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DOI: 10.1177/0191453706066977 2006; 32; 719 Philosophy Social Criticism

Deborah Cook Adornos critical materialism

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Deborah Cook

Adornos critical materialism

Abstract The article explores the character of Adornos materialism whilefleshing out his Marxist-inspired idea of natural history. Adorno offers anon-reductionist and non-dualistic account of the relationship betweenmatter and mind, human history and natural history. Emerging from natureand remaining tied to it, the human mind is nonetheless qualitativelydistinct from nature owing to its limited independence from it. Yet, just ashuman history is always also natural history, because human beings cannever completely dissociate themselves from the natural world, nature isinextricably entwined with human history. Owing to the entwinement ofmind and matter, humanity and nature, a version of dialectical material-ism can be found in Adornos work.

Key words body dialectics Hegel history idealism Marx materialism mind nature Timpanaro

The fallacy of constitutive subjectivity

In recent secondary literature, Theodor W. Adornos work has been vari-ously described as Nietzschean, Weberian, Hegelian, idealist, Marxist,and materialist.1 With equal frequency, commentators exclude Adornofrom one or the other of these camps. So, for example, Stephen Bronnerclaims that Adornos work has nothing at all to do with materialismunless that concept is configured in the most abstract terms.2 Indeed,some Italian Marxists have been far more critical than Bronner, excori-ating Adorno as a romantic idealist. This is certainly true of LucioColletti who, as Perry Anderson remarks, soundly denounced Adorno(and others as well) for his allegedly Hegelian rejection of materialism.3But Collettis charge reappears in a somewhat different form in Sebas-tiano Timpanaros influential On Materialism. Among other things,Timpanaro asserts that the Frankfurt School as a whole has an anti-materialist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-jacobin orientation; all the schools

PSCPHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 32 no 6 pp. 719737

Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453706066977


theorists are pessimist thinkers who end up in, or at least tend towards,more or less explicitly religious positions.4

Notwithstanding these critical remarks, it is certainly the case thatAdorno unambiguously describes his own work as materialist in orien-tation. Although he would reject Timpanaros bald claim that a ma-terialist would never reduce experience to a reciprocal implication ofsubject and object, Adorno would, with important qualifications,endorse his view that materialism entails above all acknowledgementof the priority of nature over mind.5 Interestingly, Adorno himselfquotes approvingly the same passage from the preface to Capital thatTimpanaro uses to support his thesis that the mature Marx was a ma-terialist (in the sense that he gave priority to physical and biologicalnature over the socio-economic and cultural levels of existence). Thepassage, in Fowkes translation, reads as follows: My standpoint, fromwhich the development of the economic formation of society is viewedas a process of natural history [als ein naturgeschichtlichen Proze6],can less than any other make the individual responsible for relationswhose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he maysubjectively raise himself above them.7

Yet Adornos interpretation of Marx differs significantly from thatof Timpanaro who appears to abridge the passage to suit his thesis whenhe neglects to cite the second part of the sentence in his quotation (canless than any other . . .). Not only does Adorno quote the entire sentencebut also (albeit elliptically) the five sentences that preceded it, interpret-ing Marxs reference to natural history as a reference to second nature.Quoting a later passage from Volume One of Capital to support hisinterpretation, Adorno claims that, when he spoke about the natural lawthat governs the development of the economy, Marx was referring tothe law of capitalist accumulation that has been mystified into a law ofnature.8 Capitalism appears as second nature when it is depictedas governed by natural, unchangeable laws. This idea of capitalism assecond nature effectively masks anything that might be conceived as firstnature. Adorno adds here that, for bourgeois consciousness, nothingappears to exist outside any more; in a certain sense there actually isnothing outside any more, nothing unaffected by mediation, which istotal (ND, p. 357; trans. mod.). Consequently, the distance betweenhuman history and nature only continues to grow (ND, p. 358).

Timpanaro mistakenly believes that, when Marx spoke aboutnatural history in Capital, he meant first rather than second nature.But Adorno would also disagree with his claim that, even in TheGerman Ideology, Marx was not yet a proper materialist.9 In NegativeDialectics, he cites a passage from Part One, Volume Five of TheGerman Ideology claiming that in it, Marx emphasized the unendingentwinement of nature and history with an extremist vigor bound toirritate dogmatic materialists. According to Marx:

720Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (6)


We know only a single science, the science of history. History can beconceived from two sides, divided into the history of nature and the historyof mankind. Yet there is no separating the two sides; as long as men exist,natural and human history will qualify each other.

Adorno follows this quotation with the dialectically inflected claim thatthe traditional antithesis between nature and history is true in onerespect and false in another. The antithesis is true insofar as it expresseswhat happened to the natural element namely, that nature has beennegated to such a degree that what now appears natural is actuallysocial. However, the antithesis between nature and history is false to theextent that it apologetically repeats the concealment of historys naturalgrowth by history itself (ND, p. 358).

