NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Arendt, Adorno, and Angela Davis: A Critique of Capitalist Culture
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Field of Political Science
By
Christina Frances LoTempio
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
September 2019 2
© Copyright by Christina Frances LoTempio 2019 All Rights Reserved 3
Abstract
This dissertation explores the role and relation of capitalism in contemporary political life, with the aim to reveal the inherent oppression of what I refer to as capitalist culture. To this end, the project follows three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2) to establish capitalist culture as a significant and pressing roadblock to any sort of emancipatory politics (3) to offer a critique of capitalist culture and the inherency of oppression within it. For this purpose, I turn to the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and
Angela Davis. 4
Acknowledgments
This project could never have been imagined without the love and support of my parents, Michael and Frances LoTempio. I am forever indebted, as well, to my feminist coven, Rhiannon Auriemma and Malia Bowers, for their ever-ready indignation and constant willingness to read bits and pieces of this project. I offer deep gratitude to my advisor, Professor Mary Dietz, for her guidance through this project, as well as to my fellow graduate students, in particular to Alan Kellner, the perfect companion for this six-year journey. Finally, to my constant supporter, my best friend, my most trusted copy editor, Brad Radvansky.
Dedication
I dedicate this project to the pursuit of knowledge everywhere. 5
Table of Contents
6 Chapter 1 The Crisis of Our Time: An Introduction
27 Chapter 2 Arendt and Capitalism: A Rereading of the Social
64 Chapter 3 When Production is Life: Adorno on Capitalist Culture
97 Chapter 4 Angela Davis: A Black Feminist Critique of Capitalist Culture
120 Chapter 5 From Critique to Future: a Conclusion
129 References
139 Vita 6
Chapter 1 The Crisis of Our Time: An Introduction
“The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man.” Karl Marx, 18431
I. Introduction
If, for a breath of fresh air, you decide tomorrow to take a springtime stroll down the
Chicago Riverwalk, you are at risk of a jarring experience. You may, in fact, you are very likely to see with your own two eyes the name of the current president of the United States displayed in massive letters on the side of a building. Not unique to Chicago, a walk in New York City, Las Vegas,
Toronto, Istanbul, and Manila might easily be accompanied by the same jarring experience: the entire history of democracy flashes before your eyes as you see the fearful white light reflected off those five, massive, letters. Fascism. This is the word we use gingerly, or perhaps not so gingerly, as we read each new executive order, as we listen to each press conference, as we make our way through the released portion of the Mueller report.
But the current president’s name is not on the side of a building in multiple major cities
(twice in New York) because he is a fascist, but rather, because he owns those buildings. Elected, in part, on the claim that he was the answer to widespread economic disadvantage, he himself profits from the economic order perpetuating those disadvantages. I began this project motivated by the way in which capitalism appears to invade every aspect of our lives, and in particular, our politics.
The results of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission2 has never sat well with me. We live
1 “On the Jewish Question” 2 See
How can this be self-governance?
But now, we live in a time when our president’s name is on the side of buildings (and not in spray paint). A time when a presidential candidate can win an election in spite of (or because of) massive racism, homophobia and misogyny. A time when our president repeatedly and indefinitely lies to us. A time when our president is accused of serious crimes and yet still retains political support from a sufficient portion of the population.3 A time of crisis.
This dissertation concerns itself with the intersection of modernity and capitalism. There exists already extensive literature on modernity and critiques of modernity, literature which very often finds itself involved, at least tangentially, with a discussion of fascism, as well as with that perennial question of emancipation. This project explores the role and relation of capitalism within this well-established crisis of modernity, as well as the role of capitalism in relation to fascism and
(anti-)emancipatory politics. It examines what I will refer to as capitalist culture, with three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2) to establish capitalist culture as a significant and pressing roadblock to any sort of emancipatory politics (3) to offer a critique of capitalist culture and the inherency of oppression within it. For this purpose, I turn to the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Angela Davis.
Both Arendt and Adorno came of age and entered the university in inter-war Germany.
With the rise of National Socialism they both left Germany for New York City,4 where they would go on to write influential theoretical works. Educated in the German intellectual tradition, these theorists remain indebted to a shared collection of thinkers (Hegel, Marx, Heidegger), a great deal
3 Approval rating reported at about 39% on April 22, 2019;
Part of the next generation of political thinkers and greatly influenced by her pre-Civil
Rights Era childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis became engaged in German philosophy, and the Frankfurt school in particular, during her college studies at Brandeis University, where she met
Herbert Marcuse. She traveled to Frankfurt to pursue doctoral study with Adorno, who had agreed to supervise her dissertation. After two years in Frankfurt, Davis found herself drawn back to the
United States due to events happening with the civil rights movement, particularly the Birmingham church bombing in 1963 and the formation of the Black Panther Party. Davis completed her dissertation under the direction of Marcuse in San Diego, and became a well-known and somewhat controversial scholar and socialist activist. Like Arendt and Adorno, Davis shares a particular attachment to Marx as well as to critical theory. Her work focuses consistently on the oppressive nature and historical legacy of contemporary capitalist life. I look to Davis for a feminist critique of capitalism which identifies the undeniable intertwining of capitalist oppression with gender, sex, and racial oppression.5
The work of Arendt, Adorno, and Davis each offers a unique and yet complimentary critique of capitalist culture. In terms of this project, I view Arendt as problematizing the constant prioritization of the capitalist economy, of production, of ever-accumulating, ever-expanding capital, over the importance and relevance of human beings themselves. A comparative rereading of Arendt and Adorno looks to recover the points of convergence and divergence on this shared
5 Davis, 1974, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, p. 144-145 9 subject matter, in order to produce a new understanding of Arendt’s work, in particular, as a consistent critique of capitalist culture. Human beings exist for the perpetuation of the market, rather than the market existing for the perpetuation of human beings. Adorno reveals the way in which capitalist culture continually draws its subjects deeper and deeper into the perpetuation of their [our] own oppression. Would-be individuals experience significant increases in quality of life, in what feels like political power and freedom, as simultaneously the capitalist apparatus reduces them [us] to faceless, voiceless, interchangeable bodies, powerless in the face of society’s masters.
Davis’ work offers a method to consider intertwined forms of oppression. Clearly rooted in Marx and Frankfurt, Davis unites a critique of capitalism with a critique of gender and race. Her detailed historical work reveals the way in which the challenges of our present political moment are rooted in our economic past as well as our political past.
II. What is capitalist culture?
When I use the phrase capitalist culture, I am referring the multiplicity of ways human life in a capitalist setting embodies the practice and trajectory of capitalism itself. For a definition of capitalism I turn, of course, to Karl Marx. First, we begin with surplus value, “…value in excess of the equivalent,”6 the extra value extracted by the capitalist from the worker at no cost to the capitalist. In more detail:
“..if the worker needs only half a working day in order to live
a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs
to work only a half day. The second half of the labour day is
forced labour; surplus-labour. What appears as surplus value
6 1857/1858, p. 249 10
on capital’s side appears identically on the worker’s side as
surplus labour in excess of his requirements.”7
Surplus value refers to the value of the extra labor that the capitalist gets for free from the worker, the worker having no choice but to give this free labor from which only the capitalist will benefit.
Marx goes on to tell us that the “great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour.”8
Capital’s aim, or the aim of the capitalist, is not just to create this surplus labor, but to create the conditions under which surplus labor becomes a necessary component of labor relations. The “… severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations…has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species…”9 Capital solidifies the perpetuation of surplus value by influencing the self-recognized properties of the human species. The term capitalism, then, refers to the overarching “system geared to the maximizing of surplus value through intense and ever-intensifying-exploitation of labour power to the utmost extent…”10 To rephrase, capitalism is a system which maximizes surplus value through the exploitation of labor.
As I refer to capitalist culture, I mean to evoke a culture which revolves around this system whose aim is to maximize surplus value through the exploitation of labor. The term recalls this
“severe discipline…on succeeding generations,” identifying this discipline as sourced far beyond just the experience of labor itself, in every detail of the surrounding culture. But what is culture? Marx refers to culture a number of times, though each reference assumes a meaning of culture as something accompanying human life, something perhaps similar to religion or civilization, something contained in nationality or ethnic identity, something related to language and manners, to
7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Robert Tucker, “Introduction to The Marx-Engels Reader,” p. xxx 11 freedom and law.11 I turn here instead to Adorno, who defines culture as “the combination of so many things…such as philosophy and religion, science and art, forms of conduct and mores…[and] the objective spirit of an age.”12 The entirety of things that we see as making up who we are, what we are, where we are, how we live, and what we value. Culture is everything. In fact, Adorno goes on to say that the “single word ‘culture’ betrays from the outset the administrative view, the task of which, looking down from on high, is to assemble, distribute, evaluate and organize.”13
Through use of the term capitalist culture, I refer to the way in which that administrative view of life has penetrated every aspect of our existence. Capitalism’s discipline acts on us not just in our place of employment, but through our leisure activities, through our hobbies, through our political affiliations, and on and on. Not irrelevant, of course, is the degree to which labor has become part of our culture. The way in which our job becomes our identity, both in terms of how we identify ourselves as well as how others identify us and we identify others. It is my aim, in the following pages, to illustrate the way capitalist culture works as an all-encompassing, all-penetrating force, ever- expanding, ever-perpetuating. The critique of capitalist culture I find in Arendt, Adorno, and Davis, by way of problematizing this ever-expanding oppressive force, finally offers subtle hope toward breaking capitalist culture’s grip on humanity.
11 See The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 35, 58, 61-62, 83, 101, 161, 178, 196, 197, 486-487, 526, 527, 608 12 1972, p. 107 13 Ibid. 12
III. Recovering an Interpretive Encounter
In their recent text, Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha identify causes for the vast absence of literature on Arendt and Adorno.14 First, the division between phenomenology and critical theory. They trace Arendt to Aristotle and to a concern with truth revealed by appearance, and
Adorno to Plato and a concern with truth concealed by appearance. This division assumes a divide between phenomenology and critical theory.15 Rensmann and Gandesha claim that Arendt and
Adorno in fact embody the “phenomenology-critical theory divide,”16 and yet fail to support, or even to explore the merits of this divide. While epistemological differences should certainly be considered, whether these epistemological differences thereby result in a firm theoretical divide requires more than a gesture to this divide as already-accepted fact. Even more so, a divide so readily accepted perhaps merits exploration. Rather than a division between phenomenology and critical theory, I suggest a division between action-oriented theory and critical theory. We might even consider this in the language of Seyla Benhabib as anticipatory-utopian critique on the one side, and explanatory-diagnostic critique, on the other.17 The second division they locate is that between Arendtians and Adornians, each conditioned to dismiss the other.18 Arendt and Adorno’s
14 Interestingly, though there is a gap in literature on these thinkers together, a number of theorists, including Seyla Benhabib, J.M. Bernstein, Hauke Brunkhorst, write extensively on both Arendt and Adorno and/or critical theory/the Frankfurt school. 15 See Marsh, James L., “Phenomenology and Critical Theory,” for affinities between phenomenology and critical theory. 16 p. 6 17 Critique, Norm, Utopia. Anticipatory-utopian refers to the dimension of critique that “addresses the lived needs and experiences of social agents in order to interpret them and render them meaningful in light of a future normative ideal,” while explanatory-diagnostic refers to the dimension which views the social system as “having internal contradictions, limitations, and crises,” p. 142. 18 Arendt and Adorno, p. 6-8 13 infamous dislike for one another and indifference for one another's work19 has perhaps influenced their intellectual descendants. This may be further explainable by the division Benhabib locates; scholars who employ a certain theoretical method often elevate that type of work above all others, even when, in truth, both methods are necessary. But even in Rensmann and Gandesha’s own volume, we get the sense that this dissonance does exist, in Dana Villa’s chapter, which contrasts
Arendt and Adorno on the subject of difference, resulting in a reemphasis of theoretical incommensurability between the two.20
Following explication of these divides, Rensmann and Gandesha claim, in this “first book
[on Arendt and Adorno],”21 to “[cut] incisively across”22 these divides, presenting a collection of pieces that take a comparative look at both authors. They provide therein extensive reasons as to why we should reconsider Arendt and Adorno together, revolving primarily around their particular attentions to the “crisis of modernity,” as well as their ability to view plurality and universalism as non-contradictory concepts.
Rensmann and Gandesha begin by exploring the shared experiences of Arendt and Adorno, and it is this similarity of experience that they credit with what they find to be an ultimately shared theoretical standpoint. As has been suggested above, Arendt and Adorno share intellectual origins,
19 The only communication that exists between the two is a short correspondence concerning the publication of Walter Benjamin’s manuscripts. However, Arendt does have a copy of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason in her archived library. While Horkheimer and Adorno do not mention Arendt in their published collections of letters nor do their biographers mention her, Arendt’s biographer mentions Adorno three times, and Arendt and Jaspers mention Adorno in their letters to each other a handful of times. In one such instance, Arendt, after complaining to Jaspers that Horkheimer and Adorno accuse anyone who disagree with them of antisemitism, then concedes that despite this, Adorno is not “untalented:” see Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence, p. 634. 20 Arendt and Adorno, p. 78-104. 21 See also Carl Djerassi, Foreplay, a fictional play about Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. 22 Arendt and Adorno, p.vii 14 as well as life-long intellectual attachments, in the German intellectual tradition. They share, also, a tendency to critique this tradition, embodying, according to Rensmann and Gandesha, the spirit of
Kantian “sapere aude, ‘daring to know,’ or the courage to think for oneself.”23 Both Arendt and
Adorno mark a conceptual break with German Idealism, a break necessitated for them by the material event of the Holocaust. Indeed, this occurrence of mass genocide informs the entirety of
Arendt’s and Adorno’s respective ideas, leading each to engage post-fascist modernity and the crisis found therein.
Rensmann and Gandesha offer a contribution to intellectual history, by way of a systematic comparison of those aspects they take as central to Arendt’s and Adorno’s work, to demonstrate the fruitfulness of such a comparative reading. They argue, first and most generally, that a comparative reading might result in a recovery of the substance of Arendt and Adorno’s work, at the very least providing a reconsideration of both theorists beyond their canonical receptions. Building on this,
Rensmann and Gandesha point to Arendt’s and Adorno’s illuminations of “the ‘dark side’ of modernity. Both theorists share a distinctive quality: a critical and productive engagement with
“political modernity’s ambivalences, antinomies, and paradoxes,”24 while remaining staunchly defensive of the “possibility of human action, subjectivity, and political transformation.”25 Finally, at the core of their comparative reading, reinforcing both of these prior claims, Rensmann and
Gandesha demonstrate the shared centrality of rethinking the relation between formal universality and substantive particularity.
Rensmann and Gandesha identify this non-contradictory relation of plurality and universality in Arendt and Adorno, as well as explicate their unique and yet shared relationships to
23 p. 2 24 p. 9 25 Ibid. 15 modernity, by way of a three-part conceptualization of political modernity: the dynamics of modernization, the idea of modernity, and modernism.26 The dynamics of modernization refers to the actual transformative processes, those which may lead to new forms of domination, but which may also act as the precondition for “genuinely democratic self-rule.”27 For Adorno, they claim, this modernization carries with it “universalized instrumental rationality that subsumes and transforms particulars according to their abstract exchange value.”28 For Arendt, this modernization involves the “‘modern glorification of labor’…through which human beings regress to a merely private, atomistic self.”29
By the idea of modernity, Rensmann and Gandesha signify modernity’s normative claim to enlightenment and autonomy. Arendt and Adorno, as some of the first theorists to “conceptually detect the decoupling”30 between modernization and autonomy in the “age of Auschwitz,” insist that political modernity itself must shape any normative political response. In this way, Rensmann and Gandesha identify Arendt and Adorno’s continued attachment to these normative goals, which must be sought in new ways. These new ways include a critical reflection on modernity’s, as well as
German Idealism’s, relationship with universality. Experience, in particular, functions for both
Arendt and Adorno as a tool by which to navigate between universality and particularism. Through the use of experience, Rensmann and Gandesha suggest, Arendt and Adorno make possible a difference-sensitive universalism, a “modern normative universalism that does not fall victim to false
26 p. 12 27 p. 13; Rensmann and Gandesha explicate this dynamism by way of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 p. 14 16 universals.”31 Such experience for Arendt relies on one’s presence in the public realm, where individuals speak, act, and disclose difference. Adorno locates such experience through “individual encounters with the other.”32 In this way, Arendt and Adorno mitigate the assumed incongruity between, on the one hand, establishing universal standpoints, and on the other, acknowledging the existence of difference and plurality. For both, according to Rensmann and Gandesha, such a mitigation is necessary if we are to pursue those normative promises of modernity itself.
Finally, following from this, modernism, defined for Rensmann and Gandesha by Jay
Bernstein’s “self-consciousness of modernity.”33 Even as Arendt and Adorno provide critical, possibly pessimistic, diagnoses of “modern mass society,” they still hold hope for an emancipatory future. While their work turns a critical eye on modernity, it never loses sight of that which is to come. Simultaneous with their criticism of the past and the present, Arendt and Adorno embody constantly a commitment to modernity’s “cosmopolitan” promise, a commitment to a forward- looking politics. They give us the tools, Rensmann and Gandesha suggest, to avoid “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”34 Informed by their suspicion of modernity, their constant attentiveness to the “dark side,” and yet their continued attachment to the emancipatory promises of modernity, Arendt and Adorno, in their respective works, turned critical attention to the rise of fascism in Europe, as well as simultaneously detecting similar threats at work in the United States.
While Rensmann and Gandesha present an insightful comparative reading of Arendt and
Adorno, one might query whether it relies too heavily on similarities, and fails to consider where and how they diverge. This may be a result of the seemingly enormous gap Rensmann and Gandesha
31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 p. 15 34 p. 16 17 very consciously attempt to bridge. Interestingly, Dana Villa’s chapter, which contrasts Arendt and
Adorno on the subject of difference, in one sense provides an interesting alternative to the otherwise overwhelmingly congruent viewpoints addressed. However, in another sense, this chapter might prove the very fear Rensmann and Gandesha put forward in their introduction.35
Villa begins by detailing the different receptions of Arendt and Adorno, particularly within
Germany. While Adorno appears as the quintessential German thinker, representative of the new
Germany following World War II, Arendt has only recently, in the 1990s, begun to enjoy attention in Germany. Alternatively, Arendt has received a great deal more international attention than
Adorno. Villa problematizes the way in which Adorno’s work reduces political thought to “cultural critique and reiterated complaints about the ‘falseness’ of late capitalism and the ‘total’ society.”36
He opposes this with Arendt’s acknowledgement of “the many forces currently undermining our public realm.”37 Here Villa notes Arendt’s attunement to "an increasingly economic polity,”38 but praises her for resisting these terms as the sole terms of critique. Far from claiming that late capitalism should be the sole terms of critique, I suggest in this project that, given both Arendt and
Adorno's attunement, as well as our contemporary political context, we might do well to reconsider this under-appreciated aspect of Arendt's thought.
J.M. Bernstein, more sympathetic to the possibility of an Arendtian-Adornian project, suggests, in his chapter, that utopia, for Arendt and Adorno, might provide the “promise of the new in its continual movement of rising up and falling.”39 Bernstein locates a utopian moment in both
35 See also Villa, “Genealogies of Domination: Arendt, Adorno, Auschwitz” in New German Critique. 36 p. 81, Arendt and Adorno 37 p. 98 38 Ibid. 39 p. 77 18
Arendt and Adorno’s thought, moments characterized differently but giving rise to a great deal of criticism toward each theorists’s usefulness for politics. He argues that the utopic criticism of
Arendt, more specifically that she does adequately address the question of "social justice,” results from her concern with the instrumentalization of politics. To see politics as a means for securing ends, for Arendt, results in the instrumentalization of life; Bernstein characterizes this concern as
“pure Adorno.”40 Both Arendt and Adorno, he claims, problematize Marxist instrumentalization of political action. Arendt’s “negativity,” which I interpret as her refusal of politics for ends, while tied to the “utopian promise present in actual democratic politics…can converge with and empirically anchor Adorno’s binding of negativity and practice.”41 In other words, what is conceived as pessimism or political impossibility by critics, read together better outlines the conditions of political action. Bernstein claims that in both Arendt and Adorno, “freedom is given shape and meaning through the concrete forces of domination, repression, coercion, and reification ranged against it, and the acts of resisting those forces.”42 Through diagnosis, critique, and resistance, both find the promise of freedom. Like the promise of the new rises and falls, this freedom is never achieved, but continually pursued.
Unfortunately, this comparative-divergent commentary remains minimal in the volume. The editors rely heavily not just on Arendt and Adorno’s shared critique of modernity, but on their shared attachment to the idea of modernity, to its emancipatory promises. As a vital component of the relation they build between Arendt and Adorno, this shared attachment takes too much for granted. Seyla Benhabib suggests that Adorno, while incredibly successful in the field of
“explanatory-diagnostic” critique, fails to venture beyond this to an “anticipatory-utopian” form of
40 p. 75 41 Ibid. 42 p. 76 19 critique, and thereby remains in the realm of value-free knowledge acquisition.43 While Adorno’s continued concern with fascism and other forms of un-freedom44 is evident throughout his work, his attention to viable political action is often questionable. Although Rensmann and Gandesha refer briefly to this, suggesting that “only Arendt developed an influential theory of politics” and perhaps that “critical theory’s ‘democratic deficit’ is one of the areas where Arendt may complement the work of Adorno,”45 they fail to fully address such common criticisms as that referenced here from Benhabib. Debatable, too, is Rensmann and Gandesha’s apparent conflation of “plurality” and
“difference,”46 particularly in relation to Arendt, for whom they certainly mean very different things.
Difference seems to signify identity and the importance of particular identities, of particularity, while plurality refers to “the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world.”47 Plurality as a collection of particularities might make sense, but again, the conflation remains unclear and unexplored.
