically fold enlightened reason into instrumental

reason, as Jürgen Habermas has suggested (Habermas 1987). Rather, the project now becomes,

for Adorno particularly, to chart a form of critical consciousness that will negate the formal

rationality of this world. A form of critical reason that will enable the subject to dissolve the

universalizing rationality of technical reason is now the aim of critical subjectivity. An emphasis

on the qualitative over the quantitative; of the dissonant over the harmonious; of what is different

as opposed to that which conforms – all of this will now become the field for Adorno’s critical

theory. This attempt to construct a theory of subjectivity that will be resistant to the totalizing

forces of the administered society represents a different response than Lukács insofar as it is

circumscribed by subjectivity itself. For Adorno, there is no praxiological way out of this

dilemma, what must serve as the prius to any such political consideration is the formulation of a

resistant subjectivity that can stave off the condition of total reification.

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Consciousness and Reification: The Negative Dialectic

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a dramatic expression of a more totalizing, administered form of

society, culture and consciousness that Adorno would seek to confront both in terms of a

negative form of cognition as well as a new theory of aesthetics and aesthetic experience.

Adorno seems to have had a penchant for Kant and his emphasis on subject’s capacity to critique

and in many ways, to resist metaphysical ideas. Kant’s project was, in large part, a critical

response to the weighty tradition of western metaphysics and its attempts to serve as a

foundation for knowledge. Kant’s essential move toward epistemic concerns and the nature of

subjectivity serve as a kind of distant mirror for Adorno’s twentieth-century philosophical

project. As Hauke Brunkhorst points out: “Adorno’s step away from Hegel’s speculative

understanding of dialectics is a step back to Kant; just a step, not a return to some sort of neo-

Kantianism” (Brunkhorst 1999: 23). Essentially, Adorno is convinced that reification has

penetrated so deeply into the structures of capitalist society that the culture and the framework

for modern forms of agency have been corrupted. The fear now is not a theory of reification as

Lukács had theorized. Whereas for Lukács reification was a kind of blockage that could be

removed by an actual historical agent (the proletariat) once the subject and object of class

struggle had been reconciled, Adorno’s view of reification is much more extensive and

totalizing. For him, reification is not something we can overcome via proletarian agency, but

had to be combatted from within – from within the consciousness and cognition of the subject

itself.

Indeed, the basic idea that Adorno shares with Weber is this antithesis between the

modern subject and the “administered world” of late capitalism. Whereas Weber saw the

problem of an “iron cage” and a withering of the individual, Adorno, too, sees that the

11
administered world absorbs the subject into its conceptual schemes thereby colonizing critical

reflection and reason. This begins with the impact that administered forms of rationalism have

had on consciousness. The central principles here seems to be Kantian rather than Hegelian: that

of a kind of heteronomous relation exists between the administered world and subjective

consciousness. This cannot be overcome through a reconciliation with subject and object, but

rather can only be combatted by a new way of relating subject and object. Since the subject is so

deeply socialized by the formal rationality of the administered world, any attempt to cognize that

world by using the conceptual schemes of that world will necessarily lead us to reaffirm it rather

than critique it.

For Adorno, reification is more total than it is for Lukács – it is perhaps as total as formal

rationality was for Weber. Adorno sticks to a Marxian understanding of this totalization as the

totalizing force of exchange and the commodity form. This has the effect, in modern society, of

serving as the foundation for our self- and other-conceptions. It has the power to constitute the

very form and content of all thought as he argues in his essay “On Subject and Object”: “Since

the prevailing structure of society is the exchange form, its rationality constitutes people; what

they are for themselves, what they seem to be to themselves, is secondary. They are transformed

by a mechanism that has been philosophically transformed as transcendental” (Adorno 1997a:

745). Here Adorno brings his concern with the dominance of formal rationality and its capacity

to conform consciousness to its own logic to the front of his concern. The philosophical

dilemma is that – as Lukács had pointed out in the second section of his essay on reification – the

very categories generated by bourgeois philosophy are the categories that merely reflect back to

consciousness the logic of the prevailing reality.