When he speaks about history concealing its natural growth,Adorno is arguing that the role that material nature has played withinhuman history has largely been ignored. As a result, our understandingof ourselves is fundamentally flawed. Adorno wants to challenge thisflawed self-understanding when he defines Negative Dialectics as anattempt to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity (ND,p. xx). In setting himself this task, Adorno maintains that he is onlyfollowing Marx. For once Marx drew the line between historical ma-terialism and the popular metaphysical kind, Adorno believes thathistorical materialism became the critique of idealism in its entirety, andof the reality for which idealism opts by distorting it (ND, p. 197). Acritique of the idealist fallacy of constitutive subjectivity entails demon-strating that the mind is not primary. Indeed, Adorno argues that Hegelhimself derived self-conscious mind surreptitiously from its relationshipto heterogeneous matter in labour. Hypostasizing the mind, he wasnonetheless barely able to conceal the origin of the I in the Not-I.Even for Hegel, then, mind originates in the real life-process, in the lawof the survival of the species, of providing it with nutrients (ND, p. 198;trans. mod.). On Adornos view, this material life-process, which isimpelled by the drive for self-preservation, has conditioned all ourrelations to external (organic and inorganic) nature. By extension, it hasalso contributed to the rise of the capitalist mode of production with itsrapacious and exploitative relationship to nature. Exchange relationsare merely the social expression of our distorted and damaged, but natu-rally driven, relationship to nature.

These ideas will be explored in what follows. In the next section, Ishall discuss Adornos claims about the relationship between subject andobject, mind and nature. To cite J. M. Bernstein, Adorno views natureas the material substratum of human life,10 but he is by no means avulgar materialist in the sense that he would reduce mind to nature.The relationship between mind and material nature is far more dialec-tical than vulgar materialism will allow. In the third section of the article,

721Cook: Adornos critical materialism


I shall examine Adornos views about the relationship between natureand history. If, as Marx insists in The German Ideology, it is not possibleto separate either nature from history, or history from nature, Adornooffers a unique account of the unending entwinement of the two. Atthe end of the article, I shall venture to describe the character ofAdornos materialism. In so doing, I shall build on the work of bothBernstein and Brian OConnor who, more than other commentators,have correctly identified the materialist dimension in Adornos work.This article therefore represents a preliminary attempt to show, notsimply that Adornos philosophical enterprise is materialist in orien-tation, but precisely what is distinctive about that orientation.

Passage to Materialism

In a section of Negative Dialectics entitled Passage to Materialism,Adorno writes: It is by passing to the objects preponderance that dialec-tics is rendered materialistic (ND, p. 192). When he speaks about thepreponderance (Vorrang) of the object, Adorno is referring specificallyto the preponderance of matter (Materie) over mind. In one formulationof it, the preponderance of the object entails that it is not part of themeaning of objectivity to be a subject, though it is part of the meaningof subjectivity to be an object. Not only do material objects make subjec-tive experience possible, there is a substantively material dimension tosubjective experience as well (ND, p. 183). Experience involves theencounter of an embodied subject with an equally corporeal, physicalobject. This helps to explain why Adorno denies that the qualities weexperience in objects (their colour, taste, smell, etc.) are purely subjec-tive; these qualities also have an objective moment because they areborrowed from the objectivity of the intentio recta, or from the subjectsown corporeal apprehension of objects. Consequently, Adorno insiststhat subjective determinations not be stripped from objects. To eliminatethese determinations would fail to respect the preponderance of theobject because it would ignore the subjects own material encounter withobjects as an embodied object itself. Ironically, perhaps, the very quali-ties that the traditional critique of epistemology eradicated from theobject and credited to the subject are due in subjective experience to theprimacy of the object.11 In a characteristically paradoxical formulationAdorno writes: If the subject has a core of object, then the subjectivequalities in the object are all the more an objective moment.12

At the same time, Adorno rejects nave realism, or the view thatmaterial objects are immediately given to consciousness as they are inthemselves. On the one hand, an object can be known only as itentwines with subjectivity (ND, p. 186). It would be wrong to think



that we might apprehend objects free of any added thought or intu-ition. In fact, Adorno argues that even if it were possible completely toeliminate subjective mediations, the subject would only succeed inconceiving of the object as a pure substratum, a subiectum (ND,p. 184) or, paradoxically, as the very reflection of abstract subjectivity.As opposed to this abstract conception of objects, Adorno argues in OnSubject and Object that the object of undiminished experience is moreobjective than that [abstract] substratum.13 On the other hand, one mayalso infer from Adornos remarks about the objectivity of supposedlysubjective qualities, that while subjective mediation does not exhaustobjects, neither is it inherently defective or obscurant. In NegativeDialectics he adds that to respect the preponderance of the object meansto make progressive qualitative distinctions between things which inthemselves are mediated (ND, p. 184; trans. mod.). Objects can be saidto be immediate only if the word immediate is used to designate some-thing that lies outside cognition, that cognition does not and cannotexhaust, and without which cognition would not be possible. To saythat an object is mediated merely implies that what is mediated is notthereby exhausted (ND, p. 172).