This dissertation finds valuable contribution not just in the similarities between Arendt and
Adorno’s ideas, but also in the differences between their ideas in light of these similarities. As Seyla
Benhabib points out, both the explanatory-diagnostic critique and the anticipatory-utopian critique remain necessary for a fully comprehensive method of critique. Rensmann and Gandesha provide an important contextual argument by which to preface my proposed project. That is, that Arendt and Adorno address the same problem, that they are critical of the same things, that is, modernity,
43 See Critique, Norm and Utopia 44 See Dialectic of Enlightenment, Culture Industry, The Authoritarian Personality 45 Arendt and Adorno, p. 15 46 p. 14 47 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 7 20 fascism, and the anti-emancipatory tendencies continually embraced in the contemporary world.48
My project takes up the editors’ call that Arendt and Adorno’s writings should “be taken seriously as theoretical, philosophical, and indeed political enterprises with striking contemporaneity.”49 As with the editors, it begins with Arendt’s and Adorno’s shared concern about conformity and thinking for oneself. It also takes as a starting point the shared biographical and educational experiences of
Arendt and Adorno.50 But it considers, too, the important differences in their critical-theoretical work. Both the different receptions of Arendt and Adorno, as well as the different ideas they themselves propose, considered in light of these similarities, promise worthwhile insight for contemporary literature on the crisis of modernity.
IV. Positioning a Feminist Critique of Capitalism
A comprehensive critique of capitalist culture requires clear and detailed attention to gender, sex, and race as forms of oppression intertwined with capitalism itself. There exists already a great deal of literature on Arendt and feminism,51 much of which struggles with the concept of Arendt as
48 Robert Fine also characterizes Arendt and Adorno as both addressing a basic contradiction of modern society: that is, the decline of rights in the face of the logic of commodification inherent in the capitalist economy, Arendt and Adorno p. 154-172. 49 Arendt and Adorno, p. 7, italics are my own. 50 Gandesha appears particularly eager to established shared epistemological ground between Arendt and Adorno based on the concept of experience. His purpose in this is to offer, in a period of forced and increasing migration, a rehabilitation of experience through Arendt and Adorno’s own experiences of exile. See also Joanna Scott, “Alien Nation: Hannah Arendt, the German Émigrés and America,” which explicates the different experiences of exile in New York and California. 51 See also Katherine Adams, “At the Table with Arendt: Toward a Self-Interested Practice of Coalition Discourse,” Joanne Cutting-Gray, “Hannah Arendt, Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win,”” Mary Dietz, “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt,” Bonnie Honig, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (edited volume), Kathleen B. Jones, 2015, “Queer(y)ing Hannah Arendt, or what’s Hannah Arendt got to do with intersectionality?,” Kimberly Maslin, “The Gender-Neutral Feminism of Hannah Arendt,” Patricia Moynagh, “A Politics of Enlarged Mentality: Hannah Arendt, Citizenship Responsibility, and Feminism.” 21 feminist interconnected with the value of reading her work for feminist theory. This dissertation suggests reorienting attempts at feminist interpretation of Arendt to an acknowledgement of the economic categories she highlights in The Human Condition. Mary Dietz, in Turning Operations,52 suggests an inherent gendering of Arendt’s categories: animal laborans as female, and homo faber as male.53 By exploring the condition of plurality simultaneously with the condition of gendered economic attachment, I suggest that Arendt can offer insight to an analysis of gender and sexuality within contemporary capitalism, with the aid of feminist theoretical work.
Interestingly, there is not nearly as much feminist theory-related literature54 on Adorno.
Andrew Hewitt recalls a moment of Dialectic of Enlightenment which identifies the representation of woman as a unique exclusion within an all-inclusive discourse, signifying their awareness of the role of gender in their analysis of consumer capitalism.55 The girl who prepares for her date, hailed differently than the man who arrives to take her on a date, participates in and completes an important aspect of the culture industry.56 I want to engage this opening that Hewitt points to by bringing a feminist analysis to Adorno’s own engagement with late modern capitalism. With that said, this analysis requires feminist theoretical work beyond what is offered in regard to Arendt or
Adorno. To begin positioning this analysis, I turn first to Rosemary Hennessy for a brief analysis of gender, sexuality, and race in the setting of capitalist culture.
52 Mary Dietz, Turning Operations 53 p. 112 54 See Theodor Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture,” and Negative Dialectic p. 136, Mary Caputi, “Identity and Nonidentity in Aesthetic Theory,” Renée Heberle, Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (edited volume), Ross Posnock, “Henry James, Veblen and Adorno: The Crisis of the Modern Self.” 55 Andrew Hewitt, “A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno Revisited?” in Heberle 56 Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 136 22
In Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism,57 Hennessy highlights the problem of visibility58 within the complex social structures and power relations of late capitalism. She suggests that something she refers to as “culture-ideology” provides capitalism with the legitimation process it requires to agree to, and then mask, its basic “motor.” The “motor” of capitalism, Hennessy explains, is the basic material inequality of the relationship between capitalist and worker; that is, the
“relationship whereby capitalist benefits at the worker's expense.”59 This motor, then, is legitimized and masked by a variety of culture-ideology practices, an array of “beliefs, norms, narratives, images and modes of intelligibility…that displace, condense, compensate, mask, and contest”60 that basic inequality of capitalism, as well as the influence of capitalism itself. Race, gender, and sexuality are types of these culture-ideology practices.
Hennessy goes on to tell us that she has, in fact, shifted her view about the primacy of capitalism from her first book, where she argued that economic, cultural, and political facets of social life are mutually determining because she came to see how systematic the effort to suppress consciousness of capitalism as a class system was becoming. Arendt and Adorno, as will be argued later, identify exactly this pervasive, difficult-to-track configuration of capitalism as it commences with the fall of fascism. For each theorist, capitalism requires a certain conformity and thereby deters political action, providing in the very illusion of freedom and equality its (capitalism’s) own reinforcement. Contained within this illusion, I want to argue, there exists an illusory emerging freedom from traditional norms of gender and sexuality that simultaneously entrances and tames.
57 2000 58 1995, p. 10; Wendy Brown also locates this difficulty in tracking “late modern configurations of capitalism.” 59 p. 11 60 Ibid. 23
The pervasiveness of capitalism, its subtle creeping into every aspect of life, finds new accomplice in seemingly progressive allowances of gender and sexuality.
Hennessy argues that by fostering consumption, neoliberalism provides the fabric for human connection, though not in the sphere of critical citizenship, but rather, in the “shopping mall.” Key reasons for neoliberalism’s success are, she suggests, this divergence of the public from meaningful connection with one another, as well as meaningful participation in governance. From this,
Hennessy demonstrates further that, within the limits of late capitalist consumption, “the visibility of sexual identity is often a matter of commodification, a process that invariably depends on the lives and labor of invisible others.”61 While acknowledging that increasing queer cultural representations certainly has positive effects, Hennessy remains attuned to a critical consideration of these increasing representations in relation to “capital’s insidious and relentless expansion.”62 Queer subjects’ visibility as consumer subjects does not necessarily lead to their visibility as social subjects. She reminds us that “not only is much recent gay visibility aimed at producing new and potentially lucrative markets, but, as in most marketing strategies, money, not liberation, is the bottom line.63
Hennessy’s work proves useful as a way to situate Arendt and Adorno’s critiques of capitalist culture, as well as the somewhat limited feminist literature on this aspect of their work, in relation to a feminist critique of capitalist culture attentive to the intertwining role of gender, sex, and race.
However, her work neglects to identify the role of race and racial oppression in capitalism and capitalist culture. For this purpose, I turn to Davis for a black feminist critique of capitalist culture.
Ever-committed to her Marxist and socialist political thought, Davis’ work consistently identifies
61 p. 111 62 p. 112 63 Ibid.; see also Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public.” 24
“interconnected systems of oppression,”64 including but not limited to gender, sex, and race.
Through detailed historical analysis, Davis tracks the simultaneous development of capitalism, sex and gender oppression, and racism in the United States, constantly attentive to a theoretical formulation of capitalism. In her own words, “…philosophy provides a vantage point from which to ask questions that cannot be posed within social scientific discourse.”65 Davis provides a unique lens through which to identify Marxist and Frankfurt theory through the history of struggles66 for women’s rights and civil rights. Much like Adorno himself, who was committed to an interdisciplinary academic approach, and even reminiscent of Arendt’s use of history,67 Davis reaches to philosophy simultaneously with historical re-telling as this “vantage point,” not as an application of theory to a particular event, not a fitting on or fitting in, but as a way to use a theoretical approach in order to interpret specific historical events and series of events, events which, as a nation deeply concerned with racism, sexism, economic inequality, and inequality of many other forms, we desperately must address.
V. Moving Forward: A Roadmap
This project positions Arendt, Adorno, and Davis in relation to each other, and yet asymmetrically, with Adorno acting as the link both theoretically as well as physically, as the chapter between, Arendt and Davis. Below I offer a brief introduction to chapters two through four. Each of these three body chapters are interactive to different degrees, and proceed in order of the
64 Eduardo Mendieta, “Introduction to Abolition Democracy,” 2005, p. 16 65 Davis 2005, p. 23 66 See Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “History as a Core Subject Area of African American Studies,” 2007 for a discussion of Angela Davis as “self-taught and self-proclaimed historian,” as well as the influence on and purpose of this method in her work. 67 We see examples of this in a number of texts, but I have in mind particularly Arendt’s use of history in The Origins of Totalitarianism, as well as in The Human Condition. 25 subtitle, beginning with Arendt in chapter two, Adorno in chapter three, and finally Davis in chapter four. The final chapter, chapter five, consists of a brief conclusion to review the variety of arguments made throughout the text, and offer a concise summation of the project overall.
Chapter two, the Arendt chapter, begins by addressing what I take as the overarching problem of the age, as well as the political reality in which it is able to take place: the problem of capitalist culture. To identify, understand, and address this political reality and the problems it poses for political life, I evoke Arendt’s warning “that the true predicaments of our time will assume the authentic form…only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.”68 While the specters of totalitarianism certainly live among us, Arendt’s suggestion of a more subtle predicament informs my own investigation of capitalist culture as this predicament. I choose in this chapter to explore
Arendt’s use of the term social, with the intention of revisiting the economic significance of the social. I offer a comparative reading aside Adorno’s culture industry so as to resolve the seeming- disparity between multifarious interpretations of the social. Beyond the dispute and criticism of this term in much of the Arendt literature, I pursue the ‘why’ behind Arendt’s use of the term social. By exploring exactly what Arendt meant to evoke with this term, I aim to regain political salience and relevance for the Arendtian social.
Chapter three, the Adorno chapter, suggests a turn to a thinker who, while outside of the traditional toolbox of political theory, provides an in-depth analysis of the capitalist economic apparatus and its impact on individuals. Regardless of our particular characterization of our current threat, whether “crisis of democracy,” “rise of populism,” “neoliberalism,” “late capitalism,” etc.,
Adorno’s work assumed this threat long before the recent trend towards illiberalism in Europe and the United States. In this chapter I identify Adorno’s social diagnoses and problematizations which signify the roots of many illiberal ideas and institutions grappled with in our present moment.
68 1953, p. 303 26
Adorno repeatedly identifies the detrimental risks of a “world whose law is universal profit;”69 a world centered around production, profit, and the accumulation of wealth. The main focus of this chapter is exactly what Adorno means by such a world. I explore the way in which Adorno sources the loss of individuality, the rise of interchangeability, and the challenge of critique as would-be individuals are better provided for even by the very frameworks which usher in the aforementioned loss. I suggest that the feeling, the experience, of greater freedom, greater access to goods and services, may in fact be characterized as a false consciousness in regard to our own degree of social control and social power.
Chapter four, the Davis chapter, addresses the multiplicity of oppressions suffered at the hands of capitalist culture, as well as the deep roots of these oppressions. I offer a brief overview of feminist critiques of capitalism, to illustrate feminist scholar’s historical attentiveness to the problem of capitalism for gender, sex, and race. With Davis, I draw attention to the way in which capitalist culture deploys racism and sexism as a method by which to perpetuate the capitalist economic order. Sourced in detailed historical analysis of the 1800s women’s rights struggle and abolitionist movement in the United States, Davis provides a historical avenue through which to see the development of phenomena identified by Arendt and Adorno in the previous chapters. I explore Davis’ critique of capitalist culture, of which she offers a global aspect, as a mode by which to loosen capitalist culture’s grip on our world.
69 Adorno 1966, p. 362-363 27
Chapter 2 Arendt and Capitalism: A Rereading of the Social
“It may even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume the authentic form—though not necessarily the cruelest—only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” Hannah Arendt, 195370
I. Introduction
In late March 2018, prosecutors in Louisiana announced the decision not to charge police officers with Alton Sterling’s 2016 death.71 Coinciding with the funeral of Stephon Clark, an unarmed African-American man shot and killed in his grandmother’s backyard, the events of this week,72 once again, returned the deadly tensions between law enforcement and communities of color to the national spotlight. For years, the United States has been engaged in a national conversation on police and security-based violence against persons of color, beginning with Trayvon
Martin’s death in 2012,73 or perhaps even earlier, with public outrage surrounding the 1991 arrest of and police brutality against Rodney King.74 The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, as well as countless protests surrounding a number of police-involved deaths of African American persons in the interim, indicates the prevalence of this issue as a matter of national importance.
70“Ideology and Terror,” p. 303 71 On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old African American was fatally shot several times at close range by two white Baton Rouge Police Department officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. See New York Times, 27 March 2018,
When asked whether the president planned to provide leadership on this issue, White House Press
Secretary Sarah Sanders said that this is a “local matter.” As journalists pressed her to speak further, she responded: “We want to find ways to bring the country together, certainly not looking for any place of division…I think you’ve seen that in the policies [the President has] put forward, he wants to grow the economy, he wants to do that for everybody, but when it comes to the authority to, the things that were decided in the last few days, those are things that have to be done at a local level.”75
This response exemplifies a particular problem of our time. That is, the prioritization of economic growth over pressing political issues articulated by citizens.
This chapter addresses that problem, what I take as the overarching problem of the age, as well as the political reality in which it is able to take place. A political reality in which, in the United
States, corporations are essentially considered citizens with the right to vote via campaign donations.76 A political reality in which, in 2016, we elected a billionaire with no previous political experience as president of the United States. A political reality in which the federal government persistently ignores pressing political issues that permeate the country: widespread racism, sexism, and homophobia, extensive police violence against people of color, frequent and deadly mass shootings, mass income inequality, and mounting environmental crises.
I characterize the problem of this political reality as the problem of capitalist culture. By capitalist culture, I gesture to the multiplicity of ways the pursuit and accumulation of wealth influences our contemporary political reality.77 To identify, understand, and address this political reality and the problems it poses for political life, I look to the work of Hannah Arendt, evoking her
75 See “White House Daily Briefing,” 28 March 2018,
Despite the already-vast body of literature,79 I choose to return to Arendt’s social, with the intent neither to rescue nor refute. Rather, I return with the intention of revisiting the economic significance of the social, connecting this economic interpretation with other meanings ascribed to the social, and employing the social as a tool to understand and address our contemporary political reality. I will suggest that reference to Theodor Adorno’s discussion of the instrumentalization of reason and, in particular, his designation of the culture industry, a contemporary of Arendt’s term,80 can aid to resolve the seeming-disparity between multifarious interpretations of the social.
78 1953, p. 303 79 For Arendt’s social, see also Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 2000; Richard Bernstein, “Rethinking the Political and the Social,” 2000; Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, 1974, and Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, 1992; Andre de Macedo Duarte, “Hannah Arendt, Biopolitics, and the Problem of Violence,” 2007; Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, 1989; Ari- Elmeri Hyvönen, “Tentative Lessons of Experience: Arendt, Essayism, and “The Social” Reconsidered,” 2014; Onur Ulas Ince, “Bringing the Economy Back In: Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and the Politics of Capitalism, 2016; Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics,” 1994; Kateb, George, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, 1983; Steven Klein, “Fit to Enter the World”: Hannah Arendt on Politics, Economic, and the Welfare State,” 2014; James T. Knauer, “Rethinking Arendt’s Vita Activa: Toward a Theory of Democratic Praxis,” 1985; Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Freedom, 1988; Kirstie McClure, “The Social Question, Again,” 2007; Owens, Patricia, “The Supreme Social Concept: The Un-Worldliness of Modern Security,” 2011, “Human Security and the Rise of the Social,” 2012, and “Not Life but the World Is at Stake: Hannah Arendt on Citizenship in the Age of the Social,” 2012; John F. Sitton, “Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy, 1987; Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, 1998; Roy T. Tsao, “Some Distance from Greece: Rethinking Arendt; Arendt Against Athens: Rereading The Human Condition,” 2002; Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, 1996; Sheldon S. Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” 1983. 80 Compare Dialectic of Enlightenment published 1944, and The Human Condition published 1958. 30
Considered by some as Arendt’s “most controversial term,”81 much of the literature on the social puzzles over Arendt’s multiplicity of deployments of that word, both in a variety of forms
(the noun social, the adjective social, the noun society, with and without the addition of the adjective mass [society]), as well as in a perceived variety of meanings. Some thinkers distinguish between the
“economic” social and the social as “high society.”82 Others identify the economic, “mass society,” and “sociability.”83 A third view discerns the economic social and the “conformist social.”84 Some readers have gone so far as to dismiss the value and analytical work of the term due to its
“inconsistency”85 and “internal incoherence.”86 We might even embrace the view, offered by some of Arendt’s readers, that Arendt herself dismissed the term soon after publishing The Human
Condition, evidenced by the absence of the hypostasized social in subsequent work.87 Rather than throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water, I follow Onur Ulas Ince’s recent suggestion, “we get the most from this concept when we take the social as…a tool that does its job if it discloses something about the political reality to which we apply it.88
I take the third view identified above, the social as economic and social as conformist, as the basis for my own intervention. Rather than begin from a position of criticism, problematizing the categorization of issues as either social or political, what if we begin by considering the “why” behind this impulse? Why did Arendt find it necessary to introduce this particular category, in this
81 Ince 2016, p. 571 82 Canovan 1974 83 Benhabib 2000 84 Pitkin 1998, p. 183 85 Bernstein 2000, p. 17 86 Canovan 1974 87 Pitkin, p. 203 88 Ince, p. 581 31 particular way, in this, and only this, particular text? What, precisely, is lost when administrative issues take up the majority of the public-political arena? What is the social meant to disclose about our political reality?
II. The Emergence
The social appears in Arendt’s 1958 text The Human Condition, wherein she describes the
“emergence of the social” as “the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices…from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere.”89 In other words, the emergence of the social signifies public, political, governmental concern with issues and activities previously irrelevant to politics. Issues previously considered “household” matters become matters of national concern, coinciding with the very concept of a nation able to be concerned. The significance of this juxtaposition of “household" and “public,” as well as the contrast between “modernity” and “antiquity” has resulted in a good deal of scrutinization and criticism for Arendt. With the shift from antiquity to modernity, she locates a particular way of engaging in politics, as well as particular definition of politics itself, that seems to have been lost in the shift from antiquity to modernity. She tells us that the rise of the social not only blurs the lines
“between the sphere of the polis and the sphere of the household and family,”90 “between private and political,”91 but that it has “changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen.”92 By Arendt’s understanding, the strict division in antiquity between public and private allowed for the existence of the public realm.
89 p. 38 90 p. 28 91 p. 38 92 Ibid. 32
With this well-established and well-maintained public realm, citizens could count on a space wherein they could appear politically, act politically, participate in political discourse, overall, citizens could count on a space where politics could exist. Throughout The Human Condition, she seems to harken back to this ancient designation of politics and its strict division between public and household, or private, thereby opening herself to a good deal of criticism for what has been interpreted as elitism and a desire to return to the political arrangements of antiquity, arrangements built on the systematic suppression and oppression of a number of populations.
To better understand what Arendt means by the social and the rise of the social, as well as why she turns to the politics of antiquity as exemplary of political life, we should consider her explanation of the human condition itself. The human condition, according to Arendt, can be understood by three defining conditions: (1) “life itself,” the biological processes of the human body and the requirements for that body to survive, (2) "human artifice,” “artificial world of things… meant to outlast and transcend” those who build and use it, the world we inherit, continue to build together, and leave behind for those who follow us, and (3) “plurality,” the “fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world.”93 All three of these conditions, together, constitute what it means to be human, the “basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.”94 Each condition, further, corresponds to a fundamental activity, life itself to “labor,” human artifice to
“work,” and plurality to “action.” While these different activities play different roles in and for human life, each one is necessary for human flourishing on earth, “all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics.”95 Each condition, and the activity associated with each condition, makes up the conditions without which politics could not be. However, “plurality is
93 p. 7 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 33 specifically…the conditio per quam — of all political life,” the condition through which political life is.
To identify the necessity of plurality for politics, Arendt turns to the image of politics in ancient
Greece. Arendt differentiates between public and private in antiquity, characterizing the former as the sphere of the polis, and the latter as the sphere of household and family.96 She locates labor in the private realm, “not need[ing] the presence of others,”97 and action in the public realm, “entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.”98 The very separation of realms in which each activity occurs and belongs is what allows, in Arendt’s view, for the flourishing of political activity.
Inherent to this flourishing, of course, is a hierarchical structure in which a large percentage of the population is considered a non-citizen and limited to the private realm wherein they take care of labor-related activities, thereby permitting citizens the free time necessary to be men of action, participating politically in the public realm.
We might interpret this image as an indication that we should seek a return to such a political order, with such a hierarchical structure. If we interpret Arendt as elitist in this manner, we must also interpret Arendt as suggesting, and truly believing, that we can and should backtrack from the rise of the social and return to a pre-existing political order. In all of her discussion of the social,
Arendt makes no reference to a way to get rid of the social itself. Rather than suggesting a return to the glory days of oppressive democracy, we can better interpret Arendt as using the designations of antiquity to identify new challenges for political activity beginning in modernity and continuing into in our contemporary moment. This interpretation understands the entire discussion of the social as an attempt to locate a particular shift in the subject of politics, rather than to harken back to Athens, or even to suggest that Arendt's description of antiquity is accurate or even meant to be accurate.
96 p. 28 97 p. 22 98 p. 23 34
Further, this interpretation suggests that Arendt’s categories, the social, in particular, but also labor, work, action, public, private, etc., are meant as tools to better understand political life, rather than to identify how political life should be. Take work, for example. Unlike labor and action, each of which is housed definitely in a particular sphere (labor in private, action in public), does not fit neatly into either sphere, nor does it have a sphere of its own. Work erects our common world, preparing the literal space for the public realm, and creating the material setting for a realm of action. Some thinkers have argued that the appropriate interpretation of Arendt’s conceptual triad labor, work, action, is not as a triad at all, but “rather as the fraught conjunction of two different pairs of concepts—labor and work, and work and action.”99 Questioning the consistency of work as a triadic category in The Human Condition opens the door for further questioning the purpose of
Arendt's categories as categories to identify the proper organization of human life, versus as conceptual tools to track patterns of phenomena that play a role in political life.