12
 Consciousness is therefore reified in Adorno’s sense once the system of the administered

world has been able to restructure itself as the categorial reflex of consciousness itself. Hence, as

Gilian Rose has observed: “To say that consciousness is ‘completely reified’ is to say that it is

capable only of knowing the appearance of society, of describing institutions and behavior as if

their current mode of functioning were an inherent and invariant characteristic or property, as if

they, as objects, ‘fulfill their concepts’” (Rose 1978: 48). Indeed, Adorno makes this clear in

Prisms when he writes: “Absolute reification which presupposed intellectual progress as one of

its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal

to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation” (Adorno 1997b: 30).

What is crucial here is that we see Adorno moving beyond Weber and Lukács even as he is using

their root ideas. What now becomes the central project is the rejection of the “false totality” that

is increasingly consuming the subject and its powers of resistance. Hegel’s thesis about the

dialectic of universal and particular now needs to be rethought. This is because the totality of a

modernity shaped by instrumental reason and exchange relations is decidedly irrational,

repressive and “evil” and, as a result Hegel’s philosophy of the universal cannot work in such a

context. As Adorno insightfully quips in his Three Studies on Hegel: “Totality becomes radical

evil in the total society” (Adorno 1971: 303).

Adorno therefore seeks to outline a new role for dialectics. At the core of this argument

is the thesis that the relation between subject and object must be recast as one where the subject

resists cognition from being absorbed by its reconciliation with the object. For Hegel, this was

the final phase of his basic theory of cognition. Dialectical thinking, for Hegel, was supposed to

end up with the “negation of the negation,” of the realization on behalf of consciousness that

what was true, what was rational was system, process. This was the speculative dimension of the

13
concept where thought would be able to participate in the rational structure that was constitutive

of reality. But Adorno’s thesis is that this is that the social totality, the totality of the

administered world, is a false truth that poses as truth as well as generates its own categories for

its own justification. The key problem here is more social-theoretical than philosophical. In

fact, philosophy – as it has come down to us at least – is unable to take into consideration this

false totality; it even has the penchant toward giving itself over to this false totality: “Philosophy

retains so much respect for systems that even that which confronts it does so as a system. The

administered world moves in this way. System is negative objectivity, not the positive subject”

(Adorno 1966: 29).

Rather than allow cognition to move to its speculative phase, pace Hegel, and thereby

become folded into the false universal of the instrumentalized world, consciousness must stay

suspended in the negative and resist the temptation toward reconciling thought with reality or the

identity of the concept with the object. To think in terms of negation means entails that we resist

the totalizing forces that the administered, instrumentally rational world impinges on us and our

thinking. Philosophy is not immune to such forces: “In its inalienably general elements all

philosophy carries, even that which intends freedom, the unfreedom in which society sustains

itself” (Adorno 1966: 54). Again, it is important to keep in mind that Adorno’s thesis is just as

much sociological as it is philosophical: he is arguing that, as Lukács had before him, the

conceptual schemes that we use are themselves produced by the social system itself. Hence,

Adorno urges, at the beginning of his Negative Dialectics, for us to see through the falseness of

the social reality present to us: “The power of the existing reality erects façades off of which

consciousness bounces. It must strive to beat its way through them. This alone would liberate

the postulate of depth from ideology” (Adorno 1966: 27).

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 But what would this look like, this kind of thinking that would enable us to crack through

the edifice or façade of total reification? Adorno proposes that negative dialectics will allow us

to free concepts from the reified manifold of the administered totality. This must be done not via

a retreat into metaphysics, but a synthesis of metaphysics and materialism (cf. Bozzetti 2002;

Bronner 1994). What is required is a confrontation with the object-domain that can grant us

some metaphysical experience of that domain that is not already determined by the prevailing

conceptual manifold of a defective social totality. What is required is immanent critique. We

can overcome the totality of reification only by asking how the relation between particular and

universal do not fit together, how neither does justice to the other. To resist identity-thinking is

therefore the key. This means exploding the quantifying tendency of formal rationality that has

the capacity to cover all particulars with a false universal: “The opposition of thought to what is

heterogeneous reproduces itself in thought as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal critique of

universal and particular, identifying acts, judging them as to whether the concept does justice to

what it deals with, and whether the particular fulfills its concept, are the media of thinking about

the non-identity of particular and concept” (Adorno 1966: 147).