Conversely, of course, without the moment of objectivity, thesubject itself would be literally nil [nichts] (ND, p. 186). Indeed, it isonly because the subject is not radically other than the object that itis capable of grasping objectivity at all (ND, p. 185; trans. mod.).Adorno uses the term affinity to refer to the resemblance or likenessbetween subject and object qua material, physical (ND, p. 270). As J. M.Bernstein remarks, affinity represents the indeterminate idea of ourimmersion in and being parts of nature. Importantly, Bernstein alsostates that Adorno deploys the word as though affinity were at oneand the same time already established and something that remains tobe achieved. He expresses himself in this way in order to halt an iden-titarian employment of our relation to nature, that is, to avoid usingthe concept as though affinity were fully instantiated.14 Far fromclaiming that we currently recognize our affinity with nature, Adornoinsists throughout his work that we have posited ourselves throughoutour history as radically other than nature with a view to dominatingnature both practically and conceptually. We neither fully experiencenor know ourselves as natural material, physical because, amongother things, we ignore the extent to which our own behaviour has been,and continues to be, instinctually motivated, specifically by the drive forself-preservation. Unconsciously motivated by this drive, we summarilyidentify objects with concepts matter with subjective (scientific orphilosophical) concepts of matter, nature with subjective (scientific or philosophical) concepts of nature. We therefore fail to respect theheterogeneous character of nature, including our own.



It may appear contradictory to refer to the heterogeneous characterof nature in the context of discussing our largely unconscious, and there-fore unreflective, affinity with the natural world. To speak about ouraffinity with the natural world, however, by no means implies that weare identical with it. To be a mind at all, Adorno writes, the thinkingsubject must know that what it touches upon does not exhaust it, thatthe finiteness that is its like does not exhaust it (ND, p. 392). Affinityought not to be posited as positive because the object is not completelyidentical with the subject. Consequently, the task of a changed phil-osophy would be to become aware of likeness by defining it as thatwhich is unlike itself (ND, p. 150). Human beings are not whollynatural, not merely in the sense that we are social beings, but in thesense that the human mind partially extricated itself from the naturalworld even as it sought to dominate it. Among other things, this meansthat nature is no more ontologically reducible to mind than mind isreducible to nature (ND, p. 201). To be sure, mind or spirit is also apiece of natural history15 because consciousness is a ramification of theenergy of drives; it is part impulse itself, and also a moment of that inwhich it intervenes (ND, p. 265; trans. mod.). Yet Adorno also claimsthat we have succeeded, to a limited extent, in distinguishing ourselvesfrom the natural world, albeit in a distorted and damaging way.

To this day, reason remains natural as the psychological force splitoff for purposes of self-preservation. Reason began partially to splitoff from nature when it attempted to secure its existence against naturein the interest of ensuring its survival (e.g. the cunning of Odysseusconfronting the forces of nature that Horkheimer and Adorno describein Dialectic of Enlightenment). Subsequently, reason turned itself intonatures otherness (ND, p. 289) both figuratively, as it began to defineitself in stark opposition to nature, and, to a certain limited extent, liter-ally. At the same time, the relative independence of mind with respectto nature is itself a natural achievement. It was by instinctually pittingourselves against nature in the struggle for survival that we developedthe capacity to abstract from the natural world using concepts, therebyacquiring a modest degree of independence from nature. As Adorno putsit, nature itself, in the form of the instinct for self-preservation, callsfor something more than conditioned reflexes (ND, p. 217). Still, ifreason has always functioned as an organ of adaptation,16 our instinc-tually driven cognitive development has allowed us to distinguishourselves, both de facto and de jure, not only from objects or fromwhat Adorno calls an existence obdurate in itself (ND, p. 392) but,by extension, from our own material substratum. Accordingly, havingachieved a relative degree of autonomy by means of its cognitiveperformances, consciousness branched off from the libidinous energyof the species (ND, p. 185).



Although its independence from nature is a natural achievement, therational subject has historically viewed itself as the absolute antithesisof nature. Failing to recognize that we are also always natural, we haveonly regressed all the more into nature: reason today merely takes theform of self-preservation running wild (ND, p. 289). But it is import-ant to note at this juncture that Adorno not only insists on the prepon-derance of the material, natural world over reason or consciousness, heis also concerned with the preponderance of the social world, of insti-tutions, agencies, organizations, socio-historical practices andprocedures, over individuals. While Hegel called this social objectivityworld spirit, Marx described it as the law of value that comes intoforce without men being conscious of it. Adorno agrees with Marx: thelaw of value is the real objectivity to which individuals are subjectedboth within (through reification, for example) and without, in themarket economy where individuals must work if they want to survive(ND, pp. 3001). Over the course of human history, the real totalmovement of society became independent of the living individuals whocreated it and continue to sustain it; this movement is over their headsand through their heads, and [is] thus antagonistic from the outset.Though, even in the best of all possible worlds, society and the individ-ual will never be identical, today they have become utterly inimical toeach other because societys law of motion has for thousands of yearsbeen abstracting from its individual subjects, degrading them to mereexecutors, mere partners in social wealth and struggle (ND, p. 304).The priority of the object, then, refers to the priority of both the naturaland social worlds over the subject.

