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A–Z Glossary Page 279 16 A–Z Glossary Adorno A critical theorist, essayist, philosopher, musicologist and social critic, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (Frankfurt am Main 1903 – Visp 1969) is best known as a leading member of the Frankfurt School. Following the submission of his doctoral thesis on Husserl he studied composition and sought a career in music. Though by the end of the 1920s his essays on music had become more popular, Adorno’s early work as a composer and music critic was not well received and he came to devote more energy to philosophy, beginning his association with the Institute for Social Research in 1928. For Adorno, thought generally misrepresents reality by making it con- form to the instrumental human interests which dominate under capitalist modernity. Under Adorno’s analysis, modern society falsely understands the world as a totality of facts, when it can never be fully described or cognized in general terms. He was deeply critical of what he saw as the political conservativism of scientific positivism, and argued for dialectical method in philosophical research. Rejecting the idea that philosophy pro- vides access to a direct or unmediated set of truths, Adorno suggests that only dialectics can escape ‘identity thinking’: thought distorted by relations of social power which attempts to make objects conform to inadequate con- cepts. It is therefore in the anomalous – or ‘non-identical’ – that Adorno finds the strongest indictments of the poverty of the present state of things. Dialectics is ‘the consistent consciousness of nonidentity’, he writes in Negative Dialectics (1966). Though heavily indebted to Marx, Adorno remained sceptical about the revolutionary potential of the working class, preferring to speak of the way in which late capitalism permeates all levels of society with its own instru- mental logic. Adorno thought that the manipulation of popular opinion through mass media supported capitalism by distorting actual needs, and his work is characterized by an emphasis on art, literature and music. He argues that the bourgeois ‘culture industry’ attacks the reflexive autonomy of art, which requires us to transcend our impulses and identify with the experience of freedom. Nonetheless, art – rather than philosophical argu- mentation – remained Adorno’s enduring hope for a humane counter- point to the world that produced the horrors of Auschwitz, since it retains the ability to illuminate the shortcomings of the context from which it arises. 13:38:26:05:09 Page 279 Page 280 Adorno’s work is difficult and often obscure. This has in no small measure hindered appreciation of his work in analytic philosophical circles, though he is widely considered to be one of the most important continental philosophers of the twentieth century. The unrelenting critical tone of his writing is an attempt to defy philosophical convention while remaining true to its most fundamental moral impulses. The pessimistic, despairing, and often mis- anthropic tenor of his composition belies the sense of hope and utopian pro- mise that is essential for understanding his thought. Nonetheless, the criticism most routinely levelled at Adorno is that his philosophy is incapable of accommodating any adequate idea of progress or improvement in human fortune. Robert Farrow Althusser The philosophy of Louis Althusser (Algiers 1918 – Paris 1990), though shaped by many influences and concepts, is concerned largely with Marx’s thought and its application. A key concept of his work on Marx derives from Gaston Bachelard, that is the ‘epistemological break’ or rupture. Althusser applied this to Marx’s oeuvre as a way of radically separating his early humanist work, characterized by the philosophy of the subject in Feuerbach, from the historical materialist philosophy that followed. Althusser’s philosophy elabo- rates a materialist epistemology, and designates the grounds outside of this area as bourgeois ideology. His philosophy seeks, concept by concept, to separate the ideological from the real. For Althusser, Marx himself is emblematic of an epistemological rupture. The concepts of the forces and relations of production enabled social and economic thought to comprehend society not simply as a collection of individual subjects, but as a complex multiplicity of processes. Althusser’s interpretation struck a chord at a time when structuralism sought to found philosophy in the structures of language as opposed to subjective human agency. In much of his work, Althusser seeks to intervene in the cultural products of the establishment, to separate that which provides knowledge (science) from that which does not (ideology). On this basis, and influenced by Jacques Lacan’s concept of méconnaissance, Althusser developed his most influential work on ideology. Ideology suffers a misrecognition of historical reality, but this misrecognition speaks of a desire underlying it. Perhaps his best-known text, his 1969 essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, was on this subject (Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, 1971). His first approach to the subject, however, was in his 1963 essay ‘Marxism and Humanism’ (For Marx, 1965), where humanism is typified as an ideology. 13:38:26:05:09 Page 280 Page 281 Marx reveals for Althusser the fallacy of interpreting a society’s products as unveiling a singular truth about it other than the nature of its economic base. Althusser was profoundly influenced by psychoanalysis, the basis for his ‘symptomatic’ readings of Marx in which he seeks to bring out the uncon- scious structures of a text. Althusser’s friend Pierre Macherey was to set out these concepts influentially in A Theory of Literary Production in 1966. Macherey clarifies the multiple social determinations and resulting meanings behind any literary production, in opposition to searching for a singular unified interpretation of one mind’s clear intention in a text. In contemporary phil- osophy, Althusser’s materialist epistemology has had its most prominent influence on Alain Badiou. Andrew Aitken Arendt Hannah Arendt (Hanover 1906 – New York 1975), celebrated philosopher and political theorist, influenced both academic and non-academic audiences through her diverse publications and lectures. Her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), reflected upon the traumatic and horrific upheavals in Germany and Russia under Nazism and Stalinism respectively. Modern forms of totalitarianism, she argues, coalesce around a central govern- ing idea or principle such as race, nation or class (‘ideology’) and are character- ized by the institutionalized but extra-judicial use of violence (‘terror’). The way had been prepared for the rise of totalitarianism in Europe by the steady erosion of institutions of social belonging and the restriction of politics to administrative and coercive functions at the expense of its proper function as a space for citizens to engage in deliberation and collective action (‘power’). Arendt’s mature philosophical contributions can be considered under the headings of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. While the Western intel- lectual tradition has typically privileged the life of contemplation which aims to transcend the realm of action and appearance, Arendt claimed that the life of action is the higher form of human existence. In The Human Condition (1958), she distinguishes three dimensions of the vita activa: labour, work and action. ‘Labour’ denotes the activity required to sustain bare life; at this level humanity is slave to biological necessity. ‘Work’ involves the fabrication of durable objects and institutions, giving rise to a human world of culture mediating our relation to nature. ‘Action’ refers to such things as speech, remembrance, argument and judgement – activities that take place at an interpersonal level. It is only in the dimension of action that human beings are truly able to realize their freedom. Modernity has been marked by ‘the rise of the social’, i.e. the increasing preoccupation in the sphere of politics with the organization and regulation of economic matters. But in fact politics 13:38:26:05:09 Page 281 Page 282 ought to be above all a domain of action and thus enable citizens to realize meaningful and free lives. According to On Revolution (1963), what we see expressed in the history of revolutionary politics, albeit imperfectly and with varied results, is the desire to reclaim such a public space of political action and hence freedom. The Life of the Mind (1978) was intended to provide the analysis of the vita contemplativa missing from the earlier work. The analysis divides ‘the life of the mind’ into the faculties of thinking, willing and judging. Although the final volume of the project, on judgement, remained unwritten at the time of her death, Arendt’s theory of judgement has nonetheless come to prominence through her posthumously published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982). Drawing on Kant’s idea of ‘reflective judgement’, she presents judge- ment as the use of one’s imagination to arrive at a universal and impartial perspective on novel states of affairs or events. Through thinking from the standpoint of others, one is able to arrive at valid judgements even when there are no established rules or norms to apply. Matheson Russell Bachelard The philosophy of Gaston Bachelard (Bar-sur-Aube 1884 – Paris 1962) can largely be described as positivist in relation to science. He saw science, specif- ically the advances of quantum physics, as having the greatest purchase on the structures of reality.
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