What need to be looked for is not an attack on reason, but rather a conception of

rationality that brings into view what the quantifying force of scientific reason has hidden. The

qualitative therefore emerges as a layer of our concepts that needs to be retrieved. As he argues

in Negative Dialectics: “To give oneself over to the object (Objekt) means to do justice to its

qualitative moments. Scientific objectification tends, at one with the quantifying tendency of all

science since Descartes, to negate qualities and to transform them into measureable

determinations” (Adorno 1966: 51). The qualitative, which has been robbed from the world by

formal rationality and become reified, can only be emancipated from those reifying powers by

15
retrieving those aspects of the object that escape the formal universalizing of the socially-

generated concept. But this does not mean doing away with concepts, it means to do away with

the kind of concepts that are embedded in the formal rationality that pervades the administered

world. Since this world also administers to us the conceptual manifold within which we

experience and “cognize” objects, it essentially fools us into thinking that what is particular is

universal. Hence, the concepts we use are really not rational in the proper sense, they instead

express and justify the particular interests of those in power, those that regulate and administer

the world. (cf. Cook 2007: 163ff).

Now Adorno’s project for a negative dialectics can be seen as an original solution to the

problems posed by Weber and Lukács. For now, Adorno proposes a dual solution both to

Weber’s dilemma of the loss of Persönlichkeit, or the possibility for autonomy within the “iron

cage” of modernity, as well as an alternative to Lukács’ thesis of the expressive totality of the

collective agency of the proletariat. A new, critical form of agency is therefore retrieved to

satisfy the Weberian challenge, and reification can be countered without the need for a collective

subject. Adorno’s solution is therefore to employ the negative dialectic to negate the capacity of

formalized concepts to cover what should otherwise be seen correctly as a world of difference,

quality, and use value, a world that is essentially human, produced and valued by us. “Adornian

critical theory,” writes Espen Hammer, “seeks to criticize claims to immediacy or objectivity that

in effect screen their actual social and historical mediation” (Hammer 2006: 36). The negative

dialectic poses for us the capacity to peer into the intrinsic potential within objects that is ignored

or concealed from view by the prevailing conceptual field. Reified objects can disclose their

potential for us once we adopt “an orientation towards the unrealized, emphatic possibilities that

inhere in damaged life” (Cook 2007: 171).

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 The negative is therefore related to the potential for emancipation. Hegel is seen as the

thinker who begins philosophy’s capacity to turn against the bias of the Enlightenment, but not

as an anti-Enlightenment thinkers, but rather as professing a form of reason that is critical of

reason’s own cooptation by formal, quantifying, dominating reason. With Hegel, Adorno

argues:

philosophy turns with its whole armature of self-reflection on the theory of

science, to the task of giving cogent expression to something that is
perceived as central in reality but slips through the meshes of the
individual disciplines. . . . [R]ather than restrict himself to a propaedeutic
examination of the possibilities of epistemology, he led philosophy to
essential insights through critical self-reflection of critical-Enlightenment
philosophy and the scientific method. Trained in science and using its
methods, Hegel went beyond the limits of a science that merely discovered
an arranged data, a science that aimed at the processing of materials, the
kind of science that predominated before Hegel and then again after him,
when thought lost the inordinate span of its self-reflection. His philosophy
is at the same time a philosophy of reason and an antipositivist philosophy
(Adorno 1971: 305).

Adorno now shows that he is not railing against reason per se, but rather the form of reason that

Weber had feared was conquering western thought: formal, instrumental rationality. Critical

reason now must engender the ability to undermine the conceptual manifold generated by the

false totality, that is, by the administered world that reifies the subject and the concepts used by

that subject to move through the world. Cognition must be empowered by the dialectic, but not

to undermine reason itself, the true aim is to enable a critical reason that can erode the powers of

the false forms of reason that allows for the domination of man and of nature. In this sense

Adorno’s differences with Weber and Lukács seem to fade for a moment, and he is in line with a

general project to ward off the defective forms of rationality that sanction social domination.