The unending entwinement of nature and history

The objective world is both social and natural. Today, however, it is thesocial world late capitalism that appears to be natural. To return toAdornos interpretation of Marx: the so-called law of nature . . . ismerely one of capitalist society (ND, p. 354). Approving of Marxsidea that societys law of motion has become second nature, Adornoalso argued that second nature currently negates or conceals extra-social or non-social nature. He continued: What is . . . produced bythe functional context [Funktionszusammenhang] of individuals . . .usurps the insignia of that which a bourgeois consciousness regards asnature and as natural (ND, p. 357). On the one hand, then, to theextent that the social world appears to have evolved naturally, it alsoappears to be something that cannot be changed. This appearance is,of course, utterly illusory because, as Adorno puts it: [t]he rigidifiedinstitutions, the relations of production are not Being as such, but even



in their omnipotence they are man-made and revocable.17 That Marxsreference to the natural laws of capitalism is not to be taken literallyis confirmed by the strongest motive behind all Marxist theory: thatthose laws can be abolished (ND, p. 355). On the other hand, becausenature has been negated under capitalism, we have lost sight of organicand inorganic nature both within and without. Driven unconsciously bysurvival instincts, we have turned nature into something reducible toour concepts of it or, on the practical level, into something to becontrolled and dominated through labour and other activities. Failingto respect the preponderance of the object on both the theoretical andpractical levels, our experience has become impoverished, diminished.

We now inhabit an inverted world where nature has been socializedby dint of being instrumentalized and conceptualized, and the socio-historical world has been naturalized, turned into second nature.However, despite Adornos extensive criticisms of the ways in which wecurrently socialize nature, it is, once again, always the case that naturecan only appear in socially mediated forms. For Adorno, nature willalways also be socially constructed (to use a repugnant phrase, thecorrective to which lies in Ian Hackings salutary question: the socialconstruction of what?). In other words, his own critical and materialistorientation towards nature will certainly not forgo conceptual media-tion, as critics like Jrgen Habermas have claimed. On the contrary,even as he is mindful of the preponderance of the natural world, Adornounderstands that a moment of conceptual mediation is both inevitableand necessary. What concerns Adorno, is not that organic nature andinorganic nature are socially mediated, but rather the identitarian andsubsumptive form that mediation has historically taken. As part of hiscritique of the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity, Adorno takes aim atthe identification of nature with our concepts of it because this use ofconcepts merely states what something falls under, what it exemplifiesor represents, and what, accordingly it is not itself (ND, p. 149; trans.mod.). If only indirectly, this explains why Adorno rejects the traditionalinterpretation of dialectical materialism. Dialectics can be said to lie inthings only to the extent that it encompasses our conceptual and prac-tical experience of material things an experience that is itself thingly,material, or natural given the preponderance of the object in the subjectitself.

On the one hand, then, nature is, and will always be, sociallymediated. On the other hand, human history has a natural dimensionor component. The detachment of nature from history is deceptive, notonly because nature is also a social construct, but because the social andhistorical realm consists of living subjects whose instincts and needs,which have been displaced and distorted by civilization, form part ofits underground history.18 In conjunction with this point about the



underground history of society or societys instinctual, embodiedhistory Adorno argues that the division between nature and historydeceives us about the fact that heteronomous history perpetuates theblind growth of nature (ND, p. 141). Marx also recognized this.Although the movement of society, its historical development, nowappears to be natural, Adorno maintains that the truth-content inMarxs idea of natural history, its critical content, consists in his recog-nition that history, which takes the form of the progressive mastery ofnature, continues the unconscious history of nature, of devouring andbeing devoured (ND, p. 355). Again, society has been blindly impelledby the principle of unreflected self-preservation (ND, p. 283). Thathuman beings have been degraded for millennia to a mere means of theirsese conservare is the law of doom [Verhngnis] thus far obeyed byhistory (ND, p. 167).19

Accordingly, Adorno argues that there are not two truths: a dialec-tical one within society and one indifferent to society. The divisionbetween society and nature, or between social being and extra-socialbeing, merely reflects the deceptive division between the social and thenatural sciences (ND, p. 141). This division is deceptive because boththe natural and the social sciences have a social character; theirprocedures, practices, and concepts have developed historically withinspecific social contexts. Indeed, the prevailing scientific concept of firstnature of biological or physical nature has obviously beenconstructed from concepts and mathematic formulae that havedeveloped over thousands of years of western history. But, if the socialand natural sciences have emerged within specific social and historicalcontexts, they also have a natural character. To the extent that theyexhibit identity-thinking, these sciences have a natural source: theinstinct to control and dominate in the interest of self-preservation.20 InDialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer went as far as todescribe self-preservation as the constitutive principle of science, thesoul of the table of categories.21 Even though, as Brian OConnorusefully points out, science implicitly recognizes the non-identity ofobjects with concepts when it revises its hypotheses in light ofevidence,22 Adorno argues that its instrumental orientation towardsobjects adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recog-nizes no function other than the preparation of the object from meresensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation.23

As odd as it may appear at this juncture to compare Adorno toHegel, Bernstein rightly observes in a recent essay that Adorno adoptshis own version of Hegels speculative proposition: everything that issubject must be shown to be as much (historical) substance, and whatis regarded as substance must be shown to be also subject.24 Adornosproposition takes the following form: history must be shown to be just



as much nature, and what is regarded as nature must be shown to bejust as much history. This idea was broached in Adornos early (1932)essay The Idea of Natural History25 an essay which he himselfquotes three decades later in Negative Dialectics: the task of thought isto grasp historic being in its utmost definition, in the place where itis most historic, as natural being, or to grasp nature, in the place whereit seems most deeply, inertly natural, as historic being. Nature andhistory are unendingly entwined because they are ultimately commen-surable. Walter Benjamin recognized their commensurability in TheOrigin of German Tragic Drama. For Benjamin, nature and historyconverge in the moment of transience (Vergngnis) (ND, p. 359). In hisessay on natural history, Adorno attributes this insight to Georg Lukcsas well: Lukcs demonstrates the retransformation of the historical, asthat which has been, into nature. Conversely, he views nature as tran-sitory nature, as history.26