What shift, then, is the social meant to track? Arendt identifies a blurred division between
“activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life.”100 A blur, in other words, between the private sphere and the public sphere. “Private” issues not only enter the public eye, but begin to be considered as issues relevant to politics. Again, Arendt has received a good deal of criticism for this observation, perhaps somewhat unfairly. Evocative of Michel
Foucault’s biopolitics, Arendt problematizes the way in which this shift presents the “body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken
99 Markell 2011, p. 18 100 Arendt 1958, p. 28 35 care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.”101 Arendt problematizes102 this housekeeping not because of the housekeeping itself, but rather because of what is left out of politics when politics consists solely, or just mostly, of housekeeping. That is, politics are left out of politics. Preoccupation with housekeeping, with the maintenance of life, eclipses political life.
III. The Social as Economic
This shift to housekeeping comes as a result of expropriation, and expropriation's own resultant, world alienation.103 First, what does Arendt mean by expropriation? She tells us the assumption that there has always been a propertyless class is wrong. In antiquity, and even as late as the fifteenth century, free laborers consisted of “free shopkeepers, traders and craftsmen,”104 all owners of their own labor and the profits of their labor. Arendt does not claim that the entire population had this freedom. Certainly, she uses the male pronoun and the category “head of household” to identify this often-unrecognized category of political person. She also differentiates between these owners of property, free to be political, and slaves, propertyless, unable to be political actors. She suggests here not that there were pre-modern days of widespread political rights.
Rather, she points out that political activity and participation were not quite so limited as we often assume, and means of survival were much more individually governed and owned. With the arrival of the modern age, comes as well a new understanding of property and a newfound relevance of wealth. To own property meant, originally, according to Arendt, “to be master over one’s own
101 Ibid. 102 The problematic of Foucault’s biopolitics is the amount of power and control the government gains over individual lives and the lives of particular populations. Arendt’s concern with human freedom might make this a relevant problematic for her, as well, though it is not the subject of this chapter. 103 Arendt, p. 254 104 p. 66 36 necessities of life and therefore to be potentially a free person, free to transcend [one’s] own life and enter the world we all have in common.”105 Rather than ownership of material possessions or even land, to own property referred to ownership of oneself, one's own means of survival, and one’s ability to exit the private realm to participate in the public realm. Of course, to be able to exit the private realm requires ownership of a private realm in the first place, and “while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own
(like a slave) meant to be no longer human.”106 When Arendt refers, then, to expropriation and the resulting the “propertyless classes” as the signpost of the modern age, she refers to dispossession of these classes that previously owned their own means of sustaining their necessities of life, the shift from self-owned labor to wage labor. This trend rises as the accumulation of wealth overtakes entry to the common world as the aim of human life and sign of human flourishing.
This replacement, accumulation of wealth replacing the importance of political life and political activity, accompanies, in fact paves the way for and ensures the success of, the “rise of a capitalist economy.”107 Distinct from the pre-modern norm of individuals owning and governing their own means of meeting the necessities of life, the expropriation of the modern-age results in a
“new laboring class,” a class deprived of “their place in the world,” deprived of any control over
“their naked exposure to the exigencies of life.”108 A class reliant on wage labor, a class no longer owners of their own profits and their own labor. A class which “literally lived from hand to mouth,” a class which “stood not only directly under the compelling urgency of life’s necessity but was at the same time alienated from all cares and worries which did not immediately follow from the life
105 p. 65 106 p. 62 107 p. 255 108 p. 254 37 process itself.”109 A class which no longer has the ability to transcend the private realm and enter the common world. This class, previously free to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to be political, can no longer transcend their own labor of survival.
From this massive shift of population into the class of wage laborer hails the “hallmark of the modern age,” world alienation. That is, the product of human activity, “mundane [human] activity,” “whose deepest motivation, on the contrary, is worry and care about the self…without any care for or enjoyment of the world.”110 With a population isolated from the world, unable to enter the common world, unable to participate or act politically, political activity, the pinnacle of human flourishing, diminishes into the mere activity of housekeeping. People are poor, people are hungry, people are fighting for survival, and as a result, the issues that appear publicly are social issues, issues concerned with the maintenance of life. A particular example of this is Arendt’s problematization of the French Revolution, and its terms of resistance as it accused the “ancien regime” of “having deprived its subjects of…the rights of life and nature rather than the rights of freedom and citizenship.”111 The primacy of social issues overwhelms the political realm. This overwhelming, nonsensical in that these are issues “to be put in the hands of experts, rather than issues which could be settled by the twofold process of decision and persuasion,”112 this overwhelming eclipses the very politicality of the public realm.
In other words, the shift that Arendt identifies with the social is the rise of capitalism. This is not to say that the social is identical with capitalism, but rather that the rise of the social, the replacement in the public sphere of political issues with social issues results from the rise of a
109 p. 255 110 p. 254 111 1963, p. 99 112 p. 81 38 capitalist economy. To begin her tracing of the social, Arendt returns to ancient Athenian political life because it is a well-known instance of politics, of democracy, one with which everyone reading her work probably has some degree of prior knowledge, and it is undeniably prior to capitalism.
With the social, Arendt attempts to trace the way in which capitalism and world alienation eclipse the politicality of the human condition.
IV. Conformity and the Social
Unlike “social,” a term relatively limited to The Human Condition, the term “society” appears throughout Arendt’s work. At times, in The Human Condition, Arendt appears to use society as a synonym of social, at times, both in The Human Condition and elsewhere, society appears to refer, more colloquially, simply to a collection of persons, and at times, society appears to refer to the norms and rules required by and to maintain the social itself. While these first two uses of society are pretty straightforward in relation to the social, the third is quite interesting. When Arendt deploys society in this way, she identifies certain effects that the social has on individuals, and certain requirements the social expects from individuals. Society appears to be the way that Arendt names the sum of these effects and requirements, and the mechanism by which they are established and perpetuated.
Society, Arendt tells us, decisively “excludes the possibility of action.”113 With this exclusion of action, Arendt identifies a second shift, from action to behavior, ushered in by the rise of society, but still simultaneous and reflexive to the shift accompanying the rise of capitalism. Society
“expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior,”114 a sharp shift from the public realm, which once offered a space for the expression and appearance of individuality, wherein “men
113 1958, p. 40 114 p. 40 39 could show who they really and inexchangably were.”115 Society achieves this behavior by “imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”116 Society requires its members to conform to a certain type of behavior. Indeed, the “conformism inherent in society”117 affects not just outward behavior, but internal or mental capacities of members, allowing “for only one interest and one opinion.”118
The rise of world alienation, and the accompanying eclipse of public, plurality, and politics, paves the way for this widespread conformity, and at the same time, is itself reinforced by itself.
Arendt explains this conformity as “the assumption that men behave and do not act with respect to each other.”119 Rather than recognizing and responding to one another, acting, reacting, and interacting in the public realm, members of society behave. They behave not in response to each other, or even to specific events and ideas. Instead, members of society follow certain patterns of behavior in order to pursue the “assumed one interest of society as a whole.”120 Society, Arendt tells us, “is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”121 Plurality here falls away, and with it, shared uniqueness of each human, the condition through which political life exists. The assumption of this shared behavior unifies
115 p. 41 116 p. 40 117 p. 41 118 p. 46 119 p. 41-42 120 p. 40 121 p. 46 40 humanity not based on the condition of plurality, but instead based on the condition of life itself.
While the condition of life itself and the survival-based activities attached to life itself must always be a part of the human condition, to limit human activity and the human condition to merely survival and physical life is, in fact, to limit all of human life to a life that is not fully human. The rise of widespread conformity and preoccupation with survival necessarily delimits human flourishing, allowing economics to “achieve a scientific character,”122 replacing “political science” with “national economy” or “political economy.”123 Up until the modern age, economics were a
“not too important part of ethics and politics and based on the assumption that men act with respect to their economic activities as they act in every other respect.”124 The idea that humans behave, rather than act, and that this behavior is motivated by a pressing urge to meet the needs of biological life, to survive, prioritizes economic issues above all others.
Economics as both the new science, as well as the most pressing science, reinforces conformist behavior at every turn, as it simultaneously minimizes the significance of plurality, politics, and political debate. “Under the conditions of a common world,” Arendt explains, “reality is not guaranteed primarily by the ‘common nature’ of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.”125 The politicality of politics in a common world consists in the coming together of these diversities of position and perspective, to address the same object. This is politics. Society is devastating in that it levels the varieties of perspectives, and removes the common object, a common world. In the modern age, when the deepest motivation is
122 p. 42 123 p. 27-28 124 p. 42 125 p. 57-58 41 worry and care about the self, “the sameness of the object,” the common world, “can no longer be discerned.”126 Arendt uses the image of a group of people sitting at a table to evoke not just the devastation, but the “weirdness” of such a situation and the consequences of this loss of common world:
“The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic
séance where a number of people gathered around a table
might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table
vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting
opposite each other were no longer separated but also
would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything
tangible.”127
The sudden loss of the table is shocking, disconcerting, and confusing. Nothing particular orients two people, sitting across from each other, toward each other, once the table disappears. The table offers a space of connection and sharing. We meet at tables to share ideas, to share food and drink, to console and to counsel, to celebrate and to mourn. The table between these two people orients those people toward each other, encouraging recognition and acknowledgment. It provides a surface on which to place books and notes, bowls of spaghetti and a bottles of wine, tissues, candles, lamps. The table which we gather around gathers us together at a common table, in a common world. Without a table, where will we place our books and our candles? How will we share our spaghetti and our wine?
126 p. 58 127 p. 53 42
According to Arendt, “what makes mass society so difficult to bear…[is] the fact that the world between [us] has lost its power to gather [us] together, to relate and to separate [us].”128 The social simultaneously fails to provide a way for us to gather, a thing for us to gather around, as well as fails to allow us to differentiate ourselves from each other. Assuming that we behave rather than act, society fixates political economy, rather than the guarantee of such as rights of freedom and citizenship129 as the prime pursuit of the nation. With these two simultaneous shifts, the disconcerting failure to gather and relate, and the crushing command toward conformity, I argue that Arendt identifies and problematizes the rise of a self-perpetuating capitalist culture.
At the same time that capitalist culture keeps members in line, continually reinforcing the capitalist economic order, this self-perpetuation often feels like the seeds of progress. The emergence of the equality principle is one such seed.130 Emphasis on the “one-ness of mankind,”131 on a shared and standard behavior, widespread acceptance of the idea that “all men are created equal,”132 as well as increased access to culture, the “good” society133 and increased class mobility encouraged this view of the equality of all persons. Arendt problematizes the value of equality as offered in the context of capitalist culture. Modern society does not offer an extension of social
128 p. 52 129 p. 99, 1963 130 Other seeds include class mobility and the nouveau rich, social services, and technological advances. 131 p. 46 132 On this, Arendt differentiates herself from Tocqueville and what she considers as most views of the relationship between equality and conformity: The social comes into being, as Arendt puts it, before the “principle of equality…had had the time to assert itself.” This is an important point for Arendt, as it prevents the roots of conformism in that principle of equality, as we have assumed “since Tocqueville.” Though this mandate of conformity does not result from the rise of equality as a generally accepted principle, it is exacerbated by it, see p. 39. 133 More on this in the next section. 43 equality, but rather an extension of an equal oppression. The equality principle signifies the absorption of all social groups into the general social body. Here, the “realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength.”134 Arendt identifies the illusory nature of such a principle, in that “the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm.”135 This equality "is in every respect different from equality in antiquity…[wherein] the public realm...was reserved for individuality.”136 Today, we are all the same no longer in the fact that we are all unique, but rather, that we are interchangeable.
V. On Dialectic of Enlightenment
Adorno and Horkheimer tell us, in the 1944/1947 preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, that
“what [they] had set out to do was nothing less than explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”137 Something, it seems, has gone wrong.
The progress narrative of human life on earth has been interrupted, has gone astray. And what is worse, for Adorno and Horkheimer, we, the collective body of humanity on earth, have not noticed.
Fresh from the experience of National Socialism, fleeing Germany, losing friends and loved ones to the horror of the Holocaust, Dialectic of Enlightenment does not set out, in 1944, to decry the terrors of fascism, of nationalism, of xenophobia, as the major perpetrators of this “new barbarism.”
Rather, they point to an attempted mastery over nature, locating the roots of this mastery centuries
134 p. 39 135 p. 41 136 p. 41 137 p. xv 44 earlier. With the fall of Nazi Germany, we should not be so naive as to think the causes of such tragedy have disappeared, nor should we make the mistake of thinking that something was wrong in
Germany in particular, rather than in western political sensibilities overall.
The phenomenon Adorno and Horkheimer identify for us in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they source in the enlightenment itself, in the event of it, the manner and attitude of thinking produced by the enlightenment and carried along through the years to their intellectual present, and to ours.
They identify, particularly, a way of approaching knowledge and truth. Frustration with tradition, mythology, and superstition, frustrations which spur the “Scientific Revolution,” have led human beings to “seek to learn from nature…how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings.”138 “Use,” as in, utility, purpose, become the primary motives of intellectual occupation. An urge to conquer the unknown, the unpredictable, results in the loss of meaning: the “concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.”139 On the pedestal, we find the method.
The method leads humans in their pursuit of progress. Anything learned along the way is important only as far as it furthers the method, as it furthers human progress. Yet the method, as most things atop a pedestal, is itself attached, ever so ironically, to myth, the myth of the possibility of mastery.
Along with meaning, the “enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.”140
Without this self-awareness, the truth to which the enlightenment clings runs the danger of falling into the category of myth itself. While myth sought “to report, to name, to tell the origins,”141 enlightenment required utility above all else. It “pushed aside the classical demand to ‘think
138 p. 2 139 p. 3 140 p. 2, italics are mine. 141 p. 5 45 thinking’…because it distracted philosophers from the command to control praxis.”142 More inventions, more technologies, an ever-increasing body of scientific knowledge, these are the things that make progress. Rather than conquering myth, enlightenment has merely taken its place: “Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity.”143 Humans take the place of God, and while blind trust and belief in tradition, religion, myth, may end, that same trust attaches to enlightenment itself.
With the enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, this particular moment which Adorno and
Horkheimer trace as the foundation of modern intellectual thought and the problems it contains, human beings achieve unprecedented power, but “purchase their increase in power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted;”144 that is, human estrangement from nature, and from one another.145 Ironically, that which intended to improve the human condition, to further human progress, to make us more free, in reality achieved an unprecedented model of oppression: capitalism. Recall from above, the authors’ assertion that human beings “sought to learn to use
[nature] to dominate wholly…[other] human beings.”146 Greater knowledge, greater technology, greater progress has led not to a more free and just world, but to a world where domination itself has been perfected. To use human knowledge for the betterment of the human condition, the enlightenment called for inventions made not by chance discovery, but by systematic inquiry. What results from this systematization? Industry—the Industrial Revolution—Capitalism.
142 p. 19 143 p. 6 144 Ibid. 145 p. 21 146 p. 2 46
Enlightenment thinkers employ a particular “schema for making the world calculable,” a schema which “makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities.”147
Named as abstraction, this “instrument of the enlightenment” strips nature of its qualities,148 “makes everything in nature repeatable.”149 This “leveling” quality of abstraction extends to the would-be liberated masses. Adorno and Horkheimer warn:
Animism has endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls
into things. On its own account, even in advance of total planning,
the economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which
decide the behavior of people…The countless agencies of mass
production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the
individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. Individuals
define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes
or failures. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or
unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function…150
The authors propose here that, with the “disenchantment of nature,” the “extirpation of animism,”151 human beings have lost their souls, along with the animals, the trees, and the assumed components of nature. The mastery of nature occurred simultaneously with the abstraction of humanity. People have become commodities. Actions, behaviors, likes and dislikes are influenced by the requirements of the market. As true today as it was at its 1944 publication, perhaps more
147 p. 4 148 Ibid. 149 p. 9 150 p. 21 151 p. 2 47 true, Adorno and Horkheimer allow us to understand the complexities of a contemporary moment in which forty-one employees of the technology company Three Square Market agree to have microchips inserted into their arms, for no greater reason than to ease their access to company facilities.152 What better example than this of individuals defining themselves as things? Entirely normalized, the language of human beings as successes or failures appears equally at home in the boardroom as in the living room. The phrase “I have to work” offers an unquestionable excuse to any obligation, while the phrase “I am ill” is neither sufficient nor even interesting to the employer.
Work really is the ultimate authority. Our role in the workforce defines our life, our purpose, all aspects of our identity.
The enlightenment itself doomed its own ideas of human rights, human freedom, human progress, the ideas upon which it was founded, by way of this leveling of all existence. With the subordination of reason to logical formalism,153 we lose the ability to talk about certain things.
Concepts, moral and ethical claims, claims that were meant to be a contribution of the enlightenment. There is nothing behind the logic, no normative commitment; there can be nothing behind the logic. All we need is the logic, according to this habit that Adorno and Horkheimer locate as beginning with the enlightenment, as indicative of the project of enlightenment in western intellectual thought. This brings me to Arendt. Certain things that cannot be decided by formulas, by equations, by logic—these are the things that Arendt calls politics.154 The abstraction of humanity, Adorno and Horkheimer explain, “is not a relapse into the old barbarism but the triumph of repressive égalité, the degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals.”155 The
152 See BBC News, 24 July 2017,
“expulsion of thought from logic,” from intellectual pursuit, the “lecture hall [ratifies] the reification of human beings in factory and office.”156 This mode of thought, enlightenment, abstraction, positivism, legitimizes the expansion of capitalist values, the primacy of these values, throughout all facets of society. We should not be so naive as to think that the market’s disregard for social status implies a more free and just world; this seeming “blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.”157 The market’s disregard for birth has nothing to do with a doing-away of hierarchal social norms, and everything to do with maximizing production.
Dialectic of Enlightenment tells us that “machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them.”158 The authors evoke a few things here: First, horrific labor practices within factories, practices still very much in effect today. They also suggest the consequences of improved technological weapons. But beyond these, they point to the mutilation of people through the exploitation of their labor. The need to fit, to succeed, to “adapt to [capitalist] power”159 perpetuates the system of domination instilled by the market. To resist, to question, to refuse, all seemingly actions promoted by the enlightenment, becomes impossible from within the capitalist system. The market, the capitalist, the one percent commands the power that allows it to “dominate wholly both [nature] and human beings,”160 in order to maximize production, and thereby to
156 p. 23 157 p. 9 158 p. 29 159 p. 28 160 p. 2 49 maximize their own possession of capital. This does seem to suggest, on the part of the masses, an inability to act, to resist, or even to notice their own oppression. While Marx attempts to awaken the working classes with his call for all workers to unite, Adorno is frequently interpreted in a more pessimistic light: In regard to Adorno’s later work, Minima Moralia, Dana Villa claims that the
“bleakness of Dialectic of Enlightenment has here hardly dissipated. In fact, it has deepened…in terms of humanity’s ever-expanding technical capacity to create hell on earth.”161 In Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer explain exactly why any form of “resistance” might be so difficult. They argue that “by subordinating life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation, the controlling minority guarantees, with its own security, the continuation of the whole.”162 Of course echoing Marx’s suggestion, Adorno here resonates also with Arendt, who warned as well of the dangers of subordinating life to the requirements of its preservation. Indeed, when Arendt credits the development of the social realm as the cause of a blurring “between activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life,”163 she identifies the development of economics as an area of study as corresponding to, as an alternative to, as overtaking the importance of, political science, defining “economic” as “related to the life of the individual and the survival of the species.” The public realm, overrun by the concerns of survival, by the needs and requirements of “life itself,” no longer offers a space for politics, for plurality, for political action.
Here, Arendt and Adorno both address the challenges and consequences of capitalist culture. With the blurring of the private and public realm, Arendt identifies a loss of political space
161 2007, p. 28 162 p. 24 163 1958, p. 28 50 and the extension of economic (species-survival) concerns into all aspects of human life.164 Adorno suggests that capitalism is structured in such a way that the exploited masses do not have the opportunity to change or even think about changing the structure, because they are constantly occupied by the requirements of livelihood. By identifying the loss of a public, political realm, as the Arendtian aspect, and the self-perpetuating structure, as the Adornian aspect, I suggest that both
Arendt and Adorno demonstrate the way in which capitalism challenges human freedom and political progress. I unite them as thinkers offering critiques of “capitalist culture,” by which I mean the variety of ways that capitalism presents itself in all areas of human life. As far as Dialectic of
Enlightenment offers an “explanation of why humanity…is sinking into a new kind of barbarism,”165 a diagnosis, in other words, of “what went wrong,” The Human Condition, beyond its diagnosis, suggests how things might otherwise be. Chapter 3 will explore how this aspect of Arendt helps us to politicize Adorno and “Adornian pessimism.” But at the moment, this diagnostic aspect of Dialectic of Enlightenment can help us to identify the diagnostic aspect of Arendt’s work, both within and beyond The Human Condition. Arendt names plurality as the condition “of all political life,” as not only the “conditio sine qua non,” the condition without which it could not be, but the “conditio per quam,” the condition through which it, that is, political life, is.
Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the
same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as
anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.166
164 Canovan 1974, p. 118 165 p. xv 166 p. 8 51
Plurality simultaneously unites and differentiates us: we are all the same, in that we are all unique.
Arendt repeats this sentiment over, and over, and over.167 If a first-time reader takes one thought away from The Human Condition, most likely, it is this one. In light of the emphasis and importance
Arendt places on plurality, the danger of the social realm begins to makes more sense. If our shared uniqueness, our shared individuality is the political quality par excellence of all humanity, then sameness, conformity, is the enemy of human political excellence.
VI. The Culture Industry
Both Arendt and Adorno identify and problematize capitalist culture’s inherent conformity
One “natural, decent, and rational”168 behavior, disseminated from the market much like behavior was once disseminated from God through the Church, determines the actions, the desires, the interests, the lives of the masses. Adorno and Horkheimer point specifically to culture, and to what they term as the culture industry,169 as a great disseminator of conformity in capitalist societies.