Aesthetic Experience as Subjective Force-Field

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The negative dialectic is therefore one means by which a critical form of subjectivity can be

maintained. The danger, again, was that the totalizing forces of modernity would be able to

absorb and to control the individual; that reification would become total and suppress any

capacity for emancipation. But a critical subjectivity can be shaped that is oriented against this

administered world. Adorno employs the concept of the “force-field” (Kraftfeld) in order to

express this idea where the formalism of the quantified ratio is resisted from absorbing

consciousness and its experience of the object domain. In critical cognition, by following the

negative dialectic, one would be able to critique and resist the tendency of being reconciled to

the formal rationality of the administered world (Tar 1977: 153ff). But Adorno also argues that

aesthetic experience is one place where the relation of the concept, of the universal to the

particular, that is to be staved off in negative dialectical thinking can be maintained:

If anywhere Hegel’s theory of the movement of the concept is correct, it is

in aesthetics; it has to do with the reciprocal relation of universal and
particular, which does not impute the universal to the particular externally
but seeks it in the force fields (Kraftzentren) of the particular itself
(Adorno 1972: 521).

Adorno, not unlike Weber and Lukács as well, saw aesthetic experience as one of the

core means by which the rationalizing pressures of modernity could be resisted. Adorno is much

more in agreement with Weber’s views on aesthetics, however, than those of Lukács. Where

Lukács saw realism as the antidote to reification through its capacity to allow the subject to

perceive the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, thereby shattering the illusions of bourgeois

culture (cf. Thompson 2014), Adorno saw aesthetic experience as an expression of the

spontaneous subject. “Indifference to shaping one’s life aesthetically,” Gerhard

Schweppenhäuser writes, “indicates only an inability to grasp things with libidinal spontaneity”

(Schweppenhäuser 2009: 69). This shares more with the concerns of Weber than that of Lukács.

18
For Lukács, the aesthetic of realism was to serve as a means by which a political aesthetics could

inform social cognition about the mechanisms behind the reified world of capitalist social forms.

The thesis was that non-realist art would only push aesthetic experience away from where the

subject’s attention ought to be focused: on the social forms that hide from view the causes and

processes of reified life.

Weber, on the other hand, saw the power of aesthetic experience as having the capacity to

link with the ecstatic feelings of love, of eros which could thereby serve to undermine the

preponderance of formal rationality. What Weber calls the “dullness of routine” (Stumpfheit des

Alltags) that emerges from the rationalized society could be combatted with the power of the

erotic and its irrational and ecstatic tendencies (Weber 1972b: 536ff). This implies a correlative

argument to what Adorno would later come to see as the standardization of the experience of the

administered world. What Weber and Adorno have in common here is a belief in the capacity of

aesthetic experience to undermine the cohesiveness of exchange relations and the capacity to put

the subject back into connection with aspects of his nature that have been repressed (cf. Müller-

Jentsch 2017). But even more, for Adorno it must serve a function that is more Marxian: it must

reveal the social processes that generate art’s experience, it must, in other words, possess “social

content” and undermine the fetish character of a commodified world that conceals its human

content (Hohendahl 1995: 149ff). Both Weber and Adorno saw that the production of artworks

were becoming increasingly shaped by the impulse of rationalization, particularly in musical

production (Paddison 1993: 135ff). Hence Adorno’s insistence that the culture industry can steal

from us one of the last vestiges of the capacity of art to mediate the social world since it replaces

true art’s function of mediation with an immediate experience of the standardized and

commodified world. Hence Adorno’s insistence on his critique of jazz, which he sees as a highly

19
standardized form of musical production masking as spontaneous expression (Thompson 2010).

What ultimately matters here is that, in the end, Adorno sees art as possessing a cognitive

function: its capacity to mediate reality is contained in its formal structure and this formal

structure determines its status as either critical or affirmative of the prevailing social reality.