Historical being must be grasped as natural being. While philosophyand science, as historically conditioned activities, perpetuate ourbondage to nature by virtue of a thinking that identifies, that equal-izes everything unequal (ND, p. 172), late capitalist society perpetuatesthis bondage in an analogous way. Under capitalism, things and activi-ties have become commodified. The secret of the commodity form, towhich Marx devoted the first chapter of Capital, is equivalence: theequivalence of one object or activity with an heterogeneous other.Through commodification, unequal or non-identical things are madeequal or identical to the extent that they are exchanged with otherthings. This is why Adorno claims that the exchange principle is funda-mentally akin to the principle of identification. Exchange is merely thesocial model of identity-thinking in which particular objects aresubsumed under, and identified with, universal concepts. As the socialmodel of the principle of identification, the development of exchangerelations has been impelled by the same instinctual drive that has histori-cally ruled mental activity generally (ND, p. 146). Our exchange-basedeconomy is supposed to benefit society by ensuring its continuedmaterial survival. For, as Adam Smith and others have argued, whencommodity producers, who are oriented exclusively towards privatesuccess in the form of profit-making, exchange their products on themarket, they unintentionally promote the material reproduction ofsociety as a whole. In other words, exchange is considered (and hashistorically been justified) as the most effective means of materiallypreserving both society and its members.

Natural being must be grasped as historical being. Among otherthings, this means that self-preservation has historically taken diverseforms. Horkheimer and Adorno outline some of these in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. In the earliest stages of nomadic life, members of the



tribe . . . took an individual part in the process of influencing the courseof nature through magical practices which, by submitting to nature,were also meant to determine the lines of that submission (when, forexample, they clothed themselves in the hides of their quarry in orderto stalk it).27 For their part, the myths that succeeded magic are alreadycharacterized by the discipline and power that Bacon celebrated as theright mark. In myths, however, the gods are separated from materialelements (the sky, the sun, weather, etc.) as their quintessentialconcepts. A single distinction develops between the logos and the massof all things and creatures outside it. By virtue of this distinction theworld becomes subject to man. Whereas Greek mythology gave Zeusthe power to rule over all living creatures, the Judeo-Christian traditionclaims that God has given human beings dominion over the living.Subsequently, however, with the advent of enlightenment, the distinc-tion between God and man dwindled because the creative god and thesystematic spirit are alike as rulers of nature. As human beings super-sede God, myth slowly turns into enlightenment, and nature into mereobjectivity.28

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, Horkheimer and Adorno showthat the instinct for self-preservation has manifested itself in differentways throughout human history. More generally, all our somaticallybased instincts have changed over time. Bernstein makes this point whenhe observes that Adorno conceives of neither external nor internal natureas an atemporal system of lawful regularities. Instead, for Adorno, evenour biologically given attributes are continually being formed, deter-mined, and elaborated through cultural practice.29 In turn, this meansthat there is no pristine inner nature waiting for release from repres-sion.30 Adornos insistence on the historically mediated character ofinstincts is evident in Thesen ber Bedrfnis, an essay seldom cited inthe secondary literature. The essay begins with the strong claim that needis a social category. Although nature, in the form of instinct [Trieb], iscontained within need, Adorno argues that it is not possible to separatethe social dimension of need, as something secondary, from the naturalaspect of need as something primary. Furthermore, instincts themselvesare so socially mediated that whatever is natural in them only appearsas something produced by society.31 Later in the essay Adornoacknowledges that the impossibility of distinguishing between good andbad, genuine and artificial, true and false needs makes it very difficultto develop a theory of needs. Because the distinction is impossible tomake, a theory of needs must view the satisfaction of all needs as legit-imate.32 At the same time, such a theory must recognize that, in theircurrent form, existing needs are themselves the product of class society.There are no needs in which a clear distinction can be made betweenhumanity and the consequences of repression.33



If our own internal, instinctual nature is not immune from the vicis-situdes of history, the same can certainly be said of external nature. AsBernstein remarks, air becomes polluted; animal species become extinct(on their own and through our intervention); mineral resources becomedepleted; new natural kinds are intentionally developed.34 Changes inexternal nature can be traced to the impact of other natural forces (suchas climate change during the Ice Age, for example) as well as to humanintervention, whether intentional or not. Nevertheless, to say that natureis always also historical and history always also natural does not meanthat nature can be wholly reduced to history, or that history can bereduced to nature. As the material substratum of human existence,nature remains something other than its historical manifestations. Whileit is always historically and socially mediated, nature is never entirelyidentical with its mediated forms (just as objects are never identical withconcepts, nor body with mind). For its part, human history has beenimpelled by natural forces both within and without, but it is also some-thing other than nature because our cognitive development has enabledus to rise above nature to a limited extent. To cite Bernstein again: whatwe think of as pure reason is an outgrowth of the drive for self-preservation, something more than that drive but still bound to it.35

