Jameson, F. (1990). Late Marxism: Adorno or the persistence of the dialectic. London: Verso

[intro is on another file]

Part 1

1

[on identity and non-identity] At that point, there slowly emerges the counter-image or –mirage of the neurotic self locked utterly into its own ‘identity’ – namely, the unrepresentable vision of the ceaseless flow of the absolutely new, the unrepetitive, the great stream which never comes twice and which Deleuze calls the ‘flux’ of perpetual change, in which neither subject nor object can yet be imagined, but only the terror and exhaustion of radical difference without markers or signposts, without moments of rest […].

To shed our defences and give ourselves over absolutely to this terrifying rush of the non-identical is of course one of the great ethical fantasy-images of the postmodern and the very delineation of the ‘schizophrenic here’ […]

These two absolutizing and frightening glimpses of a closed self and a primal flux are, however, useful in grasping the function of the compromise formations that variously come into being throughout human history with their more familiar everyday shapes […] (16)

“Thought need not rest content in its logical regularity; it is capable of thinking against itself, without abolishing itself altogether; indeed, were definitions of the dialectic possible, that one might be worth proposing” (ND 144/141) (17)

“In the history of modern philosophy, the word ‘identity’ has had several meanings. It designated, for example, the unity of personal consciousness: that an ‘I’ remains the same throughout all its experiences. […]. Then again identity meant what was supposed to be regularly or nomothetically present in all rational beings, or in other words thought as logical universality; including the equivalence with itself of every object of thought, the simple A=A. Finally, the epistemological meaning: that subject and object, however mediated, coincide. The first two levels of meaning are by no means strictly differentiated, even in Kant. Nor is this the result of a careless use of language. Identity rather shows up as the zone of indifference between psychology and logic within idealism itself”. (ND 145n/142n) (19)

In the philosophy framework, therefore, the concept is the strong form of identity, subsuming a great variety of different, really existing objects under the same term or thought (the objects being different by definition, since they all exist separately). The primacy of the concept therefore implies a historical moment in which universals come into being, in which abstractions are wrested from the primal flux of sheer names that

would seem to characterize preconceptual thinking. […] it would begin to seem that functionally the primacy of the concept (in Western philosophy) is not so different after all from the elaboration of magical names, since both are forms of ‘enlightenment’ in the sense in which they secure domination over nature, and organize the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ of the natural state into so many abstract grids.

Meanwhile, the concept – any concept – asserts and enforces the conviction that it corresponds to the thing, to its object’ how that relationship is conceived surely plays across a broad variety of epistemological fantasies, from notions that it represents some inner truth of the thing all the way to the feeling that it is somehow ‘like’ the thing.

It is true that Althusser, whose epistemology is in this sense radically non-identitarian, liked tirelessly to remind us that ‘the concept of sugar does not taste sweet’; but the therapeutic shock of this reminder cannot last long, and my hunch is that anyone trying to conceptualize the property of sweetness will ultimately end up persuading himself that the mind triumphantly manages to incorporate sweetness within itself as part of its thought (20)

The failure is not simply the result of the mind’s weakness, or its attachment to an outmoded philosophical ideology or epistemology; it is, on the contrary, inscribed in the concept itself, whose whole dynamic seeks to secure and perpetuate the feeling that it reunites subject and object, and re-enacts their unity. Adorno, who still uses the language of ideology and false consciousness, will sometimes go as far as to suggest that this primal illusion of the identity of the concept with the thing is the strong form of ideology itself and provides its very definition:

“Ideology by no means always takes the form of explicitly idealistic philosophy. It does its secret work within the very foundational construction of something affirmed as first or primary (no matter what the latter’s content), within the implicit identity of concept and thing, which justifies the world as it is, even when a doctrine summarily teaches the dependence of consciousness on being” (ND 50/40) (21)

A passing remark, early in ND, makes it clear, however, that all of these themes are first and foremost to be grasped within another tradition, namely the Marxist one. The crucial phrase identifies ‘what cannot be subsumed under identity’ – that is to say, everything that has been evoked above variously under the notions of difference and heterogeneity, otherness, the qualitative, the radically new, the corporeal – as ‘what is called in Marxian terminology use value’ (ND 22/11)

Exchange value, then, the emergence of some third, abstract term between two incomparable objects (an abstraction which, by way of the historical dialectical narrated by Marx in this chapter, ultimately takes the form of money), constitutes the primordial form by which identity emerges in human history. (23)

The ‘exchange relationship’ is the other great leit-motiv that sounds throughout Adorno’s work, and it is strictly ‘identical’ with the more philosophical leitmotiv named

‘identity’ which we have been tracing. Now the philosophical and anthropological evocation of the will to domination inherent in the identical concept gives way to a more vivid sense of the constraints of the economic system (commodity production, money, labor-power) secretly inherent in all manifestations of identity itself; meanwhile, this infrastructure of the concept then also makes it clear why its effects (sometimes also called ‘ideology’ as we have seen above) cannot simply be thought away by the thinking of a better thought, by new forms of philosophizing and more adequate (or even more Utopian) concepts. History already thinks the thinking subject and is inscribed in the forms through which it must necessarily think.

‘Society precedes the subject’ (ND 132/126); thought’s categories are collective and social’ identity is not an option but a doom; reason and its categories are at one with the rise of civilization or capitalism, and can scarcely be transformed until the latter is transformed. (24)