True art, good art, has, as Kurt Lenk has argued, a “capacity to generate experiences not yet

regulated by the system of the administered world and to give them language. Art’s task, as it

were, is to rescue once again what is totally lacking in the standardizing, conceptually fixed

social thinking that endlessly reproduces things as they are” (Lenk 1978: 64).

But what is lost here is a link between the aesthetic and the practical. Indeed, Adorno’s

Hegelianism notwithstanding, there is a strong Kantian remnant in his thinking and orientation.

Lukács’ insistence on an aesthetic of realism was never meant as an advocacy of some crude

socialist realism, despite Adorno’s own criticism to that effect (Adorno 1997c). Rather, it was

meant to highlight a political-educative function of art. Lukács’ difference with Adorno is a

crucial one since it brings to the fore the question of the purpose of critical theory more

generally. Lukács argues that the purpose of art is to serve a moral- and politically-educative

function by showing how the mechanisms of society function. The more realist a work of art is,

the more it is able to possess a cognitive function in terms of its capacity to elucidate for the

subject a rational comprehension of the forces operating behind the reified world of appearance.

Realism achieves this aim because of its ability to force the subject out of his own experience,

which has been racked by reification, and into an objective domain where judgment can be

presented. This is because Lukács’ theory of reification possesses within it the possibility for a

situated form of knowledge to shatter it given its latent phenomenological dimensions (cf.

Westerman 2010). For Lukács this is a form of judgment that is ultimately political in that it

20
constantly seeks to bring us to some political consciousness, some form of cognitive awareness

that can generate political agency (Thompson 2014).

Since Adorno, as we have seen, believes that the problem of reification is more

generalized that Lukács does, he insists that it is only via an aesthetic that can highlight the

purposelessness of art that a critical subjectivity can be shaped and sustained. The more it can

shatter the means-ends form of rationality – the very substance of reification itself – the more it

will be able to provide “truth-content” (Warheitsgehalt) that is socially relevant. Beauty is now

seen as the ability of the artwork to counter the world of function: “Beauty is the exodus of what

has objectified itself in the instrumental world (Reich der Zwecke) . . . . Speaking dialectically,

the purposefulness of artworks is a critique of the practical positing of ends” (Adorno 1972:

428). It hold out for us not an anticipatory experience that prefigures a free world, as it does for

Ernst Bloch, but rather an exercise of that capacity that stands outside the exchange-form as well

as instrumentality. “Artworks are the placeholders of things no longer disfigured by the barter

process, of that which is not injured by the profit motive and the false needs of a devalued

humanity.” But the artwork retains its political potential only if it is able to organize its content

in a form that is able to withstand and especially transgress formalism and instrumentality: “An

emancipated society would be beyond the irrationality of its faux frais and beyond the means-

ends rationality of usefulness. That is encoded in art and is its social warhead” (Adorno 1972:

338). Hence, the question raised in Negative Dialectics as to whether an experience outside of

instrumental rationality is still possible is given its definitive answer in Adorno’s aesthetics (cf.

Bronner 1994: 180ff).

The Transformation of Critique

21
But is the answer at which Adorno arrives a sufficient one? The relevant question that must be

posed now is how successful Adorno’s critical project actually has been or can be to reconstitute

a critical-political subjectivity. There is little doubt that Adorno’s ideas possess deep power in

cognitive and aesthetic terms. But the fear remains, when we step back just for a moment, that

we may be re-creating the very kind of solipsism that Weber feared and which Lukács so

passionately resisted. In many ways, Martin Jay’s summary view of Adorno’s mature

philosophical position is a good starting point: “Because Adorno so fundamentally opposed the

apotheosis of labor and so persistently questioned a hypostatized collective subjectivity, his

notorious inability to find a real link between theory and practice must be understood as more

than merely a reflection of historical failures; it was, rather, built into his negative dialectics at its

most fundamental level” (Jay 1984: 271). I think this indicates a real problem for Adorno’s

transformation of critique since it provides us with a path to a contemplative rather than praxis-

oriented critical theory. In short, I want to suggest that Adorno’s philosophical project can be

made salient only if it is in fact merged with what he opposed: to a kind of practical-ontological

dialectic that Lukács espoused.

