Rose, G. (2014). The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London: Verso.PrefaceBy introducing Minima Moralia as an offering from his melancholy science an inversion of Nietzsches joyful science Adorno undermines and inverts the sanguine and total claims of philosophy and sociology, and rejects any dichotomy such as optimistic/pessimistic for it implies an inherently fixed and static view.Interpretation of Adorno suffers when his aims and achievements are related solely to Marx or to a Marxian tradition which is sometimes un-defined and sometimes over-defined, and, equally, when he is judged solely as a sociologist. Adornos thought depends fundamentally on the category of reification. [] in the Marxian tradition reification is most often employed as a way of generalising Marxs theory of value with the aim of producing a critical theory of social institutions and of culture, but frequently any critical force is lost in process of generalisation.(ix)

Chapter 1: The Crisis in CultureInstead of politicising academia, it academised politics. [on the early FS] (2)It may be said that the members of the School were addressing themselves in their collaboration during the upheavals of the thirties to the question which Marx asked at the end of the 1844 Manuscripts, How do we now stand in relation the Hegelian dialectic?. (3)The School rejected many of Lukacs assumptions and theories, particularly the idea of the working class as the subject/object of history and the notion of imputed class consciousness. However, a subject/object dichotomy was retained []. (4)DoE, which Adorno wrote with Horkheimer in the United States in the early 1940s, might be considered the Schools response to Marxs critique of political economy. In this book Horkheimer and Adorno attempt to decode the history of the philosophical subject as the domination of nature whether under the guise of myth or of enlightened reason. [] Instrumental reason is seen as a feature of both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, although it only becomes a structuring principle in capitalist societies. (6)[Adorno] stressed the necessity of understanding social phenomena from the perspective of the totality, yet denied the possibility of grasping the totality.(10)Chapter 2: The Search for StyleIt is impossible to understand Adornos ideas without understanding the ways in which he presents them, that is, his style, and without understanding the reasons for his preoccupation with style. It is, however, Adornos theory of society which determines his style, and that theory can only be understood if one knows how to read his texts. (15)Adornos owrks are exemplars of negative dialectic, that is, they are informed by the idea that concepts, as ordinarily used, are distorting and mask social reality. [] Adorno insists that expressing the relation of the thought to its object should be prior to any concern with ease of communicating that thought. As he tersely puts it, Truth is objective, not plausible.Adorno describes his programme, as presented in his book ND, as an anti-system, and his texts may be equally well described as anti-texts as he in fact describes Hegels texts. (16)[] the idea that the object cannot be captured, and that a set of presentations may best approximate it. Adorno sometimes calls this a constellation [](17)Adorno starts from the assumption of a split and antagonistic reality which cannot be adequately represented by any system which makes its goals unity and simplicity or clarity. (20)If Minima Moralia is written from the subjective standpoint, then ND is written from the objective standpoint. [MM makes use of irony and is less formal] (21)[Adorno] defines irony as the difference between ideology and reality, and says that this difference has disappeared. Hence the classic procedure of irony which convicts its object by presenting it as what it purports to be [] and without passing judgement# is no longer possible, because there is no point in unmasking failure to measure up to a standard when the standard is itself a lie. [but] his definition of irony is the same as what he elsewhere describes as the immanent method: If Irony says: such [ideology] claims to be, but such it [reality] is, then irony works in the same way as the immanent procedure which takes the objective idea of a work, whether philosophical, sociological, literary or musical, and confronts it with the norms which it itself has crystallized. [immanent critique = irony] (23)Pitting reality against ideals is a way to criticise both the ideals and the reality without assuming a different fixed reality or a dogmatic standpoint. Adorno, of course, belongs to this tradition too [as well as Nietzsche]. (28)For Adorno, to define a concept would be to use the kind of thinking which he is criticising. [] He takes over Nietzsches idea that concepts are masks and that they hide their origins and assrts that this is due to real domination. (32)[Adorno] comments on Nietzsches alternative [the call to live every instant of life as if it were eternal] in the concluding paragraph of the essay on form, For the happiness of the instant which was sacred to Nietzsche, it [the essay] knows only the name of the negative. [] For Adorno life could not be affirmed as something apart from the life of a culture or society and its possibilities. Adorno too seeks to affirm life but, given the present society, to affirm life is to affirm that society and thus a life which does not live. Adorno instead affirms hope fo a life (that is, a society) which lives. (33)The Lament over Reification [Adorno gives a lecture in 1932 titled Die Idee der Naturgeschichte] In that lecture, Adorno attempted to redefine nature and history. Nature did not have any connotations of physical nature but meant myth or what human history bears as fatefully structured, pregiven, while history refers to the sphere of human behaviour in which change occurs. (50)Prima facie, Adorno seems inconsistent and eclectic in his appeal to the concept of reification. [] However, Adornos concept of reification is consistent and original. Many of the apparent confusions arise from his quest to avoid grounding thought in the traditional ways and from the stylistic procedures which he adopted to achieve this. Adornos theory of reification was based on commodity fetishism in a way which dependent not on Marxs theory of work or the labour-process (alienation) but on Marxs theory of value, especially on the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. (55)