The culture industry problematizes the constant, total, and sole orientation of persons toward economic interests. Culture today, Adorno and Horkheimer tell us, “is infecting everything with sameness.”170 It requires conformity in the interest of the normative (capitalist) economic order, and tasks itself with teaching this very conformity. The culture industry supports the full instrumentalization of society, society as oriented toward production. Donald Duck’s cartoon- beatings “hammer into every brain the old lesson that…the breaking of all individual resistance is
167 p. 7, 178, 244 are just a few of these moments. 168 Adorno et. al. 1944, p. 21 169 Adorno tells us that “…the expression ‘industry’ is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself—such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer—and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process” 1972, p. 100. 170 p. 94 52 the condition of life in this society.”171 Individuals exist only as part of the mass, as sharing the interests and the pleasures of that mass, particularly that capitalist, productive mass. This society expects a certain type of behavior, adherence to a certain norm, that the culture industry reinforces, toward the interest of the capitalist monopoly controlling that very industry.
The culture industry presents the illusion of equality, in that it makes the listeners of radio, or viewers of film, all equal and related to one another on the same level. It does this not to equalize, but to expose persons to a certain message in a totalitarian fashion. Recall: “enlightenment is totalitarian.”172 The culture industry “provides something for everyone, so that no one can escape.”173 This illusion of choice and taste functions to confuse the universal and the particular, to confuse the very ability of differentiation within such a culture. Whether one watches the cartoon or the comedy, the same message will be reinforced, that of conformity and of continual orientation toward production.
Adorno and Horkheimer tell us that “even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according to the unity of production.”174 The culture industry lacks the ability to acknowledge difference in relation to persons (individuals are not individuals, but are part of the mass) as well as to acknowledge differentiation in interest. The culture industry pursues continued and increased economic production, as the interest of society generally, and thereby of all individuals composing that society. This precludes any possibility of political, emancipatory, or reformative interests. Adorno and Horkheimer are acutely aware of the power constructive behind technological power. That is, that while “technical rationality today is the rationality of domination,”
171 p. 110 172 p. 4 173 p. 95 174 p. 98 53
“the basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is the strongest.”175 While the culture industry certainly engages in a leveling of individual members, there clearly exists a man behind the curtain, i.e. certain members of the society who inhabit a place of economic privilege and use the production of culture to reinforce that privilege and promote specifically their economic interests. The culture industry follows from the rise and expansion of a capitalist economy, the quintessential signifier of capitalist culture.
VII. Arendt’s “Crisis in Culture”
Arendt, as well, has quite a bit to say about culture in modern society. She suggests that there has been a shift both in what culture is, as well as in why culture is considered valuable. Arendt designates mass culture, a phenomenon “interrelated” with that of “mass society.” The designation
"mass society” appears, for the most part, outside of The Human Condition, in particular in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The common denominator between mass society and mass culture, Arendt tells us,
“is not the mass but rather the society into which the masses too have been incorporated.”176 This suggests that the “crisis” Arendt identifies in her essay “Crisis of Culture” as inherent to mass culture was activated not by something about culture itself, but, again, by the rise of the social.
Arendt frequently refers to something called “good society,” by which she means something that “probably had its origins in the European courts of the age of absolutism,” during the
“eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”177 Used to maintain the status quo, to maintain the supremacy of monarchs, society regulated the interests and pursuits of the salons. And yet, “as long as society itself was restricted to certain classes of the population, the individual’s chances for
175 p. 95 176 1954, p. 195 177 p. 196 54 survival against its pressures were rather good.”178 The individual could always escape into the non- society strata. The very creators of culture, particularly of works of art, escaped incorporation into society, even as society itself acted as their audience. Society, then, arose not just in general, but in particular among the upper class, as a way for rulers to control the citizens who might have the ability to rise against them. Arendt here describes society as something actively pursued by rulers.
This at first appears different from the way Arendt describes the rise of the social in The Human
Condition, wherein she describes the emergence of the social as the “rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere.”179 The court society that Arendt describes begins the shift of these
“housekeeping activities” into the realm of appearance. But even then, the individual remains possible. The massification of society cues the true crisis of culture, that is, sameness. The “blind conformism of bourgeois society” enters as the "new body politic” for the "new bourgeois society”180 of the seventeenth century.
How and why does this blind conformism, and the crisis of culture from which it ensues, relate to politics? She suggests that a different way of relating to culture and to objects of culture has shifted the role of these objects from culture to “consumable entertainment.” With the extension of society to mass society, to encompass the majority of the population, certain pastimes of society have been extended to the general population as well; that is, the concept of “leisure time” generally. Something “happens to culture under the different conditions of society and of mass society.”181 The “cultural philistine,” as Arendt referred to a member of the socially inferior
178 Ibid. 179 1958, p. 38 180 1951, p. 141 181 1954, p. 197 55 middle class who found himself in possession of new wealth and a pressing desire to enter into the realm of society, “seized upon [cultural objects] as a currency by which he bought a higher position in society.”182 A certain mentality arose, which “judged everything in terms of immediate usefulness.”183 Arendt problematizes the “use” of cultural artifacts, a problematization that recalls
Adorno’s critique of enlightenment method. For Arendt, “it may be as useful and legitimate to look at a picture in order to perfect one’s knowledge of a given period as it is useful and legitimate to use a painting in order to hide a hole in the wall.”184 The problem does not arise in these uses themselves, but rather, when one lacks awareness that these usages “do not constitute the proper intercourse with art.”185 The problem arises from the educated philistine who “read the classics… prompted by the ulterior motive of self-perfection, remaining quite unaware of the fact that
Shakespeare or Plato might have to tell him more important things than how to educate himself.”186
The use of the painting, or the play, or whichever cultural object, to perfect one’s own knowledge is not problematic in and of itself, but is only problematic when the object is seen solely as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. The problem arises when cultural objects are treated as values, as “social commodities which could be circulated and cashed in,” as exchange values.
This, according to Arendt, begins the crisis of culture. With the rise of mass society, the crisis of culture expands, into what Arendt terms the new phenomenon of mass culture. Society and mass society placed different demands on culture. The former “wanted culture, evaluated and devaluated cultural things into social commodities, used and abused them for its own selfish purposes, but did
182 p. 200 183 p. 198 184 p. 200 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 56 not ‘consume’ them.”187 Mass society, on the other hand, “wants not culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just like any other consumer goods.”188 Arendt differentiates entertainment from culture, and uses the term
“entertainment industry” where Adorno would certainly use “culture industry.” She claims that
“mass society, since it does not want culture but only entertainment, is probably less of a threat to culture than the philistinism of good society,”189 with one small caveat. “Confronted with gargantuan appetites,”190 the entertainment industry “seizes upon cultural objects,”191 and thus, mass culture comes into being. Under this new phenomenon of mass culture, “culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”192
According to Arendt, “entertainment, like labor and sleep, is irrevocably part of the biological life process,”193 concerned with the survival of the species, rather than the building of a world. We can only even begin to think of culture once survival and worldliness have been established. What does it mean, then, when that which was meant to be the artifice, to outlast its creators and those who interact with it, is consumed? For Arendt, it means the crisis of culture.
187 p. 202 188 Ibid. 189 p. 203 190 Ibid. 191 p. 204 192 Ibid. 193 p. 202 57
VIII. The Subtlety of Oppression
The consumability of culture troubles both Arendt and Adorno. Spurred by increased accessibility to cultural artifacts and experiences as well as an increase in leisure time of the masses, increased production and availability of culture to feed rising appetites essentially validated the means-end valuation of culture itself. This shared problematization of culture itself, however, comes as a result of other trends of modernity, centering around this shift toward means-end valuation.
With this chapter, I aimed to identify the parallel trends in Arendt and Adorno as each thinker identifies the rise of the capitalist economic apparatus and the challenges such a rise poses for political freedom. I do so to resolve the seeming-disparity between various interpretations of the social in Arendt scholarship, as well as to unravel the relevance of the social for our contemporary political predicaments. By identifying shared critiques of capitalist culture, I locate, and hope to persuade my readers, of a shared concern between Arendt and Adorno, a concern not with an isolated incident, but with a social and political trend accompanying the rise of capitalism.
This trend includes a massive shift toward the instrumentalization of reason and a means-end system of values, incurring mass conformity across the population as the economic apparatus gains increasing impact on the behavior of individuals. As a frightening accompaniment of this infectious
“sameness,” Arendt and Adorno both identify a false sense of social progress, an assumption that sameness signifies equality, rather than a more widely-distributed oppression. The mass-production, or industrialization, of culture reinforces both this crushing conformity and the experience of that conformity as equality, liberation, and class mobility. Both thinkers here certainly bring to mind
Marx’s On the Jewish Question,194 wherein Marx problematizes the assumed synonymity between political emancipation and human emancipation. Adorno and Arendt share a concern with what
194“On the Jewish Question” 1843, p. 35 58
Marx calls false consciousness. The economic apparatus, and the controlling elite of that apparatus, have a vested interest in maintaining the deception of the masses. As they reveal to us the subtle, sneaking, creeping dangers of capitalism, Arendt and Adorno both draw our attention to the ways in which the world we live in has not so much changed since Marx, but rather has developed far less obvious ways to instill and perpetuate oppression. They are concerned with the assumption of progress when, in reality, oppression has merely improved its disguise.
Just as Adorno locates one “natural, decent, and rational”195 behavior, disseminated from the market, so too does Arendt identify that society “expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior.”196 This preoccupation with a loss of free action, free thinking, and free decisions making presents a major point of convergence for Arendt and Adorno. The social requires certain behavior from its members, a behavior that, Adorno points out, is learned and continually reinforced by the so-called cultural objects in which we are immersed. The reward we receive as contemporary subjects, access to so-called culture, to leisure time and leisure activities, to a seemingly increased quality of living and of life, all of these things work to perpetuate a hierarchical and oppressive world order.
IX. Conclusion: Eclipse of Politics
We return, now, to the question posed at the outset of this chapter: What is the social meant to disclose about our political reality? Arendt observes a transformation of western political life, a transformation complicated by the multifarious compulsions of life within the confines of a capitalist economic apparatus. Human plurality’s significance, for Arendt, lies in the relation of action, of the vita activa, to this plurality. The possibility of action, that human activity which makes
195 Adorno et. al. 1944, p. 21 196 Arendt 1958, p. 40 59 us truly human, exists only under the condition of plurality. We can only act amongst other human beings, different, particular, unique human beings. Action contains the possibility for thinking the world anew, for new and unforeseen imaginaries. Arendt mourns the impossibility of thinking something anew within the social’s demand of conformity. Horkheimer and Adorno mourn something similar in the culture industry, in that it “confronts human beings with a model of their culture.”197 It leaves no room for divergence or imagination. Those who attempt to avoid conformity are labeled “asocial,” “abnormal,”198 and considered fair game for that classic Donald
Duck beating.199
Earlier, I suggested that with the social, Arendt locates a particular shift, something that begins at the outset of modernity and comes to a sort of precipice in her contemporary moment.
The absorption of culture by the entertainment industry, for the purpose of the mass-production of consumable entertainment, evokes the very blurring “between activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life”200 that Arendt describes as indicative of the rise of the social. Further, both Arendt and Adorno refer to the increasing prevalence of utility as the upmost value of objects and occupations. Both the enlightenment thinker and the educated philistine exhibit a new habit of thinking, one interested in, even so far as centered around, utility, value, currency. Knowledge becomes something to perfect, to conquer, to stockpile, to instrumentalize.201
This utility-centered habit grows in popularity, becomes the norm of intellectual life. Arendt, like
Adorno, traces this habit and connects it to capitalism.
197 Adorno et. al. 1944, p. 95 198 Arendt 1958, p. 42 199 Adorno et. al. 1944, p. 110 200 Arendt 1958, p. 28 201 Horkheimer refers to this, in his 1947 Eclipse of Reason, as the “instrumentalization of reason.” 60
For both Arendt and Adorno, instrumentalization itself is not necessarily always problematic. Adorno problematizes not instrumentalization itself, but instrumentalization as the sole approach to reason and thinking in the world. Arendt, too, concedes that in some cases, instrumentalization and, what follows, bureaucratization, can be appropriate ways to organize our world. She explains this by differentiating between things that we can know with certainty and things we cannot know with certainty, using the example of housing. What adequate housing is, what it actually consists in, is the social question. Whether adequate housing should also be integrated, for example, is the political question. “With every one of these questions,” Arendt tells us, “there is a double face. And one of these faces should not be subject to debate. There shouldn’t be any debate about the question that everybody should have decent housing.”202 The problem arises, for Arendt, when the social issue, the issue we can know with certainty, what adequate housing consists in, appears as a political issue. This encourages a conflation of social and political issues, issues we can know with certainty and issues that require public debate. With this conflation, the role of public debate falls away, all issues become the same type of issue, and thereby able to be addressed in the same way. Arendt identifies this conflation as a major failing of the French
Revolution:
“Since the revolution has opened the gates of the political
realm to the poor, this realm had indeed become “social.”
It was overwhelmed by the cares and worries which
actually belonged to the sphere of the household and
which, even if they were permitted to enter the public
realm, could not be solved by political means, since they
202 Hill, p. 318: These comments are from Arendt’s response to Mary McCarthy and Richard Bernstein at a 1972 conference in Toronto. 61
were matters of administration, to be put into the hands
out experts, rather than issues which could be settled by
the twofold process of decision and persuasion…the
whole questions of politics, including the then gravest
problem, the problem of form of government, became a
matter of foreign affairs."203
Preoccupation with social issues, with cares and worries that were really matters of administration rather than politics, prevented the revolutionary masses from engaging in the politically that had been, or should have been, the purpose of the revolution in the first place.
Through her designation and discussion of the social, Arendt identifies a major political challenge of the modern age, a challenge more, rather than less, prevalent in our contemporary moment: the eclipse of politics. Capitalist culture, with its multiplicity of self-perpetuating reinforcements, eclipses the true issues and objects of political life. Preoccupied with issues of biological life, with the accumulation of wealth and individual success and advancement within the confines of the governing economic order, we neglect issues relating to the governance of a plurality of human beings living together on earth, inhabiting the world. This neglect itself benefits and perpetuates capitalist culture. It prevents attention to the most essential and political condition of the human condition, that is, the condition of plurality. At the same time that capitalist culture engenders widespread conformity, it simultaneously encourages a crushing obsession with the importance of self-interest.
Reflecting on our contemporary political reality, I return to Arendt’s problematization of the social to re-establish the importance of plurality for politics. From Arendt, with the help of
Adorno’s critique of capitalism, I re-characterize the subject of politics. Rather than viewing politics
203 1963, p. 81 62 as the administration of economic life with a view toward increasing the national GDP, Arendt pushes us to understand politics as the decisions we make and values we engage together, as a public, about how we live together, as a public. The rise of political economy led to a centering of economy, and a forgetting of political. This forgetting is clear in Press Secretary Sanders' deflection of rising racial tensions across the country. The White House and the President have no interest in commenting on this issue of how the American public is (or is not) living together. Rather, the
White House and the President draw attention to the national economy. Growing the national economy is the best way to benefit the American public; addressing racial tension, mounting racial violence, and outright racism is irrelevant, in the eyes of the current government.
Readers may question this assessment, suggesting that this White House, this President, this government, are outliers, a sick joke, a mistake we should not take as representative of contemporary American politics. The next chapter will argue against this view, suggesting that by tracing the roots of illiberal ideas and institutions from the present moment through the work of
Adorno, we gain valuable insight to our political reality beyond merely problematization or diagnoses. While the current chapter makes use of a great deal of shared attachments and concerns between Arendt and Adorno, the fact remains that significant theoretical divergences do exist between the two thinkers. Not least of these is their own personal and mutual distaste of the other.204 Theoretical attachments and schools of thought provide a significant area of divergence, as well. Adorno’s positionality in relation to Marx and Hegel significantly splits from that of Arendt,
204 Arendt wrote frequently to Karl Jaspers that she believed Adorno was behind attacks on Heidegger, even accusing him of using his mother’s name to appear less Jewish to the Nazis. She was well known to have harbored resentment toward Adorno ever since his vocal denial of Gunther Stern’s postdoctoral appointment at Frankfurt am Main. However, her library does contain a copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and she did admit to Jaspers that Adorno is not “untalented” (p. 634) For what it is worth, Jaspers vehemently disagreed on this last point. See Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1992, as well as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, 1982. 63 though I have suggested, in this and the previous chapter, that Arendt’s own attachments to Marx are deeper and more engaging than commonly thought. The Aristotelian-Platonic split, another frequently-cited divergence, gives rise to the division between phenomenology and critical theory.
Far from attempting to ignore or resolve this divergence, I suggest that the incongruence between
Arendt and Adorno’s theoretical frameworks and readerships makes even more compelling their shared problematization of the contemporary economic apparatus and the resulting capitalist culture. Adorno’s consistent and explicit concern with problematizing capitalism and it’s effects provides guidance to Arendt’s own methods of problematization. Similarly, Arendt’s discussions of what politics should be or should look like provides useful resources to more deeply examine
Adorno’s work, beyond the often-assumed pessimistic-diagnostic limits, to search in Adorno as well as Arendt for answer to that perennial question, “What can be done?”
64
Chapter 3 When Production is Life: Adorno on Capitalist Culture
“While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before.” Theodor Adorno, 1944205
I. Introduction
A number of general concerns animate contemporary political-theoretical inquiry. The quest for justice, equality, peace, representative and deliberative governance have, more or less, motivated political theory since antiquity. In a time when we face seemingly new challenges, such as mass income inequality in the face of, or as a result of, late capitalism, renewed, or rather newly visible, racism and sexism, the question of who to turn to, whose work to engage in order to shed light on these challenges and to allow political theory to approach these challenges surfaces once again. I suggest we look outside of the traditional toolbox of political theory, to a thinker whose work provides an in-depth analysis of the capitalist economic apparatus and its impact on individuals.
Political theorists frequently reject the political value of Theodor Adorno’s work,206 claiming his work is too pessimistic to offer any real political contribution. His work, these critics claim, provides diagnoses of problems without any solutions. It seems that Adornian pessimism precludes the possibility of any recovery or response to these diagnoses. This chapter contends that Adorno’s
205 Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xvii 206 For this perspective, see Simone Chambers, The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, 2004, p.234; Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, 1978, p. 50; Heinz Steinert, Culture Industry, 1998; Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, 1984, p. 202; For an alternative perspective, see Samir Gandesha and Lars Rensmann, Arendt & Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, 2012; Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, 2002. 65 work in no way precludes the possibility of addressing these diagnoses, and in fact provides a rich political and cultural commentary of particular interest in our contemporary political moment.
Having experienced first-hand the horrors of national socialism, Adorno wrote consistently to address what he saw as the constant threat of fascism,207 always lurking two steps behind, on the other side of any door, just out of sight. Whether we refer to our current political threat as the
“crisis of democracy,” “rise of populism,” “neoliberalism,” “late capitalism,” etc., Adorno’s work assumed this threat long before the recent trend towards illiberalism in Europe and the United
States. In fact, Adorno locates the seeds of this recent turn in the downfall of fascism in the 1940s and the response of western and particularly U.S. culture.
This chapter suggests that Adorno’s social diagnoses and problematizations signify the roots of many illiberal ideas and institutions grappled with in our present moment. Adorno repeatedly identifies the detrimental risks of a “world whose law is universal profit;”208 a world centered around production, profit, and the accumulation of wealth. Such a world, willing to brave any means if it results in a maximization of profit, looses its ability to acknowledge what cannot be measured, to prioritize and preference any goal beyond economic stability and success. People, too, are lost in this process. Individuals who are more than just cogs, more than just butchers or bakers or candlestick makers, but who have thoughts and feelings and interests and a role to play in the world beyond just their industrial occupation. As individuals are valued only as far as they are considered to be productive contributors to the workforce and the economy, that very individuality begins to fade
207 In fact, Peter Gordon writes, “Adorno came to believe that fascism, too, owed much of its success to techniques first developed in advertising (such as the use of mass-produced logos and carefully crafted appeals to personal satisfaction) along with the ‘repetition of designated words’ that magically invoked dates of personal and collective bliss…In Adorno’s view, the jargon of authenticity functioned in a manner similar to popular music and fascist propaganda, stereotyping and hollowing out the subjectivity it claimed to preserve” p. 97, Adorno and Existence, 2016. 208 Adorno 1966, p. 362-363 66 away. Even life outside of the workforce, one’s own “leisure time,” intertwines with the efforts and goals of the capitalist apparatus. This massifying, this sweeping curtain of sameness eclipses traditionally-identifiable categories such as class conflict and class struggle, leaving behind the would-be individuals in a sea of social helplessness, measured solely by their contribution to that governing apparatus. Individuals themselves, and not just the surrounding apparatus, measure themselves, their own value, their own identity, not in terms of human being amongst fellow human beings, but in terms of their productiveness, their usefulness, as contributing members of a society synonymous not with welfare, well-being, and community, but with that governing capitalist apparatus. Through the above developments, individuals themselves become unidentifiable, interchangeable, not just to the surrounding apparatus, but to each other.
Simultaneous with this interchangeability, would-be individuals experience a significant increase in the quality of life, or at least, what seems to be an increase. As we experience these improvements to our quality of life, we become increasingly attached to the apparatus providing them,209 increasingly reliant on technology and the persons and power structures behind those technologies. The feeling, the experience, of greater freedom, greater access to goods and services, may in fact be characterized as a false consciousness in regard to our own degree of social control and social power. As we experience a refreshed surge in misogynist, racist, and homophobic sentiment, we must reflect on the above as how we ended up here, before reaching the understandable and often-asked question, what can be done?
209 See Wendy Brown “Rights as Paradoxes” for another iteration of this dilemma. In the following chapter, I turn to Angela Davis to investigate sexist and racist attachment of capitalist culture and capitalist oppression. 67
II. A World Whose Law is Universal Profit
In the 1969 preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer acknowledge the possibility that the formulation they offer in their text, in regard to some specifics, “…is no longer adequate to the reality of today.”210 Perhaps this acknowledgement on the part of the authors themselves can work to assuage any misgivings present as I encourage our turn toward Dialectic of
Enlightenment; certainly, this text meant to inform the aftermath of the National Socialist terror.