Adornos materialism

Adorno offers a distinctive rendering of historical materialism. As I havetried to show, his aim is to demonstrate that history and nature aredialectically entwined. Yet it should be obvious that the degree to whichhis version of historical materialism remains faithful to Marx is moot.Certainly many Marxists assume that Marxs claims about the materialdimension of human existence refer exclusively to socio-economicprocesses and institutions. All too frequently, Marxists fail to considerthe interaction between these processes and material nature. As KateSoper remarks, this means that Timpanaro is right to pose the questionof the extent to which Marxism either inherently or in its contempor-ary distortions supports a false reduction of natural to social determi-nants. Indeed, Soper agrees with Timpanaro that Marx is partly toblame for this false reduction. At the same time, she disagrees withhim when she states that Marxs lack of clarity about the relationshipbetween the social and the natural worlds extends to his later work aswell.36

Having carefully examined the character of Marxs materialism,however, John Foster would take issue with both Soper and Timpanaro.Foster points out that, in his early manuscripts, Marx introduced theidea of a metabolic relation between human beings and nature which



he later developed in such a way that he was able to give a more solidand scientific expression of this fundamental relationship, depicting thecomplex, dynamic interchange between human beings and nature result-ing from human labor.37 Moreover, although he denies that Adorno isa materialist, Foster would certainly endorse Adornos interpretation ofThe German Ideology in which Marx and Engels depict nature andhistory as dialectically entwined. Nature can neither be reduced tohuman history, nor can it be easily divorced from human history andthe sensuous activity of human beings as it develops with a givendivision of labor, involving specific relations to nature.38 In fact, in hislater work, Marx used the concept of metabolism to express the humanrelation to nature as one that encompassed both nature-imposedconditions as well as our capacity to affect these conditions. Moreimportantly, however, the concept provided Marx with a concrete wayof expressing the notion of the alienation of nature that was central tohis critique from his earliest writings on.39

What is peculiar in Adornos account of the dialectical relationshipbetween nature and history is the obvious influence on it of SigmundFreuds theory of instincts. Bernstein offers a suggestive account of thatinfluence when he remarks that Adorno was interested, precisely, inpsychoanalysiss conception of the transformation of the natural (drivetheory) into the social and the recurrent interplay between these twolevels.40 However, psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook would reject Bern-steins account. According to Whitebook, instincts are not to beconceived as exclusively natural. Instead, they transgress the frontierbetween psyche and soma. Freud himself defines instinct as the psychi-cal representative of the stimuli originating from within the organismand reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mindfor work in consequence of its connection with the body.41 Indeed, itis just Freuds recognition of the entwinement of nature and history ininstinct that recommends him to Adorno. In Die Revidierte Psycho-analyse, Adorno defends Freuds approach against that of the revision-ists by arguing that Freud is not content to leave reason and sociallydetermined behaviour unexplained but attempts to derive even complexmental behaviours from the drive for self-preservation and pleasure.Essays like Civilization and its Discontents, which Adorno held in highregard, show that Freud views human history as natural history. At thesame time, Freud did not deny that nature too has a history because henever excluded the possibility that the concrete manifestation ofinstincts might undergo the most sweeping variations and modifica-tions.42 What Adorno draws from Freuds theory of instincts, then,enables him not only to explain such phenomena as Nazi Germany, butto elaborate on Marxs speculative claims about the relationshipbetween nature and history.



I briefly distinguished earlier between dialectical materialism and thedialectical relationship that Adorno postulates between nature andhistory. Yet immediately after he denies that dialectics can be extendedto nature as a universal principle of explication, Adorno remarks thatit is equally wrong to say that nature is undialectical and society dialec-tical (ND, p. 141). Because we too are part of the natural world andinteract naturally with it, there is a sense in which nature can be saidto be dialectical. Throughout our history, the drive for self-preservationhas induced us either to subject ourselves to (external) nature or tosubjugate it. Almost invariably, we have subjugated nature, damaging(sometimes irremediably) and distorting both external nature and ourown inner nature in the process. If the ferocity of other animals can beattributed to their imprisonment in survival mechanisms, our imprison-ment in these same mechanisms helps to explain our own unacknowl-edged and therefore more dreadful ferocity (ND, p. 180). Once again,one of the goals of Adornos natural history is to make us aware of ourembeddedness in nature so that we finally acquire the self-understand-ing that we need to put an end to the controlling, dominating, andmanipulating activities in which our own internal nature manifests itself.To paraphrase Freud, where irrational behaviour was, there rationalbehaviour shall one day be.

Still, when he denies that human history can be reduced to nature,or nature to history, Adorno also rejects vulgar or mechanical materi-alism. Unwittingly impelled by nature, the sciences, in which mechanis-tic materialists appear to have boundless faith, remain in thrall tonature. In fact Adorno claims that, when we reflect upon the conceptof causality, so pivotal in science, we become all the more aware ofnature in ourselves because we discover causality in nature wherever wefall under the sway of natural impulses and attempt to control anddominate nature (ND, p. 269). If we were to become mindful of naturein ourselves, we would resist merely equating the natural world withour causal conceptions of it because we would also respect the alterityof nature. Adorno views science as idealist in character when it reducesobjects to subjective (socio-historical) concepts and mathematicalformulae. Of course, he does not deny that science works in some senseof that term; he merely suggests that science might work better if it werenot so reductive, if it no longer reduced difference, alterity, conceptu-ally by identifying objects with concepts, and practically by attemptingto control and manipulate them. Even as he criticizes science, however,Adorno also regrets that philosophy has split off from the naturalsciences. Describing this split as fatal, he praises the development ofphysics since Einstein because it has burst the visual prison as well asthat of the subjective apriority of space, time, and causality. Because ithas jettisoned the Newtonian principle of subjective observation, physics



has become more faithful to our experience of the world an experi-ence that argues for the primacy of the object, and against its ownomnipotence (ND, p. 188).