Adorno’s contribution toward a theory of critical subjectivity is powerful insofar as we

consider it from a contemplative point of view. That is to say, his theory lacks a core feature that

Lukács is able to retain: namely that the overcoming of reification is not merely cognitive, but is

embedded in practices themselves. The theory of reification and the solution that Lukács gives

in 1923 is not the same theory he holds to in his later work. Indeed, he says this explicitly in his

1967 preface. But what is shared by the young and old Lukács alike is that the status of the

object domain is a function of human praxis. That is to say, it is not only a cognitive constitution

of the object that is at issue, but a social-ontological constitution of the object domain that

22
requires our attention. Adorno’s limit here, as I see it, is his collapse into a cognitive and

aesthetic solipsism, one where one may indeed rage against the reified world, but without a reach

mechanism for social transformation. Only by merging Adorno’s and Lukács ideas about

“beating through” the horizon of reification can we glimpse a more praxis-oriented form of

critique.

What Lukács offers in his social-ontological thesis – one that is inherent even in 1923 – is

the Hegelian-Marxist idea that Idealism and materialism must be sublated into a critical social-

ontology. But from Adorno, we must also take the thesis that the aesthetic contemplation of

objects as well as an immanent critique of the object-domain that seeks metaphysical dimensions

of objects that are repressed by reified cognition serves as the moment where consciousness itself

becomes an act – but an act that is fleeting. This must not, however, stop at the negation, it must

proceed to what Lukács later sees as the social-ontological potential of human praxis to mediate

and alter the status of the object-domain. This cannot be done only contemplatively. The

realization must also be there that any qualitative meaning that the object possesses and that is

lost by the process of reification – something we can discern via the negative dialectic – is only

retrievable through a transformation of our practices. These practices, in turn, can themselves

only be transformed once the social-relational form that constitutes and orders those practices are

themselves transformed and altered (cf. my argument here with Feenberg 2014: 203ff). Linking

the cognitive-aesthetic with the practical and then the social-ontological levels of social reality

therefore can provide us with a critical theory that can link an immanent critique of

consciousness with a critique of the social forms that generate the damaged life of capitalist

modernity.

23
 Both Lukács and Adorno therefore possess elements of a critical theory of society that

can diagnose and overcome the pathologies of culture that Weber had pointed to and was

himself, ultimately, unable to solve. Adorno is right to emphasize the subject’s immanent

critique of received concepts as well as the power of art to encode within it the capacity to

experience the non-reified, alienated world. Adorno’s Hegelianism remains curiously

contemplative. But from Lukács we have the more Hegelian idea of a social metaphysics that

seeks to root both the diagnosis and overcoming of reified society with the need to transform the

social-relational nexus that constitutes social being. If we hold on too closely to Adorno’s

position we run the risk of falling into a passive, even inert form of negative thinking. But once

the negative dialectic that Adorno espouses comes to its moment of opening up new dimensions

of the object, then where are we?

It seems to me that Lukács’ emphasis on a critical social-ontology is one place to begin.

The reason for this is that the kind of opening that negative thinking creatures can be

supplemented with a form of praxis that sees the social-relational organization of social life as

the only means by which reality can be transformed. The social-ontological moment unites the

agentic and structural domains once it is grasped that the social-structural reality that generates

the defective conceptual manifold that negative thinking needs to explode is only maintained and

granted its ontological weight (i.e., its existence) by the preponderance of that very conceptual

manifold. Once we seek to re-organize the ontology of social relations, we can begin to grasp

the field of practice necessary for self- and social transformation. Indeed, what Andrew

Feenberg has insightfully called “transforming practice” (Feenberg 2014) can now be seen in a

more textured and political register: only subjects that have been able to dislodge themselves

24
from the powerful apparatus of the totally administered society make the first step toward a

transformation of self and society that is, in the end, the ultimate aim of critical theory.

25
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