Certainly, this text remains undeniably tied to its particular temporal setting and context. And yet, this text remains explanatory of our contemporary political moment. Adorno and Horkheimer follow their acknowledgment of the text’s limitations with the admission, “…all the same, even at that time we did not underestimate the implications of the transition to the administered world.”211
That is, they did not underestimate the degree to which the law of universal profit would come to govern every aspect of our world.212
What does Adorno mean when he describes the world as one whose law is “individual universal profit?”213 What does it mean for the law of the world to be universal profit? Adorno writes this to set the context for a particular reality. This reality consists of something beyond fear, beyond terror, a reality in which terror is entirely regular. Only the call to seek profit, to achieve profit, to maximize profit, offers some remnant of a world commitment. Any idea of laws to provide justice, equality, and peace has long since ceased to exist, in practice if not also in ideology. Far from an
210 Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, p. xi 211 Ibid. 212 Julian Roberts suggests that, “…with Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno identify a number of ills, including the “mythification of philosophy…and…features of American capitalism, notably racketeering and other monopolistic abuses, on the one hand, and ‘amusement,’ that is, the ideological dumbing-down of culture perpetrated by Hollywood and the entertainment industry— on the other,” Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory 2004, p. 58. 213 Adorno 1966, p. 362 68 abstract argument lost in its own negativity, Adorno here attempts to recognize a problem resulting from the fascist experience, an unacknowledged stronghold of oppression despite the fall, and even the disavowal, of fascism itself. It matters that the self under capitalism remains just as invisible as the self under fascism. Adorno’s efforts to reveal not just the oppressive effects of fascism, but the remnants of those oppressions within the capitalist apparatus, offer an avenue for a critique of capitalism sourced in the history of oppression itself. Late capitalism, of both Adorno’s and our contemporary moments, offers merely the most recent instantiation of oppressive power apparatuses.
People no longer come first (if they ever did).214 Perhaps this is better put as, people remain inferior to the goal of the governing apparatus. Today, “profit comes first.”215 The needs of individuals, constructed by the market itself, work to further the progress and profit of that market, rather than the individuals themselves. The consumer, or “customer,” “is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject, but its object.”216 The consumer, the customer, the individual, exists for the purpose of the market, of the culture industry,217 of the governing apparatus, and yet we have been convinced that the opposite is true. Rather than a market formed by and responsive to the needs of individuals, Adorno identifies a “humanity fashioned into a vast network of consumers [wherein] the human beings who actually have the needs, have been socially
214 Stuart Walton characterized democratic politics under late capitalism as that of “…a society that would crumble to bits if individuals were allowed full measure of their constitutional gains hardly has the interests of individuals at heart,” p. 31, Neglected or Misunderstood: Introducing Theodor Adorno, 2017. 215 Adorno 1964, p. 148 216 Adorno 1972, p. 99 217 Steinert suggests that, “…culture industry makes a show of revealing how culture has become involved in domination via instrumental reason. For Adorno, this is another instrument of domination,” p. 74. 69 pre-formed.”218 Consumers needs contribute not to the survival of the individual, but to the survival of the market, often to the detriment of the individual. The value of the individual consists in their value as consumer, as producer, as contributor to the governing apparatus. Beyond this, that individual remains unseen.
Claims to particular rights, to a shared condition of humanity, to a communal purpose of world and society, all these fade away under the watchful gaze of the market’s all-seeing eye. As these once-prevalent ideals dissipate from consciousness, Adorno identifies a “transformation of the world into industry,”219 a transformation accompanied by a prioritization of the “thing-like quality of the means.” Initiated by the fascist experience and the effects thereof, this switch in priorities results in a signifiant loss: a loss of reflective thought, or rather, a loss of value associated with reflective thought. The product, the material, the thing that has monetary value begins to be the only type of object which has any value. The priority of monetary value eclipses any alternative understandings of value, as “anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist.”220 Primary for Adorno among the values that suffers, truth and reflective thought struggle to remain relevant. Speculative thought and some degree of a search for “truth” might be “tolerated ungraciously…for the purpose of formulating hypotheses, which must be conceived outside working hours and yield results as quickly as possible.”221 But mere reflective thought, interested in truth for its own sake, unengaged in maintaining and increasing production and monetary value, “is repudiated by the rulers themselves as mere ideology.”222
218 Adorno 1964, p. 148-149 219 1944, p. 30 220 1951, p. 47 221 p. 68 222 1944, p. 30 70
At first glance, this might appear as mere gripping on behalf of the leftist intellectual, decrying a world so far gone that it has lost any hope of emancipation. But consider these words in the context of the world we know. Consider the way in which the image of the “welfare queen” has been demonized since the 1990s.223 Consider the slanderous use of the term “socialism” to critique, or rather to condemn, Bernie Sanders,224 Barack Obama,225 Elizabeth Warren,226 and any number of other politicians. The United States condemns social welfare programs on the basis that they take the money of citizens who do work and give that money to lazy citizens unwilling to work. These critiques and the individuals who espouse them do not consider the obstacles to earning a living wage in the United States, nor do they recognize the widespread benefit a social safety net offers to the entirety of the population, themselves included. The dismissal of any sort of commitment to social welfare as socialist, as ideological, discredits the value of values for a political community. It discredits the value of the members of that community, allowing value to consist only in what those members produce. This is what it means to repudiate reflective thought. Like Arendt,227 Adorno notes an inversion between means and ends, in which “the relation between life and production…
223 See Ange-Marie Hancock, “Contemporary Welfare Reform and the Public Identity of the ‘Welfare Queen,’” Race, Gender & Class, 10(1) 2003, p. 31-39. 224 See
III. Production of poverty and powerlessness
In a world where production is life, what happens when the need for producers is minimized? What sort of social power do those “producers” have? And what about the would-be producers, no longer needed in this streamlined version of production? Simultaneous with the growth of the “capacity permanently to abolish poverty,” poverty itself, “as the antithesis between power and impotence is growing beyond measure.”230 While, due to late capitalism’s massively high levels of production, we have the resources to abolish poverty, we actively perpetuate poverty in order to maintain this level of production, which requires cheap labor and fierce competition among laborers.231 As the governing apparatus achieves ever-new, ever-higher levels of efficiency in production with the help of perpetual technological advancements, the need for actual workers, for human bodies to perform labor, becomes less and less. And yet, the needs of these bodies, bodies who exist whether they get to be workers or not, do not diminish.
Far from viewing this development as a problem of the modern age, this massification of poverty, or the threat of poverty, works to the benefit of the market apparatus. Laborers willingness to work for less, less money, less benefits, less security correlates directly with the degree of
228 Adorno 1951, p. 15 229 Herbert Marcuse characterizes Adorno’s thought thus: “The absorption of ideology into reality does not, however, signify the 'end of ideology.’ On the contrary, in a specific sense advance industrial culture is more ideological than its predecessor, inasmuch as today the ideology is in the process of production itself ” p. 11, One-Dimensional Man, 1964. 230 Adorno 1944, p. 31 231 As you will see in chapter 4, Davis addresses this challenge particularly in terms of the globalization of capitalism. 72 competition in the workforce. As the “masters of society”232 minimizes its need for workers, so too does it, simultaneously, minimize the value of those workers and their labor costs. As the
“livelihood of those still needed to operate the machines can be provided with a minimal part of the working time…the overwhelming mass of the population…are kept alive as an army of unemployed.”233 This “superfluous remainder”234 reminds those lucky enough to be employed, under whatever conditions they might be, that there are always more bodies waiting in the wings, ready and willing to accept just a little less payment for the same work. The “army of unemployed” functions as “guards of the system, so that they can be used today and tomorrow as material for its grand designs.”235 So goes the exponentially-expanding antithesis between power and impotence: with every waking blow served to the masses, the governing apparatus increases its own power, as if some mythical monster feeding on its own damage dealt to its victims.236
As the masses find themselves reduced to “mere objects of administration,” social welfare problems to be dealt with (or not) by that very governing apparatus responsible for their needs,237 this positionality “conjures up an illusion of objective necessity before which they believe
232 Adorno 1944, p. 31 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. 235 Ibid, 236 Davis situates racism and sexism as forms of oppression which perpetuate, or feed, the existing capitalist order. 237 Yvonne Sherratt characterizes Adorno’s critique of capitalism as a rectification of an essential Marxian mistake: Something indeed was wrong with Marx’s philosophy of history, and it resided in what Marx had not foreseen as accompanying the process of capitalist industrialization. Capitalism had developed a problematic, bureaucratic form of reason” p. 40. 73 themselves powerless.”238 Any achievable social power is lost in hopelessness, self-prescribed apathy, and the daily struggle to stay afloat in a world rooting for you to sink.
This may sound, on first read, too dramatic. Too ‘workers of the world, unite.’239 Too late-1800s-factory working class. Overstated for our contemporary moment. If these suspicions arise for you, consider this: the current hourly minimum wage in Cook County, Illinois is $11.00.
The hourly living wage, as indicated by the MIT Living Wage Calculator,240 is $17.01 for a four- person household with two adults working full-time, $70,771 per year. The living wage is calculated based on annual expenses for necessities such as food, child care, medical care, housing, transportation, and taxes. For example, housing accounts for $1,232 of annual expenses. For Cook
County, that is a pretty conservative estimate, suggesting a 2-bedroom apartment for a family of four. And yet, this minimum calculation of a livable wage is almost three times the national poverty rate, which is $25,100 for a family of four.241 The desperation with which Adorno identifies poverty and income inequality within late capitalism cannot, should not, must not be ignored, nor should it be limited to the confines of what the state considers poverty. As Marx before him and many others after him, Adorno emphasizes the subtle yet lethal effects of a self-perpetuating, ever-maximizing apparatus.
He wants to warn us that while life may look as though it has improved, while the standard of living for the majority of the population may appear to have improved, and “although the prediction of increasing pauperization of the proletariat has not proved true over a long period of
238 Adorno 1944, p. 31 239 Paraphrasing from p. 500 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1948 (1978) 240 For evidence, see
A contemporary example here can expand on the timeliness of Adorno’s concern. Recently, we have seen a rise in what I will refer to as “self-proclaimed socially-aware corporations.” Google,
Facebook, Amazon, and others, have worked their way into the leftist consciousness as progressively-minded companies. From supporting left-leaning political issues and candidates245 to
[seemingly] addressing workplace issues such as gender disparity in leadership and sexual harassment,246 these corporations appear to offer a dramatic shift toward social awareness, social activeness, and social responsibility. But these corporations, just like any others, are invested in profit, in their own bottom-line, and in the social power they gain by supporting these issues. These
242 Adorno 1964, p. 149-150 243 Ibid. 244 Ibid. 245 See
IV. Extension of the Market Role
So, as we, we the society, we the masses, we the majority, come ever-closer to the means for a more just world, we simultaneously find the barriers to such a world continually and proportionally fortified against those would-be efforts. While we have achieved an “increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world,”248 a surplus of the materials needed for survival as well as the ease with which we can produce this surplus due to technological advancement, this increase itself “affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population.”249 Beyond the obstacles of poverty and powerlessness, the push from above, from those “masters of society,” maintains a certain, mandatory system of social organization, reducing individuals, compelling them, to particular roles for the purpose of maintaining the existing economic apparatus.
247 Adorno 1964, p. 149-150 248 Adorno 1944, p. xvii 249 Ibid. 76
Adorno characterizes this process as the “universal extension of the market system.”250 This extension, rather than taking place “beyond the specific social conflicts and antagonisms, or in spite of them…works through those antagonisms themselves.”251 The market deploys already-existing tensions resulting from class hierarchy, racial and ethnic differences, racial and ethnic neighborhood segregation, etc. toward its own maintenance and benefit, thereby achieving a constant presence in contemporary life, dictating not just the role of individuals as they participate in the market, but their roles beyond the market as well. Compelled by the market, “each individual without exception must take some function on himself in order to prolong his existence.”252 That function, that market role, serves not just as the job one does in the realm of market. As the market extends beyond its own limits, beyond where it should or ought or is expected to be, so too does that function extend beyond. The very “instantiations of labor have become reifying categories of socialization,”253 the sum of one’s appearance, one’s identity, the ‘who’ one presents to the world.
One’s market function serves as the way in which the individual is able “to prolong his existence,”254 is able to survive not just physically, but as an existent being within this market apparatus.
These roles train human beings toward “pure self-conservation at the same time that [they deny] them conservation of their Selves.”255 Every step the individual takes toward better fulfilling one’s “role” in “that structural mechanism of society” is simultaneously a step “toward the
250 Adorno 1964, p. 149 251 Ibid. 252 p. 145 253 1966, p. 54 254 1964, p. 145 255 p. 148 77 extinction of [one’s] personal identity.”256 The notion of “role” itself derives “from the theater, where actors are not in fact the identities they play at being.”257 Using the title of the instantiation of one’s own labor as both one’s “role” and one’s “identity” denies a Self beyond the self recognized by the market. As human beings, we are so much more than butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, more than artists and teachers and doctors and janitors. We have feelings, we have thoughts, we have physical sensations. We have physical and emotional needs, physical and emotional desires. We have worries and fears, we have families and friends. We are so much more than what the market sees us as, or values us as, or calls on us to be. And yet, we cannot see ourselves in this light, nor can we see our fellow human beings in this light. The market apparatus has so successfully, so thoroughly penetrated our world, we now embody the values, goals, and ideology of the market as our own.
From this mass extension of the market, “relationships between men…have grown increasingly independent of them.”258 As individuals relate by and through their market functions, they come to see one another and to value one another as the market sees and values them, rather than as fellow human beings. Relationships between human beings come to be made, or at least seem to be made of “some different substance” than human beings themselves, “opaque,” even
“incomprehensible”259 to the human beings who assumably participate in them. Referring to this as the “advance of human beings into the inhuman,” Adorno identifies the way in which individuals embody the value claims of the market as their own values, the success of the market as their own success, even as these values oppress, impoverish, and dehumanize. Indeed, “while his function
256 Ibid. 257 Ibid. 258 p. 147 259 Ibid. 78
[within the market] lasts,” the individual of the late capitalist contemporary era “is taught to express his gratitude for it.”260 Even worse than the lowest role would be to have no role at all. To be viewed not as bus driver or doctor, teacher or factory worker, but as a ‘drain on society,’ a threat to the market as we know it, a threat to one’s own role, a threat to one’s own existence. As the market ever-reasserts its labor roles guised as sociality, “even the social misfit has [their] role to play,”261 the cautionary tale, the threat we must unite against, the mark of urgency that keeps us in line.
And so, “the whole business keeps creaking and groaning on, at unspeakable human cost, only on account of the profit motive.”262 The system itself has achieved such an order of primacy and control that our oppressions have become our identities. We can no more easily toss aside our market role as we can chop off our own limb. Human beings now “owe their [lives] to what is being done to them.”263 We have been conditioned to prioritize, in our selves and in others, the profit motive of the market over the value and benefit of the human race.
V. Progress or placation?
Just as we find our own individual systems of valuation transformed by the market apparatus, we find ourselves drawn ever-further into that all-pervasive culture industry.264 Adorno suggests that “while individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before.”265 Even as that apparatus erases
260 p. 145 261 1966, p. 54 262 1964, p. 149 263 p.152 264 See previous chapter, p. 51-54 265 Adorno 1944, p. xvii 79 individuals for its own perpetuation, it at the same time provides those would-be individuals with their very means of sustenance and survival, in fact doing so more effectively than in the past.
Contemporary western life offers many conveniences, many indulgences, which placate the contemporary individual, discouraging resistance or even critical thought and reflection.
Consider the Amazon corporation. Originally an online bookseller, and in fact a space where private individuals as well as larger organizations could sell new and used books, Amazon now sells everything. Literally, everything. Books, shoes, groceries, take-out, and anything else you can think of, Amazon can deliver right to your home. And the best part: everything is pretty cheap! What an amazing time to be alive. Amazon provides access to an innumerable amount of goods for many people who might not have had access before. You live in the city and do not have a car? That used to mean you had to spend more money on groceries and other household products, prioritizing stores within walking distance to stores with the lowest prices. Now, Amazon can bring you your groceries. Amazon can deliver diapers, toilet paper, and pet food, all of which are much cheaper when bought in bulk. Amazon can deliver groceries to the elderly and other populations who have difficulty accessing to the grocery store. In addition to providing access to products, Amazon provides jobs, offering both remote work and the possibility to revitalize struggling urban centers by establishing headquarters. At the same time that Amazon better provides for individuals, making day-to-day life easier, it contributes to the vanishing of those individuals. The local bookstores, grocery stores, pharmacies, as well as the communities in which they existed, struggle to exist in the age of Amazon. Amazon as employer minimizes individual means to make a living and earn an income. Just as when the majority population of a town was employed by the same coal mining company, dangers accompany a monopoly employer, particularly when that employer provides not just the majority of jobs, but also the majority of resources. Amazon might make life easier, and even more indulgent, but at the cost of the user’s own individuality. 80
One might ask, is this really such a big deal? Isn’t this just some millennial-era trend? Far from making light of the loss of individuality, Adorno looks to the horrific events of the Holocaust to illustrate the severity, both in extent and effect, of interchangeability under capitalism:
“What the sadists in the camps foretold to their
victims…’skyward,’…bespeaks the indifference of each
individual life that is the direction of history. Even in his
formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and
replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots.”266
This passage illustrates, first and foremost, the degree to which Adorno’s own preoccupation with capitalism throughout his career was always directly connected to a study of the past fascist experience and an attempt to discern what might return us to a similar experience in the future. The indifference and replaceability demonstrated through the words and actions of the Nazis in the concentration camps offers more than just a view of frightful genocide. It suggests something about the direction of history. Even with “formal freedom,” even with the National Socialist age behind us, condemned forever in the history books, we carry something of the reality of that experience into our present: the individual is replaceable.
Continuing with his disturbing yet meaningful imagery of the concentration camp, Adorno tells us that “in a world whose law is universal profit…there is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps.”267 The juxtaposition between our present life
266 1966, p. 362 267 p. 362-362; In referring to this language from Adorno, I do have a concern that there is a risk of instrumentalizing the events of the Holocaust. However, I think there is an important purpose to Adorno’s use of this imagery. These references exemplify the way in which Adorno is really concerned with the fascist tendencies of capitalism, tendencies he sources as roots for the events of the Holocaust. Throughout his work and throughout his scholarly life, it is clear that Adorno is constantly consumed with grieving and guilt for the events of the Holocaust, and fear that we are on our way to a similarly horrific event in the future. 81 and life under National Socialism appears pretty dramatic. Adorno wants us to reconsider the
‘freedom’ we assume ourselves to possess, to reconsider the progress we assume has been achieved in the past seventy-five years. He wants us to see the creeping, crawling subtleties of fascism as present in our daily lives. He wants us to reveal to ourselves the massive control the market apparatus exerts over all aspects of our lives.
The culture industry would have us believe that the “customer is…king.”268 The market exists for the consumer. We, as the masses, control, create, and enjoy all forms of culture. Right?
Wrong. “The masses,” Adorno warns us, “are not primary, but secondary…an appendage of the machinery.”269 We, the masses, help to make the culture industry function as planned. The customer “is not king, not [the culture industry’s] subject but its object.”270 The subject, always and already, is the culture industry itself, the market, the masters of society who control the means of production, the machinery and all appendages. All this means to suggest that while Amazon (and
Google, and Facebook, and Venmo) might on the surface make our lives not just easier but better, there might be a pretty serious catch. Having groceries, and movies, and all forms of entertainment, any products we might need, at our fingertips, delivered to our homes in two hours or less (in some cases, instantly), for a reasonable, affordable fee: this might “parade as progress,”271 but as the old adage goes, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The so-called progress of contemporary life “…remains the disguise for an eternal sameness.”272 However our current reality
268 1972, p. 99 269 Ibid. 270 Ibid. 271 p. 100 272 Ibid. 82 may look, or feel, or be experienced as new, different, improved, at its core it still consists of the same, age-old political problem, the “domination of men over men.”273
VI. Interchangeability
This domination presents itself by way of an all-encompassing sameness, a blanket of sameness that covers all of society. The ability to differentiate oneself, or to think outside of the constraints of society, fades away, as society finds unlimited ways of accessing and controlling the individual. This aspect of Adorno’s work receives a great deal of resistance and criticism, as there appears to be no outside to this domination. Interpreted as pessimism and an impossibility of resisting or changing the current state of things, many thinkers either neglect or misunderstand274 the value of Adorno’s characterization of the pervasiveness of capitalist culture. If this embraced- interchangeability, this embraced-sameness works as self-perpetuated domination, how can we, the dominated masses, oppose such domination? While this chapter will eventually discuss exactly how and where Adorno does suggest ‘what can be done,’ for the moment, I urge the reader to take
Adorno’s critique for what it is. Behind the liberal ideals and the seemingly-freeing capitalist market, mass conformity as well as the continued attribution of power to authoritarian-leaning institutions and individuals remains the cornerstone of western life.