Although he claims that he recognizes the limits of mechanistic ma-terialism, Timpanaro nonetheless seems to endorse precisely the un-differentiated idea of matter that Adorno criticizes. Timpanaros view ofmatter as undifferentiated may also help to explain why he emphasizesthe passivity of experience. In response to criticism, however, Timpanaroexplains that, by passivity, he means only that there exists in knowl-edge even in its most elementary form, sensation an element of passiv-ity, irreducible to the activity of the subject. In other words, cognitionrequires a stimulus coming from the external world which is preciselythe given.43 Surprisingly, perhaps, Adorno would agree with Timpa-naro to the extent that he asserts that there is no sensation without asomatic moment. That a somatic moment can be found in sensationaffects, in turn, not only the basic relation of subject and object but thedignity of the corporeal [des Krperlichen] because it implies that corpo-reality emerges as the ontical pole of cognition, as the core of that cogni-tion (ND, pp. 1934). Yet Adorno also warns against emphasizing thepassivity of experience: if passive reactions were all there is, all would. . . be receptivity; there could be no thinking (ND, p. 217).

Again, although subject and object refer to one another and aremediated by the other, neither is reducible to the other. Referring to JohnSearles The Rediscovery of the Mind,44 OConnor remarks that bothSearle and Adorno want to undermine structures that have given riseto reductionism. Moreover, both philosophers contend that, whilesubjective consciousness is irreducible, its irreducibility does not giverise to dualism. However, OConnor also points out that, in contrastto Searle who believes that it is our definitional practices [that] forceus to make the distinction that introduces the reduction of subject toobject, Adorno rejects this reduction on the grounds that the subject isitself a constitutive element of objectivity.45 Although OConnors useof the word constitutive here is infelicitous, because Adorno claimedthat the subject is the agent, not the constituent, of object,46 it iscertainly the case that, as the objects agent, the subjects conceptualmediation of the object cannot be stripped away, eliminated, or ignored.Indeed Adorno warns that critical thought must not place the objecton the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the subject. Rather thanturning the object into an idol, the purpose of critical thought is toabolish the hierarchy (ND, p. 181). By extension, the hierarchy betweennature and history must also be abolished. Nature is always mediatedby historically situated, socially conditioned, and embodied subjects.Since nature is in part what we have made of it, it is just as much histori-cal as our own history is natural.



Unlike Timpanaro, then, who refuses the name materialism to theview that experience involves the reciprocal implication of subject andobject, nature and history, Adorno not only adopts this view, he alsomaintains that materialist theory became untrue when it tried to reduceconsciousness entirely to matter, as though matter and consciousnesswere identical. For Adorno, who is obviously recasting dialectical ma-terialism here, dialectics would no more exist without the consciousnessthat reflects it . . . than it can evaporate into that consciousness. Hecontinues: If matter were total, undifferentiated, and flatly singular,there would be no dialectics in it (ND, p. 205). Yet, while there is asense in which Adorno can be said to have reconstructed dialecticalmaterialism, I have called Adornos materialism critical followingOConnor. For OConnor, Adornos materialism is critical because itmaintains both that the subject does not passively receive meaningsfrom objects, and that the activity of the subject is circumscribed by thedeterminate independence of the object.47 Nevertheless, there is anothersense in which Adornos version of materialism may be described ascritical, a sense that OConnor mentions but does not develop. Adornosmaterialist theory is designed to show that our experience is impover-ished and nature damaged precisely because we have failed to recognizethe degree to which we are part of nature even as social and historicalbeings. Human history displays an appalling continuity when viewed inlight of our drive to dominate the natural world, other human beings,and finally our own inner nature (ND, p. 320). Unconsciously in thrallto instinct, history also shows that these behaviours have been unremit-tingly destructive and self-destructive. On the one hand, the nature onwhich we rely for our survival has been damaged, and continues to bedamaged, by our very attempts to secure our survival. Untamed survivalinstincts now seriously jeopardize our future survival on this planet. Onthe other, in the quest to preserve ourselves, we have seriously harmedourselves by repressing instincts and distorting needs. Our very attemptsto preserve ourselves have damaged the very selves for the sake of whichthese attempts were made. These are just some of the paradoxes onwhich Adornos critical materialism invites us to reflect.

Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor, Canada

Notes

1 See Karin Bauer, Adornos Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology,Readings of Wagner (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,1999) for a Nietzschean reading of Adorno; see J. M. Bernstein, Adorno:


PSC


Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001) for a Weberian reading; see Yvonne Sherratt, Adornos PositiveDialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) for an idealistreading; see J. M. Bernsteins Hegelian reading of Adorno in NegativeDialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel, in The Cambridge Companion toAdorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);see Fredric Jamesons Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of theDialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990) for a Marxist reading; andsee Brian OConnors materialist reading of Adorno in Adornos NegativeDialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge,MA and London: MIT Press, 2004).