How so? Adorno conjures for us the “the chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder.”275 For
273 1964, p. 148 274 A phrase coined by Walton in his 2012 text with the same title. 275 Adorno 1951, p. 25 83 me, this conversation happened on a plane rather than a train.276 A space of communal travel where there truly is no escape until you reach your destination. A space where we often find ourselves in a predicament of whether we tacitly agree with the outrageous statement of our chance travel companions, out of convenience, even out politeness, perhaps out of fear for one’s own body, or whether we openly disagree, risking all the things previously mentioned. That consent, even when offered for reasonable purposes, “is already a betrayal.”277 This may seem harsh. Adorno suggests this not so much to place blame for these moments of “betrayal,” but rather, to point out that our existence under this market apparatus “connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other.”278 Preoccupied as we are with a market-relative system of values, as those value relate both to ourselves and to others, we cannot talk to each other. We relate, as
276 My partner and I were traveling from Chicago to San Diego. We were flying United and, as per usual, were not permitted to sit together without paying an additional fee. We were each seated in a middle seat, one in front of the other. At least we were somewhat close. Seated to my right was a man of about 60, with a distinctly military look, though not unfriendly. I would soon learn my assumption of a military background was accurate (Semper Fi, he would tell me, repeatedly). To my left was a woman, in her early 40s, wearing quite heavy makeup. She wore headphones, as did I. About an hour into the flight, the man to my right tapped me on the shoulder. I took out my headphones and he said, “Sorry to bother you. I need a woman’s opinion.” Internally, I rolled my eyes. But, knowing I had about three hours to go in this seat, it just didn’t seem worth it to explain why that was a ridiculous, and offensive, thing to say. He proceeded to ask me if I could see an Adam’s apple. At first I had no idea what he was talking about; my mind was still on my podcast. I realized that he was asking me if the woman to my left was transgender. I had no idea how to respond. I found myself in a very inappropriate and possibly hateful situation. There were so many things wrong with this conversation. First, the woman in question was on the other side of me. Everyone knows how small plane seats are. She was very close. Second, it was not our business to discuss the gender identity and physicality of this woman. Third, I had never spoken to this man in my life. How could he think it was appropriate to begin this conversation with a complete stranger? But, because I knew I was stuck in this seat for a while and I wanted to avoid making the experience even more uncomfortable, I merely responded, “I don’t know, but I don’t think it matters.” I offered a feeble protest, one that did result in him backpedalling and telling me how of course he doesn’t care, things are different in these days, he was just wondering, etc. But I responded absolutely in the way Adorno predicted I would. To avoid dispute, I was polite rather than an ally for transgender persons. 277 Adorno 1951, p. 25 278 Ibid. 84 suggested at the end of section IV, by and through the values of the market itself, rather than as fellow human beings. To dissent at the moment in question would overall be meaningless in the face of such standardization. The dissent would go unheard, unrecognized, interpreted only as an act of aggression, an attempt to be difficult. If we cannot talk to one another, cannot see each other, cannot hear each other, then neither can we share ideas, learn from one another, choose and work toward a world we want to live in together.
Adorno names a very particular loss here: we have lost access to that “most honorable mode of conduct in socialism,” solidarity. Once “intended to make the talk of brotherhood real” by uniting “groups of people who together put their lives at stake, counting their own concerns as less important in the face of a tangible possibility,”279 that particular mode of resistance becomes impossible because of the very impossibility of the goal itself. What made solidarity a powerful tool of action in the past was its very ability to find the particular within the general, viewing the
“Party…as the sole representative [of the particular] in an antagonistic world of generality.”280
Without the particularity of the Party, the tangibility of an alternative to the present order of things, to the market apparatus, becomes at the least clouded, and at the most, invisible. Adorno identifies here a significant shift in political parties and political actors. No longer attached to its own particular aims, both political parties in the United States intertwine deeply, inextricably, with the market apparatus itself. And yet, individuals’ attachment to their parties remains. That which unites no longer promises a tangible possibility of the new, but rather promotes, even necessitates, maintaining the status quo. We cannot talk to one another because to truly talk, to share ideas, this would threaten the status quo and the governing apparatus itself.
279 p. 51 280 p. 51; On this, Walton asks, “What happens to solidarity if all are living under what Adorno calls the spell, ‘the subjective form of world spirit[?]’” p. 46. 85
While the “invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era,” Adorno suggests that the symbol of his time would best be “the mimeograph, the only fitting, unobtrusive means of dissemination.”281 For the present moment, I would suggest the ‘retweet' or the ‘share’ as the appropriate symbol. What a drastic shift in that which guides the times, from unprecedented access to diverse ideas and information, to the ability to easily reproduce and distribute information if only one can access a particular machine, ink, and paper, to that same distributing ability at the literal tips of our fingers, twenty-four hours a day. In this pattern, the ideas we share are rarely our own ideas, but those disseminated from whichever source we find ourselves drawn. We certainly find a plethora of sources from which to ‘tweet.’282 Even as they are opposed in mass media and in
Washington, the right and the left, like the culture industry from which they extend, offer something for everyone, working together to perpetuate the market apparatus in the mode acceptable to each individual. At the end of the day, whether you supported Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Barack
Obama or Mitt Romney, your support helped to maintain the market apparatus; it helped to maintain the world as we know it, a “world whose law is universal profit.”283
In this profit-focused world, our information, our news, our access to the world around us passes always through the sieve of the culture industry. As Adorno warns us, the culture industry “is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the thing itself…and to the rationalization of distribution
281 Adorno 1951, p. 51 282 On this point, Walton suggests that “…there is a fundamental lacuna for Adorno and Horkheimer between the ideology of equality’s fairness and the primal injustice of treating everybody in the same way” p. 34-35. He points to what he considers a “fundamental paradox” of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that is, the way in which equivalence paves way for the emergence of the homogenous mass, p. 36. Sheratt refers back to Adorno’s use of the mythical lotus eaters, suggesting that “for Adorno, the lotus-eaters appear in modern society in the guise of the culture industry. Culture industry products, such a film, ‘lull the audience into a state of [empty] passivity’ and through a kind of illusionary pleasure which, in reality ‘confirms…that the real will never be reached.’ Because this pleasure disconnects the ‘Subject’ from reality, the consumers of the culture industry’s products are condemned, like the lotus-eaters, ‘to a primitive state" p. 84. 283 Adorno 1966, p. 362-363 86 techniques.”284 The culture industry refers, certainly, to movies, television, music. But beyond what we easily recognize as “culture,” it refers to a way of being in the world, a way of thinking about our world and ourselves. The concept of the American “melting pot,”for example, “was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism.”285 Far from an image of democratic equality, the “thought of being cast into [this melting pot] conjures up martyrdom, not democracy.”286 In the melting pot of the
American dream, my grandparents refused to teach their children their first language. They refused to let their daughters have their ears pierced, because they would look ‘too ethnic.’ My partner’s grandparents changed their last name to sound “less foreign.” They actively suppressed their culture, their history, in the interest of the melting pot. Today, immigrants are critiqued for not conforming to “western" dress, for continuing to use their first language, for practicing traditions and values divergent from those considered “American.” Why are these critiques so severe? Adorno suggests that such behavior, behavior threatening the myth of the melting-pot, threatens the market apparatus itself. In this way, the culture industry extends far beyond the entertainment we reach for; it acts as a direct component of our selves.
The divisions perpetuated between different groups, different ethnic groups, races, classes, ages, sexes, sexualities, religions, these differences are used to maintain the power of the “masters of society,” the power of the market apparatus itself. Beyond all “specific forms of social differentiation…the market system represents the domination of the general over the particular, of society over its captive membership.”287 Under the context of the market apparatus, the individual,
284 Adorno 1972, p. 100; Roberts described the culture industry, and in particular the “art” of the culture industry as “an instrument of ideology, a means of suppressing the critical faculties of the masses,” p, 71. 285 Adorno 1951, p. 103 286 Ibid 287 1964, p. 149 87 the butcher or baker or candlestick maker, the mother or father or daughter or son or lover or friend is irrelevant. The individual matters only so far as that individual benefits the overarching system, contributes to increasing profit, increasing production, maintaining and participating in the culture industry and the market apparatus itself. This phenomenon “is not at all a socially neutral phenomenon, as the logistics of reduction, the uniformity of work time, might suggest.”288 That is to say, while working conditions may have improved drastically in the past one hundred years, while they may be continually improving, the system of valuation inherent to the market apparatus undeniably takes its toll on each individual who participates. This, then, evokes what I mean with the phrase ‘capitalist culture:’ a reality in which every instance orients toward, works to maintain, to improve, to internalize the market apparatus and achieving the goal of maximized profit. For as individuals are continually and better “provided for by that apparatus…they serve,” they are simultaneously “vanishing before the apparatus,”289 vanishing in the face of capitalist culture.290
VII. The Rise of Technological Power
With the emergence of mega-corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Google, I imagine
Adorno must, simultaneously, be rolling in his grave, even as he waggles his finger, sternly admonishing, “I told you so.” With the rise of this culture centered around corporations and the endless stream of products and distractions they provide for us, the habit of television and comedic satire has received widespread popularity. As we live in an age eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s
288 Ibid. 289 1944, p. xvii 290 As far as who, specifically, vanishes, Hauke Brunkhorst claims, “It is not the backward farming population but rather the most advances and best organized classes of society, including the urban proletariat, that are collapsing into atomized, manipulable masses under ‘those in control of the system” Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, p. 256. 88
Oceania,291 our constant access to entertainment streaming allows mass-popularity and gigantic fanbases of many television shows. One show in particular, Parks & Recreation, took quite strong strides to address the terrifying direction of technology corporations: In the final season of the show, set in the year 2018 (and filmed in 2015), something called “Drizzlepads” have become commonplace. Resembling futuristic smartphones, these devices are revealed to have been recording every aspect of their users’ lives. Drizzle, a technology company meant to evoke Google, sends personalized gifts, via drone, to the home of every resident in town. People are furious that their privacy has been violated to such an extent, but they learn that this violation was completely legal due to a last-minute change to the Drizzle-Pawnee contract. Drizzle provides Pawnee, a small
Indiana town, with free internet and state-of-the-art Drizzlepads. In exchange, Drizzle “data-mined the hell”292 out of everyone in the town.
Why is this relevant to Adorno, you might ask? Drizzle executives argued, and maybe even truly believed, that they were making peoples’ lives better by violating their privacy. By doing so, they were making money for their company, which allowed the company to continue providing
Pawnee with special services and resources. They were also personalizing Drizzle-users’ experiences and providing free products and personalized gifts. The storyline on Parks & Recreation is exaggerated, and it is meant as satirical humor. But the role of Google in the daily life of most
Americans is not far off from the role of Drizzle in Pawnee. Technological advances majorly contribute to capitalist culture. Recent technology, both technological devices and non-physical technological products, has transformed what counts as production, capital, and the fruits of one’s labor. Many of these products are utilized by consumers seemingly cost-free. Facebook, Google search engine, Gmail, Google Drive, Spotify: these things make our lives so much easier. They allow
291 George Orwell, 1984, 1949 292 Episode 5, season 7, Parks and Recreation, NBC 89 us to stay in constant contact with friends, family, and coworkers, to share pictures and files, to communicate quickly, easily, and constantly. And this is all free.
But nothing is free, especially in a capitalist society. So how do we pay for these things? Short answer: we agree, whether tacitly or explicitly, to have every aspect of our lives intertwined with these mega-corporations. Rather than viewing this trend as the result of the rise of the internet, a millennial-era tendency to use electronic devices to achieve every task, can we flip our take on this?
Adorno tells us that the “increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population.”293 When we consider the rise of, and resulting mass access to, the internet, as well as the arrival of fantastical new forms of technology such as smartphones and the apps that accompany them, what happens if we consider these things in
Adorno’s terms? What I mean by that is, consider the invention, production, and dispersal of these things not as fueled by consumers’ own desire for them, but rather consumers’ desire as fueled by the market’s production and availability of these items; a "humanity fashioned into a vast network of consumers,”294 ruled by the market rather than their own needs or wants.
In Adorno’s time, and I argue that this remains true today, “what is decisive…is the power structure, whether direct or indirect, the control by entrepreneurs over the machinery of production.”295 We can argue how technology has improved life for millions of people until we are all blue in the face, but the fact remains: technological advancement is not consumer-driven.
Consumer-needs and consumer-desires are driven by the market itself. The “masters of society” pursue ever-new systems and gadgets not for the good of their consumers, but to continue to make
293 Adorno 1944, p. xvii 294 1964, p. 148 295 p. 146 90 a profit from their sales. Google can feature endless tear-jerker commercials296 that show countless people whose lives have been made better by their products. The fact remains, Google makes those products to make money, not to help people live better lives.
However, their calculated attempt to characterize their products, and their company itself, as purposed toward helping people live better lives, plays on more than just human tenderness. In a very real way, apps that provide location-based maps, ride sharing, transit times, electronic payment options, etc., as well as email, texting, and constant smartphone access overall, fill a very real human need for security and control. If we agree with Adorno that the entire point of the Enlightenment was to liberate humans from fear, as well as that the enlightenment failed to achieve this liberation,297 we might consider how that fear (fear of the unknown, fear of the uncontrolled) might be soothed by the tools contemporary technology offers us.
What, then, do we lose, in this technology-fueled world?298 Our privacy, our independence, as previously discussed. We lose sight of the power-differentiation between us (the masses) and the makers and owners of technology. What is more, a concern detailed in above sections, we lose, access to each other. The way we relate, interact, and recognize those around us as fellow human beings, as more similar to us than different: this fades away, as we speak face to face even less.
Perhaps not so much for our friends, but for those we disagree with, political opponents, or for those we see as different from us, different ethnicities, religions, classes, races, etc., never needing to look each other in the eye does wonders to deepen the gulf between us. Just as technology “is
296 For example,
With significant shifts in technological progress, access to information about our world, and news media in particular, has transformed dramatically. The making of news into an industry offers an excellent illustration of the culture industry:
“The very word mass-media, specially honed for the
culture industry, already shifts the accent onto
299 Adorno 1951, p. 40 300 Ibid. 301 April 17 2016, the current president tweeted “Crooked Hillary Clinton is spending a fortune on ads against me. I am the one person she doesn’t want to run against. Will be such fun!”
harmless terrain. Neither is it a question of primary
concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of
communication as such, but of the spirit which sulfates
them, their master’s voice. The culture industry misuses
its concern for the masses in order to duplicate,
reinforce, and strengthen their mentality…”303
Mass-media, first and foremost, operates within the confines of the market apparatus; harmless, unthreatening, and often in the hands of the “masters of society.”304 The media exists not to provide the masses with essential information, but rather to ascertain the master’s access to the ears, eyes, and homes of the masses. As individuals, we find ourselves with very little control over the sources providing our information, as well as the interests and attachments of those sources.
Behind every news article we read, every report we listen to, every headline we catch a glimpse of, there are particular interests and intentions. We cannot trust the mass-media to provide us with accurate and unattached reporting. Our access to news is always already intertwined with a particular standpoint, a particular interest; it is always already contaminated by the industry providing it.
VIII. And so, what can be done?
And so, where does this leave us? Adorno offers a critique of our contemporary moment, that much, certainly, must be clear. But what are we to do with that? What use are mere diagnostics when the point of philosophy is not to merely interpret the world, but "to change it!?”305 According
303 Adorno 1972, p. 99 304 News media and other forms of media are owned by individuals and corporations, and these awnings are neither neutral nor without the aim of making a profit. 305 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach 1845 (1978), p. 145 93 to Adorno, “a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory’s refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify.”306 The practice of reform, of revolution, of change, consists not just in transformatory plans and projects, but in deep thought about what is, what has been, and how we have arrived where we are now. Part of the purpose of Adorno’s attention to diagnostics includes a retrieval of thought itself. Critical thought, necessary for
“overturning the status quo,” is exactly what Adorno claims has been lost in his critique of the culture industry and the post-fascist era overall.307
“Thought,” Adorno tells us, “is subjected to the subtlest censorship of the terminus ad quem: whenever it appears critically, it has to indicate the positive steps desired.”308 Thought functions as a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself.309 Thought must be productive, it must be accompanied by a plan, by specific actions to achieve the goal it proposes, and, of course, thought must have a goal. Adorno problematizes such “concrete and positive suggestions for change” as mere repetitions of “administrating the un-administrable” and “calling down repression from the monstrous totality itself.”310 Change within the oppressive system that exists, change within capitalist culture and sanctioned by capitalist culture can really only offer another version of that same oppressive regime. This type of reform can only ever offer the lesser of two evils, the assertion that things might still be bad, but at least they have improved. This type of reform offers
306 Adorno 1944, p. 33 307 See Adorno’s description of “The thing-like quality of the means, which makes the means universally available, its “objective validity” for everyone, itself implies a criticism of the domination from which thought has arisen as its means. On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself…Today, with the transformation of world into industry, the perspective of the universal, the social realization of thought, is so fully open to view that thought is repudiated by the rulers themselves as mere ideology” p. 30, 1944. 308 1964, p. 153 309 See chapter 2, p. 56-57 310 Adorno 1964, p. 153 94 complacency. A commitment to critical thought, on the other hand, offers something entirely transformatory: "Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in the face of the great historical trend.”311 Critical thought has enormous potential for Adorno. It allows us to acknowledge progress without complacency, and in fact requires us to continue taking inventory of the world around us and working toward a more “free” reality, however unlikely or difficult to achieve that future may seem.
What Adorno offers here has amazing potential, and far from pessimistic,312 provides an extraordinarily hopeful view of our future. However, it also requires a good deal of work as well as acknowledgment of the challenge and the reality of severe powerlessness in the face of current capitalist culture. So, while this may be a double-edged sword, Adorno gives us yet another advantage on the side of critical thought and a transformatory future. The entirety of Adorno’s social theory functions as a critique of the tendency of capitalist culture to require thought to do something, to be a means to an end, to have a goal, to administer the unadministerable. At the same
311 1944, p. xi 312 Sherratt also offers a non-pessimistic reading of Adorno. She identifies what she refers to as “Adorno’s Utopian project, his positive dialectic of enlightenment.” This utopia, she claims, might appear much less embodied than the Utopias we are used to or that we prefer: “Adorno’s Utopia…is barely even a picture of society at all…Adorno’s positive vision is in part—metaphorically speaking —one of the ‘human soul”…Adorno believes in a psychological essence to humanity. He is convinced that part of this essence consists in human beings having a drive for “aesthetic experience.” As a consequence, he is against a society that marginalizes the aesthetic by relegating it to the realm of ‘leisure’, ‘pleasure’, or the autonomous aesthetic realm rather than seeing it as an essential part of all aspects of human life. Adorno regards the aesthetic as an essential part of relationships, social, economic and political activity, ethics, all kinds of sensory engagement with the external world and indeed, to gaining knowledge and to the very process of reasoning itself… Adorno’s uniqueness is that, from a notion of human nature…he generates a Utopianism which consists of incorporating aesthetic experience into all the foundational dimensions of human life, including reason itself ” p. 16-17. While my non-pessimistic reading of Adorno differs widely from Sherratt’s, we have in common the certainty that Adorno has a particular project in mind, a particular vision of ‘what must be done’ toward a more progressive future. 95 time, his work is an exercise in exactly the thing he tells us is no longer valued, the thing that is critiqued because it does not present a proper end.313 His work is both a diagnosis of a particular problem, and simultaneously an effort against exactly that problem. Adorno frequently laments a shift that has happened in philosophy and critical thought, or rather, what is considered to be philosophy and critical thought. In Minima Moralia, he claims that the “melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect.”314 Adorno himself engages in the work he argues as necessary to, for lack of a better term, “change the world.”315
The above reflection on Adorno’s work, both as critical of capitalist culture and as exemplary of an alternative to the capitalist-culture-mode-of-thinking, allows us to look with fresh eyes on the diagnoses that seem to have no way out. True, the pervasiveness of the existing system provides an enormous challenge to any type of resistance or social progress. However, to dismiss
Adorno’s diagnosis because it makes the possibility of resistance challenging does not solve the predicament of capitalist culture. Rather, by valuing Adorno’s work, and engaging his social theory that details the multiplicity of ways in which the existing power structure acts on its objects and
313 David Held suggests that “…the authors of Dialectic print a critical rather than constructive view of history. They do not recommend particular practices as correct and beneficial. Their work is motivated by an awareness of the threat of domination. They offer, as the subtitle (curiously omitted from the English translation) promises, ‘philosophical fragments.’ Their philosophy of history attempts to break the grip of all closed systems of thought; it is conceived as a contribution to the undermining of all beliefs that claim completeness and encourage an unreflected affirmation of society” p. 150, Introduction to Critical Theory. Held’s interpretation here, while perhaps more pessimistic or inactive than either I or Sherratt would care to characterize Adorno, suggests something nevertheless quite interesting about the text Dialectic of Enlightenment: he suggests that the very style of the text, far from the correct recipient of critique, itself does the work Adorno and Horkheimer call for in the theoretical work of the text. 314 Adorno 1951, p. 15 315 Marx, “Thesis on Feuerbach” 1845, p. 145 96 maintains itself through each of those objects, we can better understand the structure we are attempting to critique and, yes, eventually attempting to change. Adorno’s critique of post-fascist capitalist society attempts to point out that the problems of fascism, including mass conformity and authoritarian tendencies, do not disappear with the fall of national socialism and other forms of capitalism.
As we look toward the future, aware of the very inevitability of that future regardless of our own actions, Adorno offers us a way to grapple with the problems of the present. Adorno offers us a system of diagnosis of the problems of our present such that we can reflect on what has gone wrong, on what has been lost, on what we value, and on what we might value. Adorno urges us to engage in critical analysis of our present to find dissatisfaction even as we acknowledge the immense progress our world has achieved in the past century. We can maintain a massive increase in rights, in access to food, water, and services, in life-saving and life-soothing technologies, while also calling out the immensely oppressive practices of a capitalist economic order. We can engage in critical thought not for the purpose of making money, of increasing production, or even increasing quality of life, but merely because to think critically, to engage in philosophical understanding and exploration about the world around us is an immensely human task. And we can work to achieve progress that has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with “real humanity.”316 The following chapter continues this pattern of looking to a thinker outside of the traditional political theory tool box. I turn to Angela Davis to expand on the inextricability of oppressions within capitalist culture, as well as to imagine alternative ways of ordering our world.
316 Adorno 1944, p. xi 97
Chapter 4 Angela Davis: A Black Feminist Critique of Capitalist Culture
“The commodity—and capitalism in general—has insinuated itself into structures of feeling, into the most intimate spaces of people’s lives.” Angela Davis, 2005317
I. Introduction
Chapter Two began with a discussion of police violence against persons of color, highlighting the way in which this pressing national issue was effectively brushed under the proverbial rug by the White House, in deference to a focus on the economy. Effectively, Press
Secretary Sanders’ reorientation to issues of the economy318 exhibits an overarching belief that all the problems that exist in the United States, violence, poverty, racism, sexism, crime, can be solved by improving the economy. Of course, that does assume that we view the above list as problems.
Let’s assume it does, for now. What does it mean to improve the economy? Improving the economy, of course, means: maintaining a capitalist free-market; providing tax incentives for corporations and the wealthy; minimizing corporations’ costs from union demands, employer- provided healthcare, and a livable wage. The current administration’s view of “improving the economy” is code for providing benefits for corporations and the wealthy. Improving the economy means, specifically, improving the capitalist economy.
I am not an economist, and the purpose of this dissertation is neither to critique specific economic policies of the current administration, nor to provide promising alternatives to those
317 Abolition democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture 318 See chapter 2, p. 27-28 98 economic policies. Rather, this dissertation as a whole aims to reveal the inherent oppression of capitalist culture. For this reason, I turn now to scholar and activist Angela Davis, who certainly would not disagree that the economy is deeply intertwined with violence, poverty, racism, and crime, and has been for a very long time. She would also agree that improving the economy will help
“everybody.” Where Davis and the current administration disagree is on what it means to improve the economy, and what, exactly, an improved economy might look like. Along with Arendt and
Adorno, Davis continually problematizes perpetual oppression at the hands of capitalist culture.
In terms of this project, I view Arendt as problematizing the constant prioritization of the
[capitalist] economy, of production, of ever-accumulating, ever-expanding capital, over the importance and relevance of human beings themselves. Human beings exist for the perpetuation of the market, rather than the market existing for the perpetuation of human beings. Adorno reveals the way in which capitalist culture continually draws its subjects deeper and deeper into the perpetuation of their [our] own oppression. Would-be individuals experience significant increases in quality of life, in what feels like political power and freedom, as simultaneously the capitalist apparatus reduces them [us] to faceless, voiceless, interchangeable bodies, powerless in the face of society’s masters. Davis’ work offers a method to consider intertwined forms of oppression.
Clearly rooted in Marx and Frankfurt, Davis unites a critique of capitalism with a critique of gender and race. Her detailed historical work reveals the way in which the challenges of our present political moment are rooted in our economic past as well as our political past.319 Attempting to address such problems without acknowledging and addressing the complex roots of these problems will always be in vain. At a time when capitalist culture has truly reached its precipice, now more than ever we must work to reveal the role of capitalism as perpetuator of our most pressing present problems.
319 See Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “History as a Core Subject Area of African American Studies,” 2007 for a discussion of Angela Davis as “self-taught and self-proclaimed historian,” as well as the influence on and purpose of this method in her work. 99
Davis identifies the way in which capitalist culture deploys racism and sexism as a method to perpetuate the capitalist economic order. Rather than risk unrest or reform, capitalist culture finds a way to encompass resistance in order to maintain the status quo. Recognizing that racism and sexism are not unique or isolated phenomena, but rather inextricable from capitalist culture itself, offers a significant step toward addressing capitalist culture on the terms which it must be addressed.
I begin with a brief overview of feminist critiques of capitalism, illustrating the way in which a variety of feminist thinkers have identified the inextricable links between sex and gender oppression and capitalist culture. I then explore Davis’ historical formulation of the rise of the housewife and the role of industrial capitalism in the making of this particular ideal of American womanhood.
Moving forward, I next address the role of industrialization in perpetuating and solidifying
American racism in the years following the Civil War. At this point, I turn to Davis’ use of intersectionality and her own method of intertwining between the roots and results of various forms of oppression within capitalist culture. While Arendt and Adorno mourn the loss of individuality, Davis problematizes the rise of individualism320 as a tactic to separate and stall disenchantment with capitalist culture itself. Finally, I address the global aspect Davis offers to her critique of capitalist culture, as simultaneously a more expansive understanding of different iterations of oppression and their intertwining, as well as a mode by which to loosen capitalist culture’s grip on our world.
II. Feminism and Capitalism: A Brief Review
To suggest that oppressive iterations of normative gender and sexuality relate to capitalism is certainly not a novel suggestion. Friedrich Engels draws attention to this in his 1884 text The Origin
320 See chapter 3, p. 84 100 of the Family, Private Property, and the State.321 He argues here that “the first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex.”322 At the very advent of the capitalist age, at the moment in which economic exchange begins to be the basis of human interaction, Engels locates “woman” as that which is exchanged, that which is oppressed, that which comprises the very first proletarian. The “female sex”323 is the original proletariat. He identifies this moment as the inauguration of “that epoch, lasting until today, in which the well-being and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other,”324 that is, of “woman” or the “female sex.” According to Engels, capitalism founds itself, first and foremost, on the oppression of women.
Marxism itself, however, has often neglected this attention to gender. Marxist theorists commonly focus on the proletarian worker as the oppressed class of import: once this class oppression is removed, other forms of oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) will fall away accordingly.325 And yet, there have been many thoughtful interrogations into the relation between
321 Friedrich Engels, 1874 “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” 322 Ibid., p. 738 323 These categories belong to Engels, not me. 324 Ibid. 325 See Monique Wittig, 1990 “Homo Sum,” The Straight Mind, 1992, Boston: Beacon Press, p. 48, for a criticism of Marxism here. 101 gender, sexuality, and the economic system, a rich feminist materialist tradition326 often neglected.327
Here I overview just a few of these texts. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective declares, “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political- economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses.”328 That same year, Luce Irigaray publishes The
Sex Which Is Not One, beginning a chapter titled “Women on the Market,” claiming that “The society we know, our own culture, is based on the exchange of women. Without the exchange of women, we are told, we would fall back into anarchy.”329 Later, Michèle Barrett suggests a slightly different claim, writing in 1989 that “…the oppression of women, although not a functional prerequisite of capitalism, has acquired a material basis in the relations of production and reproduction of capitalism today.”330
In 1997-1998, Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler debate the position of sexuality in relation to capitalism, with Fraser claiming that sexuality is a “mode of social differentiation whose roots do not lie in political economy because homosexuals are distributed throughout the entire class
326 See also Michèle Barrett, “Capitalism and Women’s Liberation,” 1997; Margaret Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” 1969; Wendy Brown, States of Injury, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” 2000; Angela Davis, Women, Culture, & Politics, 1984; Christine Delphy, “The Main Enemy,” 1970, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, 1984; Heidi Hartman, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” 1981; Linda Nicholson, “Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic,” 1985; Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History, 1988; Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” 1975. 327 Clare Hemmings, “Is Gender Studies Singular? Stories of Queer/Feminist Difference and Displacement” 2016, p. 86 328 Combahee River Collective, p. 66 329 Irigaray, p. 170 330 Barrett, p. 124 102 structure of capitalist society.”331 Butler responds that “both gender and sexuality become part of material life...because normative gender serves the reproduction of the normative family.”332 She argues that while queerness is not necessarily tied to unpaid and exploited labor, movements aimed to transform sexuality in the social sphere are intimately connected with the economic sphere because divergence from normative sexuality threatens the capitalist order that relies on those normative (heterosexual) sexualities.
With the aforementioned dialogues in mind, this chapter takes up the question of gender, sexuality, race, and capitalism. You may ask why I turn to Davis, rather than to theorists of intersectionality, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, etc.333 While the concept of intersectionality has completely transformed feminist theory and itself provides an invaluable lens through which to study intersections of oppression (one Davis herself references quite frequently), I turn to Davis for one very specific reason: her detailed critiques of capitalism, attached and deeply indebted to a Marxist and Frankfurt framework. Davis unites an intersectional perspective on sex, gender, and race with a committed and classical perspective on class and capitalism. Davis constantly names capitalism itself as that which must be considered and addressed. Unlike many Marxist and critical theory thinkers, Davis constantly names gender, sex, and race, as well.334 With Davis, nothing needs to be assumed, or extended. Her subject is oppression, rooted in capitalism, gender, sex, and race, beginning with the 1800s shift to industrial capitalism in the United States, and extending into the present day, where she addresses domestic events such as Ferguson and global
331 Fraser, Justice Interruptus, p.18 332 Butler, Merely Cultural, p. 272 333 See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” 1991; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 1990. 334 For a criticism of Davis’ turn to communism and a so-called unwillingness to acknowledge ways in which communism may be problematic for women, see Cecilia Green, Returning the Gaze, 1993. 103 events such as Palestine. To her commentary on both Ferguson and Palestine she extends her critique of capitalist oppression, as attached to gender, sex, and race, as well as the way in which the domestic relates to the global and vice versa. Davis is able to center a critique of capitalist culture and capitalist oppression in a way that simultaneously centers sex, gender, and racial oppression.335
Davis tells us that feminism must “involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and post-colonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.”336 What, then, is feminism? For years, I have turned to bell hooks for a concise definition of feminism, and I continue to do so here:
“Feminism is the movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”337
Intersectionality’s value lies in the fact that these oppressions are intertwined with other forms of oppression. Committed to this intertwining, Davis brings feminism, intersectional feminism, black feminism, to a Marxist critique of capitalism. She envisions feminism as a “guide to strategies for struggle, ”338 a “way of conceptualizing, a methodology.”339 For Davis, feminism does something, rather than telling something about someone. Feminism has a purpose, a role. Recently, feminism has been to some degree incorporated into capitalist culture itself, with stores selling clothing and other objects with the word ‘feminist’ in big block letters, companies and CEOs declaring themselves feminists, as well as a massive amount of somewhat-mainstream media interest and attention on feminism. Feminism is not about identifying as a feminist, not about calling oneself a feminist. It is about doing something, looking at something in a particular way. Davis uses feminism.
335 As discussed in the introduction, p. 14-17, there exists some feminist work on Arendt and Adorno, though a feminist critique of capitalist culture requires additional analysis and resources. 336 Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement 2016, p. 104 337 feminism is for everybody: passionate politics 2000, p. 1 338 2016, p. 27 339 Ibid. 104
What’s more, Davis thinks that feminism should be used. In thinking of feminism as an approach rather than as “something that adheres to bodies,” we learn that “feminism doesn’t belong to anyone in particular.”340 Men can be, and increasingly are, involved in feminist studies. But Davis gives us something beyond this broadening of who can be involved in feminist studies, in feminist theory, in feminism. If feminism is a vital aspect of a critique of capitalist culture, then this broadening seems to come with an attached imperative. That is, anyone who presumes themselves towards the end of capitalist oppression must necessarily engage the intertwining of sex, gender, and race.
Davis cites Black feminism as the feminism she engages, a feminism which “emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit.”341 Davis’ feminism, in this way, provides a point of entry so that we can understand the significance of centuries of feminists, and feminism, rejecting women of color.
Even as many abolitionists were involved in the women’s movement, even as many former slaves, such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, were involved in the women’s movement of the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, that movement remained plagued by a “failure to recognize the potential for an integrated women’s movement.”342 The National American Women’s Suffrage
Association's 1893 resolution reads:
That without expressing any opinion on the proper
qualifications for voting, we call attention to the significant facts
that in every State there are more women who can read and
write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more
340 2016, p. 27 341 p. 3-4; Here I want to clarify that my purpose is merely to explain why I found Davis the appropriate thinker for my focus. I am not engaged in or interested defining and differentiating between feminisms, particularly between feminisms. 342 Davis, Women, Race, and Class 1981, p. 59; See also Ula Taylor, “The Historical Evolution of Black Feminist Theory and Praxis,” 1998. 105
white women who can read and write than all negro voters;
more American women who can read and write than all foreign
voters; so that the enfranchisement of such women would settle
the vexed question of rule by illiteracy, whether of homegrown
or foreign-born production.343
With the passing of this resolution, Davis observes, “the suffragists might as well have announced that if they, as white women of the middle classes and bourgeoisie, were given the power of the vote, they would rapidly subdue the three main elements of the U.S. working class: black peoples, immigrants and the uneducated native white workers. It was these three groups of people whose labor was exploited and whose lives were sacrificed by the Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons,
Vanderbilts, by the new class of monopoly capitalists who were ruthlessly establishing their industrial empires.”344 White suffragist Susan B. Anthony explained this decision, and other ones like it, to black suffragist Ida B. Wells, as necessary allowances in order not to alienate Southern white women from the suffragist movement, justifying racism on the grounds of “expediency.”345
Along a similar vein, feminists have notoriously been resistant to acknowledge the struggles of
343 p. 116 344 Ibid. 345 p. 112; Here Davis tells the story of Fredrick Douglass’ daughter, who was formally prohibited from attending classes with white girls at a private school in Rochester, New York. The source of this prohibition was not the other students, or even the other parents, but rather the principal, a suffragist. This principal attempted to rally support first from the pupils of her school, and when she found none of them in objection to having Rosetta Douglass as a classmate, she reached out to the parents, finally finding one parent willing to object, and on the basis of this single objection, prohibited Rosetta from classes. 106 household workers in particular, and working women overall.346 While Black women’s absence at the Seneca Falls Convention should be cause for concern, so too should be the unacknowledged motives behind many working women’s attendance.347 As stated earlier, Marxists certainly have been guilty of their share of similar crimes, similar ignorances. Through a Marxist-intersectional-black- feminist approach, Davis offers a way to conceptualize, critique, and eventually reform the spectrum of oppressions that plague our present political moment.
346 p. 97; Here Davis tells the story of a feminist activist who requested her friend, a fellow feminist activist, to sign a petition to provide seats for the local bank clerk girls, who had to stand on their feet for ten hours a day. Feminist Two responded by asking how long her servant, a black woman, spent on her feet. Feminist One replies, “Oh, I don’t know, five or six I suppose.” Feminist Two then proceeds to calculate the number of hours the servant spends working, and concludes that she probably spends fourteen hours a day at work. Feminist One, blushing, quickly defends that her servant can sometimes sit at her work, and has Sunday after dinner off each week. Feminist Two replies that the bank clerks have all of Sunday, and then promptly signs the petition. As Feminist Two points out, Feminist One was entirely unaware that she herself perpetuates the very oppression she protests. Yet her contradictory behavior and her inordinate sensitivity are not without explanation, “for people who work as servants are generally viewed as less than human beings,” while the bank clerk (the white bank clerk) could be a daughter, a relative, a fellow human. This disconnect plagued the suffragist movement and the labor movement alike. 347 p. 55; Here Davis exposes the way in which even the Seneca Fall Convention failed to recognize the needs and interests of a wide portion of its supporters: “By the summer of 1848, when the Seneca Falls Convention took place, conditions in the mills—hardly the ideal to begin with—had deteriorated to such an extent that the New England farmers’ daughters were fast becoming a minority in the textile labor force. Replacing the women from ‘well-born,’ ‘Yankee’ backgrounds were immigrant women who, like their fathers, brothers, and husbands, were becoming the industrial proletariat of the nation. These women—unlike their predictors, whose families owned land—had nothing to rely upon but their labor power. When they resisted, they were fighting for their right to survive. They fought so passionately that ‘in the 1840’s, women workers were in the leadership of labor militancy in the United States.’” Davis refers to a specific young woman, Charlotte Woodward, whose “motives for signing the Seneca Falls Declaration were hardly identical to those of the more prosperous women. Her purpose for attending the convention was to seek advice on improving her status as a worker. As a glove maker, her occupation was not yet industrialized: she worked at home, receiving wages legally controlled by the men in her family” p. 56. The struggle, or lack of any attempt to struggle to acknowledge the needs and interest of working-class women and specifically, working women, was a great failing of the women’s rights movement. 107
III. Industrialization and the Housewife
Through a detailed historical examining, Davis reveals that much of what we understand in the United States as the typical heteronormative categories of women came as a result of deindustrialization and a particular economic shift in the early 1800s. Prior to the industrial revolution, women performed a wide variety of essential tasks in and for the home, and were themselves valued accordingly for their “productive and absolutely essential domestic labor.”348
Before factories, women were the manufacturers, “producing fabric, clothing, candles, soap, and practically all the other family necessities.”349 As these tasks began to be taken over by factories, women’s “status began to deteriorate accordingly.”350 The “ideology of womanhood”351 arose simultaneous with the shift of manufacturing from home to factory.
Davis views the very concept of the “housewife” as an “ideological consequence of industrial capitalism…shaping of a more rigorous notion of female inferiority.”352 While female inferiority certainly existed before this event, Davis reveals how the particular ideal role of woman and mother as “housewife” can be traced to fabrication by the rise of industrial capitalism. While women had previously “been productive workers within the home economy”353 and “…as workers…had enjoyed economic equality,” with the shift of manufacturing outside the home, women “as wives…become appendages to their men, servants to their husbands…as mothers…
348 p. 31 349 p. 32 350 p. 31 351 p. 32 352 Ibid. 353 Ibid. 108 passive vehicles for the replenishment of human life.”354 We might question whether some of this is exaggeration, or glorification of women’s pre-industrial capitalist role. But Davis’ purpose here, I believe, is not to glorify what came before, but to tear down seemingly intrinsic ideas about womanhood and women’s role. When daily life required that the vast majority of women performed hard labor, that is exactly what women did, undisputed by any ideology of women’s proper role.
When life became easier, no longer requiring women and men to toil daily with intense physical tasks just to survive, at this point we see the rise of the “housewife” ideal, an ideal oppressive and diminutive to women.
Recall here Adorno’s suggestion that as we achieve an “increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world,”355 this same increase “affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population,”356 as well as his concern that “while individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before.”357 Davis points out this very phenomenon in the manufacturing of the housewife ideal: life improves, survival becomes easier. As a result of this ‘progress,’ formerly-necessary producers (women) are left without a relevant productive economic role, in a world increasingly focused on productive value. So arose the cult of the housewife, the ideal of womanhood, and with it the normative claim upon all women that they fulfill the expectations of such a role. The idea that women’s place is ‘in the home,’ while accurate for the role of woman as valuable manufacturer of necessary home goods, takes on new meaning. Women should cook, clean, raise children, and keep perfect houses. This
354 Ibid. 355 Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, p. xvii 356 Ibid. 357 Ibid. 109 housewife ideology remains a challenge for female identity in our present moment. Davis’ revelation that the housewife first, is a relatively recent development in American ideology, and second, comes as the result of a shift in systems of production, allows a vantage point from which to critique normative gender roles. Beyond that, it provides evidence of how capitalism itself has shaped what we often accept as the quintessential nature of gender roles in the United States. Capitalist culture offers a certain image of ourselves that is neither necessarily true nor even beneficial to us, but rather, always in the interest of maintaining itself, of maintaining the status quo and the capitalist economic order.
IV. An Economic Shift Toward Racism
This mid-1800s shift to industrial capitalism played a role, as well, in racism during the post-
Civil War era, as the southern economy experienced major changes. Davis suggests that white southerners’ brutal racism against former slaves provided an opportunity for, as well as a misplaced outlet against, the “colonization of the southern economy by capitalists from the North.”358 As the positionality and social standing of working class white southerners shifted, due both to the end of slavery and the transformation of economy and industry, hostilities raged. If “Black people…could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the super-exploitation of
Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused.”359 The
“masters of society,” as Adorno might phrase it, greatly benefitted from these racial hostilities, which resulted not only in extra-cheap labor, but also offered a distraction for the white working class from their true source of oppression. This, Davis claims, “was a critical moment in the
358 1981, p. 190 359 Ibid. 110 popularization of racist ideology.”360 The racial solidarity the white working class assumed in relation to their own oppressors fueled structural and social racism, the effects of which we address today. Again, Davis points out this rise of racist ideology spurred by capitalism not to glorify the pre-industrial-capitalist South, but rather to identify the way in which the capitalist economic apparatus has benefitted from the maturation and perpetuation of racist ideology.
Just as the shift to industrial capitalism exacerbated already-existing racial tensions, the shift away from industrial capitalism did the same. Davis links the disproportionate number of African-
Americans in prison with the process of deindustrialization. As corporations, “in search of ever- cheaper pools of labor,”361 migrate to Mexico, Vietnam, and elsewhere, the people left behind experience a great deal of struggle and hardship. “Left without livable futures,”362 many are driven to seek illegal means of survival, both economically and emotionally. The broad societal problems that we address today, in terms both of domestic unemployment and vast labor abuses abroad, not only are sourced in capitalism, but are a necessary result of capitalism, a necessary component of capitalist culture.
V. Davis’ Intertwining of Oppressions
Davis identifies an 1800s trend wherein prominent abolitionists failed to connect oppression from slavery and oppression from capitalism. “Even the most radical white abolitionists,” she explains, “basing their opposition to slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds, failed to understand that the rapidly developing capitalism of the North was also an oppressive system.” “As a rule,” she goes on, “white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no
360 Ibid. 361 2016, p. 46; see chapter 3, p. 71 362 2016, p. 46 111 conscious class loyalty at all,”363 using the example of a well-known abolitionist and publisher who frequently used his pro-abolition newspaper to denounce the efforts of Boston workers to form a political party. Abolitionists “viewed slavery as a detestable and inhuman institution, an archaic transgression of justice,” and yet simultaneously “did not recognize that the white worker in the
North, his or her status as ‘free' laborer notwithstanding, was no different from the enslaved
“worker” in the South: both were victims of economic exploitation.”364 While the work of the abolitionists was certainly admirable, we can recognize here the roots of a false consciousness on the part of the radicals of the age. We might even reach so far as to see, in this early dismissal of labor- related rights, the beginnings of the anti-welfare sentiment we find so common today.
Amidst this disconnect between forms of oppression, Davis points out specific figures who voiced exactly the similarities to which she draws our attention today. Angelina Grimke, a well- known and outspoken abolitionist, gave a speech in which she stated:
“The war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor
of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles, a war
upon the working classes, whether white or black…In this war,
the black man was now the first victim, the workingman of
whatever color the next…victims of the same violence that for
two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war. While
the South has waged this war against human rights, the North has
stood by holding the garments of those who were stoning liberty
to death…The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either
363 1981, p. 65 364 Ibid. 112
become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land
of the free.”365
I draw attention to this particular passage, first, because it is indicative of a significant break from the majority viewpoint of abolitionists in the late 1800s, and thereby offers evidence that an alternate perspective did exist. Second, because Davis herself includes this passage in her own text.
Theoretical work that attempts to draw connections between different things, different types of oppression, in this case, must proceed cautiously, avoiding any sort of eclipse or minimizing that might result from saying that one thing, one sort of oppression, is exactly the same as another. And yet, as Davis teaches us, being able to draw connections not only helps us to better understand the multiplicity of oppressions at work, but is necessary to that understanding and even more necessary if we plan to seek out any sort of reform.