2 Stephen Eric Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (Oxford andCambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 1867.

3 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New LeftBooks, 1976), p. 70.

4 Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism, trans. L. Garner (London: NewLeft Books, 1975), p. 19.

5 ibid., p. 34. Adorno would not be alone in qualifying this thesis. As KateSoper writes: the properly materialist character of historical materialismcannot simply lie in its acknowledgement that physical matter pre-existsall human thought and action and exerts its particular determinations uponthe latter. For in itself that is no solution to the problem of what makesour relationship to that thought and action a relationship of scientific(materialist) knowledge. Indeed the reassertion of the natural and biologi-cal dimension does not distinguish Marxist materialism either fromnaturalism and biologism . . . or from certain empiricist and idealistepistemologies that are at odds with Marxism. See Marxism, Materialismand Biology, in Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. II, Materialism, ed. JohnMepham and David-Hillel Ruben (New York: Humanities Press, 1979),pp. 701.

6 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: SuhrkampVerlag, 1973), p. 347.

7 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, trans. BenFowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 92. Timpanaro quotes partof this sentence in On Materialism, p. 41.

8 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:Continuum Books, 1973), p. 354. Cited henceforth in the text as ND.

9 Timpanaro, On Materialism, pp. 401: it must be said that Marxism,especially in its first phase (up to and including The German Ideology) isnot materialism proper. Physical and biological nature is certainly notdenied by Marx, but it constitutes more a prehistorical antecedent tohuman history than a reality which still limits and conditions man.

10 J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 189.

11 Theodor Adorno, On Subject and Object, in Critical Models: Interven-tions and Catchwords, trans. H. W. Pickford (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1998), p. 250. I am slightly revising remarks I made inAdorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (London and



New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 81, where I quote an earlier translationof Zu Subjekt und Objekt.

12 ibid., p. 250 passim.13 ibid. In Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 288, Bernstein offers this

gloss: if subjects have an objective core, if the subject is thus somethingother than a transcendental subject, more than a geometrical location inspace, then this will be due to just those sensory/perceptual qualities whichit shares with objects that traditionally have been designated as merelysubjective.

14 ibid., p. 291.15 Theodor Adorno, Progress, in Critical Models, p. 156.16 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,

trans. J. Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), p. 222.17 Adorno, Progress, p. 156.18 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 231.19 In Adornos Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge,

MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 165, Lambert Zuidervaart mistak-enly claims that Adornos recollection of the early Marx is largely ironic.However, Zuidervaart rightly points out that Adorno does not simply takeup the goal of naturalizing human beings and humanizing nature.Rather, Adorno would say that human beings already are natural, all toonatural, and nature is unavoidably human, all too human. Human beingscarry out domination as if they were beasts of prey, and nature has becomea mere object of human control.

20 This behaviour may manifest itself in many (non-mutually exclusive) ways:making money from scientific endeavours in order to gain ones livelihood,competition among scientists for research grants or for recognition by thescientific community, experimentation that involves manipulating andcontrolling objects (including human subjects), or gearing research towardsproducing results that will increase the profit of corporations or thestrength of the military.

21 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 86.22 Brian OConnor, Adornos Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possi-

bility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 53.23 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 834.24 Bernstein, Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel, p. 20.25 Theodor Adorno, The Idea of Natural History, trans. B. Hullot-Kentor,

Telos 60 (1984): 11124.26 ibid., p. 119.27 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 21.28 ibid., p. 9.29 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 189. Bernstein offers his

own interpretation of Adornos claims about nature and history in thisparagraph. Later, he introduces the term genealogical naturalism todescribe the dialectical relationship between nature and history in Adornoswork (see pp. 245ff.). Unfortunately, I cannot comment extensively onBernsteins interpretation here. Briefly, while I accept the basic thrust of hisinterpretation, I reject his claim that Adorno defined nature exclusively as



animate, and his assertion that Adorno wanted to re-enchant the world byanthropomorphizing it.

30 ibid., p. 200.31 Theodor Adorno, Thesen ber Bedrfnis, in Soziologische Schriften, vol. I

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p. 392.32 See also ND, p. 92: Material needs should be respected even in their wrong

form, the form caused by repression.33 Adorno, Thesen ber Bedrfnis, p. 393.34 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 189.35 ibid., p. 245.36 Soper, Marxism, Materialism and Biology, p. 72. Interestingly, on the next

page, Soper begins to focus on Marxs claim that human beings arenaturally social, or that human sociality is naturally determined.

37 John Foster, Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: MonthlyReview Press, 2000), p. 158.

38 ibid., p. 116.39 ibid., p. 158.40 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 245, n. 11.41 Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and

Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 186. Whitebook isquoting Freuds Instincts and their Vicissitudes, in The Standard Editionof the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. J. Strachey(London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 122.

42 Theodor Adorno, Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse, in Soziologische Schriften,vol. I, p. 22.

43 Timpanaro, On Materialism, p. 55.44 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (London and Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1992).45 OConnor, Adornos Negative Dialectic, pp. 978 passim.46 Adorno, On Subject and Object, Critical Models, p. 254.47 OConnor, Adornos Negative Dialectic, p. 20.



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