Davis draws attention to the way in which reformers of the past, Marxists, suffragists, abolitions, frequently failed, or refused, to recognize the intertwining of various forms of oppression. While Grimke pointed out the similarities of oppression between Southern slaves,
Northern factory workers, and women, most leaders of movements committed to reforming these oppressions remained confined to their particular ‘strain’ of oppression.366 For example, according to Susan B. Anthony, the “great distinctive advantage possessed by the workingmen of this republic is that the son of the humblest citizen, black or white, has equal chances with the son of the richest in the land.”367 As Davis reflect on this statement, she comments that “Anthony would never have made such a statement if she had familiarized herself with the realities of working-class families. As working women knew all too well, their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons who exercised the
365 Ibid. 366 p. 66 367 Davis quoting Anthony, p. 141 113 right to vote continued to be miserably exploited by their wealthy employers.”368 While many working-class women recognized for themselves the intersection between suffrage and their economic status and even participated in the women’s movement, the leaders of the movement, and so the movement as an entity itself, refused to make this connection, whether from will or ignorance is unclear. They refused, according to Davis, to recognize that “political equality did not open the door to economic equality.”369
Reminiscent of Marx’s differentiation between “political emancipation and human emancipation,”370 Davis draws our attention here to the challenges of a goal-oriented political movement. Women did earn the vote. Slavery was abolished. For all intents and purposes, these movements, the suffragist movement and the abolitionist movement, achieved their goal. And yet, oppressions related to these movements, oppressions that caused the need for these movements in the first place, did not simply disappear with the achievement of these respective goals. I have no dispute with the particular goals achieved. I offer overwhelming gratitude to Susan B. Anthony,
William Lloyd Garrison, and their fellow leaders of these movements. But democratic governance requires continual work, continual striving in the direction of greater freedom, greater justice. By turning back to the sources of oppression we address today, we find not just an informative history that aids our understanding, but a clearer vision of how to simultaneously approach these intertwining forms of oppression.
368 p. 141 369 Ibid, 370 Marx 1843, p. 30 114
VI. The Problem with Individualism
While Arendt and Adorno problematize a loss of individuality, Davis problematizes the primacy of the individual over the collective group. Capitalism encourages individualist attitudes and behaviors, at the same time that it contributes to a loss of individuality.371 Inherent to capitalism’s zero-sum game, individualism runs rampant in contemporary society. We act as mirrors of capitalism, reflecting back in our personal, private, and daily lives, the same attitudes and behaviors the market takes on itself. We want to maximize profit, to maximize capital, to maximize material possessions. Maximize means not just that we want as much as we can get, but we want more than our neighbors. Take the immense outrage over a living wage: We prioritize our access to cheap hamburgers over the well-being and livelihood of the employees serving us those hamburgers.
We want some workers, some jobs, to be valued and compensated below a livable wage because it benefits us, it means our jobs are more valuable, it means we are more valuable to society.
This way of thinking assumes that we need to make these choices. It assumes the zero-sum game. But can we value all different types of work, simultaneously? What would it take to pay fast food workers a livable wage? More expensive fast food? Lower salaries for CEOs of fast food companies? It may be more expensive to buy fast food, but how much of a problem is that, really?
When we weigh this option next to the problems that result for fast food workers earning a non- livable wage, how can we help but loosen our grip on this zero-sum game ideology?
Quite easily, it would seem. This takes us back to Arendt and Adorno on the loss of individuality. Just as capitalism works to encourage individualism in terms of behaviors, it acts quite efficiently to mold our values to fit the capitalist agenda, thereby effacing individuality in terms of thoughts and ideas. Capitalism’s constant self-perpetuation through us as individuals, through its own objects, eclipses our ability to think beyond the confines of capitalist ideology. We believe that
371 See also chapter 2 p. 42, 50-51, and chapter 3 p. 79-80 115 there must always be a choice, there must always be someone who suffers with less and someone who profits with more.
Davis points out that our progressive politics often mirror this individualist ideology.
Activist work and scholarship that focuses on one issue or topic, ignoring the intersections of other forms of oppression, is already doomed to fail, regardless of how ‘progressive’ it is. For example, prior to the emergence of Black feminism, “Black women were frequently asked to choose whether the Black movement or the women’s movement was more important.”372 Black feminism, the response to this constant question, claimed that “…this was the wrong question. The more appropriate question was how to understand the intersections and interconnections between the two movements.”373 Focusing on just one issue not only means we miss the intersections of multiplicities of oppression, but it also acts as a reiteration of capitalist individualism: ‘My issue is the most important. Let’s solve my issue first and then we’ll get to yours, or perhaps yours will just disappear because my issue is so important.’ We see this all the time in activism. We saw this with the women’s suffrage movement and their exclusion of black women.374 We saw this with the Black
Panther Party and their exclusion of black women.375 We saw this with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign’s alienation of “identity”-based political issues.376
372 2016, p. 3-4 373 Ibid. 374 1981, p. 58-63, 96-97 375 2016, p. 72; Davis here cites the Black Panther Party’s vehemently anti-capitalist Ten-Point Program, and simultaneously offers deep criticism for the masculine and anti-feminist tendencies of the Party. For a criticism of Davis’ tendency to avoid acknowledging this in her earlier work, see Cecilia Green, Returning the Gaze, 1993. 376 Here I cite just one news article indicative of a series of statements and attitudes common during the Sanders campaign:
We see this, too, in the “depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.” Individual figures can certainly be important representations of history, historical movements, and historical projects. But “in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever- expanding community of struggle,”377 we need to resist these individualist tendencies that result from our attachment to capitalism. All “…progressive struggles,” Davis tells us, “are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.”378 Progressive politics itself is not immune to the ever-reaching, ever-reiterating, capitalist self-perpetuation.
VII. Globalizing the Struggle
Along the same lines as addressing insidious capitalist individualism, Davis points out the necessity of recognizing and engaging the global struggle against capitalist oppressions, and the global intersections of the variety of oppressions we identify and work to resolve. For example, we might consider the shift toward global capitalism. On the one hand, this shift left many populations in the United States out of work, as factories left for cheaper labor without union demands. Those left behind frequently turned to illegal drugs and other illegal industries to sustain them both economically as well as emotionally.379 On the other hand, the shift toward globalization of industry resulted in comparable havoc in the countries and communities of the global South, where corporations relocated production. Capitalist corporations colonized the third world, displacing
377 2016, p. 2 378 p. 1; At the same time that “…there are more than nine hundred streets named after Dr. King… there are also some 2.5 million people in US jails, prisons, youth facilities, military prisons, and jails in Indian country. The population of those facilities constitute 25% of the world’s incarcerated population as compared to 5% of the planer’s population as large” p. 65; Davis emphasizes here a pressing political problem, not just in terms of mass incarceration in the United States, but in this dangerous illusion of an anti-racist of post-racist America. 379 2016, p. 46 117 subsistence economies with cash economies, creating artificial unemployment, adhering to little, if any, regulations in terms of workers’ rights, and resulting in widespread pauperization.
So, a “direct consequence of exploiting human workers living in the global south is the deindustrialization of U.S. cities.”380 Both sides of the coin spell havoc for these populations.
Uniting these two critiques of global capitalism, identifying the interactions of these shared oppressions, leads us to a critique of capitalist culture, global in scope. It offers a critique ofte neglected by either of these populations or those who speak on their behalf. What other forms of oppression can we globalize in our perspective? Davis urges that we think about how what happened in Ferguson and what is happening in Palestine are related, the militarization of the police and the normalization of this militarization.381 Black feminist experiences and Palestinian feminist experiences can be shared to strengthen both of these movements, together.382 For Davis, the guiding oppression is capitalism and the effects of capitalist culture. That is not to say that Davis prioritizes capitalist oppression, but rather that, of the wide variety of oppressions we identify and aim to struggle against, she encourages a lens which reveals the capitalist roots and attachments of these oppressions.
VIII. Conclusion
As Arendt and Adorno reveal the ways in which capitalism maintains itself in us, in our own attachments to the apparatus, so does Davis reveal that other forms of oppression, particularly gender oppression and racial oppression, are yet additional instances of capitalism reinforcing itself.
Davis offers a way to view gender and racial oppression in terms of capitalist culture. That is, the
380 Ibid. 381 p. 14 382 Ibid. 118 purpose behind these oppressions is not to maintain a certain gendered or racialized order, even if that is the ideology embodied by those who carry out the daily doses of these oppressions. Rather, sexism and racism are utilized by the overarching capitalist system, to perpetuate that very system.
This perpetuation occurs in two ways: First, and most obvious, an additional oppression of particular populations. Second, an outlet for the aggressions of the oppressed. Here, women and minorities serve as scapegoats for the common frustrations of life under capitalism.383
Consider the vast majority of U.S. citizens who voted for the current president, or who generally vote Republican. Certainly many wealthy people vote this way, but they do not make up the majority, because they are not a majority at all. How do low-income white voters decide to vote for a billionaire?
Consider the common complaint of sending industry overseas, of losing jobs in the U.S. due to globalization. This happens not as the result of the leftist agenda, but as the result of capitalism, of global capitalism. This occurs with the full consent and support of conservative politicians, including the current president.
Davis tells us that capitalism “…has penetrated every aspect of people’s lives all over the world in ways that have no historical precedent…has insinuated itself into structures of feeling, into the most intimate spaces of people’s lives.”384 Far from sudden, this arrival took decades, centuries, to achieve such totality of penetration. However, with the passage of time, we now have something else: “…human beings are more connected than ever before and in ways we rarely acknowledge.”385
The globality of our world, the ease with which we can travel and communicate instantly, while fueled by capitalism itself, might help us to build a different world. “All around the world,” Davis
383 See also chapter 3, p. 72-73 384 2005, p. 25 385 Ibid. 119 suggests, “people are saying that we want to struggle together as global communities to create a world free of xenophobia and racism.”386 These movements have the ability to interact, to be connected, in ways never before possible. Identifying the interrelatedness of various sources of oppression, as Davis helps us to do, provides a method to move forward, to address complicated problems, to reform oppressive habits and attachments ingrained in capitalist culture. Davis brings
Frankfurt philosophy to contemporary activist struggles, giving us not just hope, but direction for the future.
386 2016, p. 75 120
Chapter 5 From Critique to Future: a Conclusion
“What is important in political theory, then — rudimentary as it may sound — is the theorizing and articulating of concepts and meanings that foster in human beings the capacity for thinking and doing as actors in the world.”387
I. Overview of the Critique
This dissertation intended to offer a critique of what I refer to as capitalist culture. As outlined in chapter one, capitalist culture refers to the multiplicity of ways in which human life in a capitalist setting embodies the practices and trajectories of capitalism itself. With this term, I mean to evoke the experience of a culture which revolves around a system whose aim is to maximize surplus value through the exploitation of labor. Capitalism’s discipline acts on us not just in our place of employment, but through our leisure activities, through our hobbies, through our political affiliations, and on and on. It was my aim, in the past hundred or so pages, to illustrate the way capitalist culture works as an all-encompassing, all-penetrating force, ever-expanding, ever- perpetuating.
I outlined three main objectives for the project: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2) to establish capitalist culture as a significant and pressing roadblock to any sort of emancipatory politics (3) to offer a critique of capitalist culture and the inherency of oppression within it. For this purpose, I turned to the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt,
Theodor Adorno, and Angela Davis. Each body chapter roughly corresponds, chronologically, to the aforementioned objective.
387 Mary Dietz, Turning Operations 2002, p. 5 121
Chapter two, the Arendt chapter, began by addressing what I take as the overarching problem of the age, as well as the political reality in which it is able to take place: the problem of capitalist culture. To identify, understand, and address this political reality and the problems it poses for political life, I evoked Arendt’s warning “that the true predicaments of our time will assume the authentic form…only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.”388 While the specters of totalitarianism certainly live among us, Arendt’s suggestion of a more subtle predicament informs my own investigation of capitalist culture as this predicament. I chose in this chapter to explore
Arendt’s use of the term social, with the intention of revisiting the economic significance of the social. I offered a comparative reading aside Adorno’s culture industry so as to resolve the seeming- disparity between multifarious interpretations of the social. Beyond the dispute and criticism of this term in much of the Arendt literature, I pursued the ‘why’ behind Arendt’s use of the term social.
By exploring exactly what Arendt meant to evoke with this term, I aimed to regain political salience and relevance for the Arendtian social.
Chapter three, the Adorno chapter, suggested a turn to a thinker who, while outside of the traditional toolbox of political theory, provides an in-depth analysis of the capitalist economic apparatus and its impact on individuals. Regardless of our particular characterization of our current threat, whether “crisis of democracy,” “rise of populism,” “neoliberalism,” “late capitalism,” etc.,
Adorno’s work assumed this threat long before the recent trend towards illiberalism in Europe and the United States. In this chapter I identified Adorno’s social diagnoses and problematizations which signify the roots of many illiberal ideas and institutions grappled with in our present moment.
Adorno repeatedly identifies the detrimental risks of a “world whose law is universal profit;”389 a world centered around production, profit, and the accumulation of wealth. This chapter focused on
388 1953, p. 303 389 Adorno 1966, p. 362-363 122 understanding what Adorno meant by such a world. I explored the way in which Adorno sources the loss of individuality, the rise of interchangeability, and the challenge of critique as would-be individuals are better provided for even by the very frameworks which usher in the aforementioned loss. I suggested that the feeling, the experience, of greater freedom, greater access to goods and services, may in fact be characterized as a false consciousness in regard to our own degree of social control and social power.
Chapter four, the Davis chapter, addressed the multiplicity of oppressions suffered at the hands of capitalist culture, as well as the deep roots of these oppressions. I offered a brief overview of feminist critiques of capitalism, to illustrate feminist scholar’s historical attentiveness to the problem of capitalism for gender, sex, and race. With Davis, I drew attention to the way in which capitalist culture deploys racism and sexism as a method by which to perpetuate the capitalist economic order. Sourced in detailed historical analysis of the 1800s women’s rights struggle and abolitionist movement in the United States, Davis provides a historical avenue through which to see the development of phenomena identified by Arendt and Adorno in the previous chapters. I explored Davis’ critique of capitalist culture, of which she offers a global aspect, as a mode by which to loosen capitalist culture’s grip on our world.
II. Reiterating a Feminist Lens
Through Angela Davis’ black feminist approach, as well as a preliminary review of
Rosemary Hennessy’s analysis of sexual identity in late capitalism, this project offered specifically a feminist critique of capitalist culture. It aimed to unite analysis and critique of varied forms of oppression, toward the purpose of identifying the way in which capitalism deploys these oppressions to its own advantage and perpetuation. While neither Arendt nor Adorno offer a distinctly feminist 123 critique of capitalism in the manner offered by Davis, their theoretical work nevertheless provides an entry point for such a feminist critique of capitalist culture.
Through her designation and discussion of the social, Arendt identifies a major political challenge of the modern age, a challenge more, rather than less, prevalent in our contemporary moment: the eclipse of politics. Capitalist culture, with its multiplicity of self-perpetuating reinforcements, eclipses the issues of political life. Preoccupied with issues of biological life, with the accumulation of wealth, individual success, and advancement within the confines of the governing economic order, we neglect issues relating to the governance of a plurality of human beings living together on earth, inhabiting the world. This neglect itself benefits and perpetuates capitalist culture. It prevents attention to the most essential and political condition of the human condition, that is, the condition of plurality. At the same time that capitalist culture engenders widespread conformity, it simultaneously encourages a crushing obsession with the importance of self-interest.
As argued in chapter three, Adorno’s social diagnoses and problematizations signify the roots of many illiberal ideas and institutions grappled with in our present moment, repeatedly identifying the detrimental risks of a “world whose law is universal profit;”390 a world centered around production, profit, and the accumulation of wealth. Such a world, willing to brave any means if it results in a maximization of profit, looses its ability to acknowledge what cannot be measured, to prioritize and preference any goal beyond economic stability and success. People, too, are lost in this process. As individuals are valued only as far as they are considered to be productive contributors to the workforce and the economy, that very individuality begins to fade away. Even life outside of the workforce, one’s own “leisure time,” intertwines with the efforts and goals of the
390 Ibid. 124 capitalist apparatus. Through the above developments, individuals themselves become unidentifiable, interchangeable, not just to the surrounding apparatus, but to each other.
This project proceeded, first, to draw out this similar strain in Arendt and Adorno’s post- fascist critiques of capitalism, and next, to identify the way in which such a critique might be articulated simultaneously as a feminist critique of capitalist culture. Hennessy highlights the problem of visibility within the complex social structures and power relations of late capitalism, suggesting that something she refers to as “culture-ideology” provides capitalism with the legitimation process it requires to agree to, and then mask, its basic “motor.” The “motor” of capitalism, Hennessy explains, is the basic material inequality of the relationship between capitalist and worker; that is, the “relationship whereby capitalist benefits at the worker's expense.”391 This motor, then, is legitimized and masked by a variety of culture-ideology practices, an array of
“beliefs, norms, narratives, images and modes of intelligibility…that displace, condense, compensate, mask, and contest”392 that basic inequality of capitalism, as well as the influence of capitalism itself. Race, gender, and sexuality are types of these culture-ideology practices, practices that then suffer from this problem of visibility.
While I do not necessarily pursue Hennessy’s “culture-ideology” categorization, I turn here to the visibility problem she highlights in order to draw out that problem of visibility reflected in
Arendt’s social and Adorno’s “world whose law is universal profit:”393 we are unable to identify the institutionalized tools and resources of capitalism (these oppressive culture-ideology practices
Hennessy refers to) because we are so focused on participating in capitalism ourselves. Adorno even offers a moment that almost identifies the presence of these oppressive practices when he refers to
391 p. 11 392 Ibid. 393 Adorno 1966, p. 362-363 125 the “way in which the young girl accepts and performs the obligatory date.”394 Here, rather than a date being sought out by the young girl for love, for companionship, for the satisfaction of desire,
Adorno situates the date as an obligation which must be performed in order to secure her place as existing within and recognized by the culture industry. While there may not exist a feminist critique of capitalist culture from these thinkers, their work does not forego the possibility of such a critique, but rather, positions us very well to understand how and why the conditions identified by Davis could have come to be.
As Davis identifies the way in which capitalist culture deploys racism and sexism as a method to perpetuate the capitalist economic order, we can look back to Arendt and Adorno to understand the conditions under which such deployment could possibility go unnoticed. Preoccupation with successful participation in capitalism and capitalist culture paved the way for the perpetuation of sexism and racism, as instruments of capitalism itself, upon the unsuspecting masses. While we were busy trying to figure out just exactly how we might pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, the
“masters of society”395 and the very apparatus itself solidified their own mode of self-maintenance.
In our willingness to accept privileges based on sex, gender, race, ethnicity, etc., with no awareness of the experience on the lower end of that tipped scale, no regard for hardships produced by these privileges, we falsely believed that our quality of life had improved. We falsely believed that our world became safer, more equal, more just. We now must address capitalist culture, our current reality, with attention to that culture’s normalization of sexism and racism.
394 1972, p. 136 395 Adorno 1944, p. 31 126
III. Micro-brews and CSAs: To a Future
Each of these thinkers, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Angela Davis, offers some direction for us collectively as actors in the world. While the pervasiveness of capitalist culture may seem, following these critiques, simply impenetrable, each thinker nevertheless holds out hope that we can act, that we can change the structure of our world, that we can build a different future.
Arendt’s prioritization of plurality urges us to understand politics as the decisions we make and values we engage together, as a public, about how we live together, as a public. Davis, too, offers a perspective of such plurality, as she suggests that the globality of our contemporary world, the ease with which we can travel and communicate instantly, while fueled by capitalism itself, might help us to build a different world. Arendt’s preoccupation with a loss of plurality in our contemporary political moment simultaneously offers us the key to a future better than the present, by reestablishing that plurality. At the same time that capitalist culture itself breaks down the plurality, it offers us new potential toward reestablishing what it has broken: technology allows us constant immediate access to each other, beyond barriers such as distance and language.
Adorno, finally, urges us toward a commitment to critical thought. He offers us a way to diagnose the problems of our present such that we can reflect on what has gone wrong, on what has been lost, on what we value, and on what we might value. Adorno urges us to engage in critical analysis of our present to find dissatisfaction even as we acknowledge the immense progress our world has achieved in the past century. We can maintain a massive increase in rights, in access to food, water, and services, in life-saving and life-soothing technologies, while also calling out the immensely oppressive practices of a capitalist economic order. We can engage in critical thought not for the purpose of making money, of increasing production, or even increasing quality of life, but merely because to think critically, to engage in philosophical understanding and exploration 127 about the world around us is an immensely human task. And we can work to achieve progress that has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with “real humanity.”396
Each of these thinkers possess a deep appreciation for the progress our world has achieved, as well as a simultaneous awareness that there is so much more to be done. Political victory “is not forever guaranteed.”397 Politics are a continual process, requiring action and effort every step of the way. There is no endpoint, no point at which we are finished. Politics cannot be achieved, they can only be continually pursued. While this may be frustrating, this should offer a sense of hope: the oppressions we address today, while deeply rooted in our past, intricately interwoven in our present, do not necessarily predict our future. By exploring what went wrong, by identifying how our oppressions are continually reiterated, we can learn. We can reflect. And we can change.
Capitalist culture’s ability to perpetuate itself through us, to situate us so that we perpetuate our own oppressions, is granted by unawareness and apathy of this structure. As we become aware of this structure, we can change our role in it. In fact, we are. Chain restaurants like Applebee’s and
Chili’s,398 mass-produced beers like Budweiser and Coors399 are struggling as people, particularly young people, prefer locally-sourced products. Community-supported-agriculture (CSA) and farmers markets, local restaurants, breweries, and distilleries: these things are not just trendy. They loosen the hold of corporations on our lives. The popularity of sustainable, ethical products, as well as the ability to research and seek out such products, suggests a shift in how we live. If the challenge to identifying the institutionalized tools and resources of capitalism results from our on participating in capitalism ourselves, what happens when we shift that focus? These shifts may seem
396 Adorno 1944, p. xi 397 Davis 2011, p. 20 398 See
Or are we beginning, as a plurality, to recognize this pull of capitalist culture and resist our marching orders? If the world can end with a whimper, couldn’t it also be saved by one? 129
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Vita
Christina Frances LoTempio was born in Buffalo, New York in 1989. She graduated magna cum laude from the State University of New York College at Brockport in May 2011 and earned her masters degree in Political Science and Political Theory from Fordham University in May 2013.
She completed her 200-hour Yoga Teaching Certification in May 2018 and has been teaching yoga ever since. During her time at Northwestern, Christina has been an active participant in the Political
Theory Workshop, the Gender and Sexualities Studies Cluster and Certificate Program, the Critical
Theory Cluster and Certificate Program, the Political Science Commune/Graduate Student
Organization, and the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching.