Negative Dialectics and Constellations

This is an attempt to offer my miserable understanding of Theodor Adorno's negative dialectic and the concept of “constellations”, as I've read about it in a number of works, primarily Susan Buck-Morss's The Origin of Negative Dialectics and Adorno's own Negative Dialectics.

The movement of negative dialectics is this:

What is, is more than it is. This “more” is not imposed upon it but remains immanent to it, as that which has been pushed out of it. In that sense, the nonidentical would be the thing's own identity against its identifiations (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 161).

A few things:

1. This movement is with concepts and objects, between the universal and the particular
2. This difference is immanent to the object
3. This is the sense in which the identical is false—the “thing's own identity against its identifications”

So, what do we have? We have here an inversion on the Hegelian identity of identity and non-identity. Rather than being subsumed under pure self-identity, there is a continual motion of the elements. Nonidentity is real, the profusion of particulars; reality resists identification. Rather than an all-encompassing whole, as found in thinkers like Lukacs, we get a fragmentary understanding. The passage quoted above is probably the best one I have found so far that explains the concept of negative dialectics and nonidentity.

How do we understand concepts without succumbing to a prima philosophia, simply with the dialectic posited as the “first”? The problem of systematization was solved, supposedly, in Adorno's concept of the “constellation”. Adorno elaborates on it thus:

The model for [the constellation] is the conduct of language. Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. Where it appears essentially as a language, where it becomes a form of representation, it will not define its concepts. It leads objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centered about a thing” (Adorno 162).

In other words, without defining terms—we don't have to posit a starting point—the dialectic is able to work its critique upon the world immanently. Prior existing concepts are worked on by the dialectic, attempted to be sorted through. The damage inherent in our subject-object relations is pointed out—things are not what they seem. Constellations are important because they are a restructuring of phenomena in a concrete way that attempts to picture the essence of society. In a sequence of phenomena, structures may be erected out of them in specific ways—in the language of the above quote, these concepts are centered around an object, a thing. This is the precarious point, neither positivism nor idealism that Adorno praises in the work of Max Weber.

A further reflection: the specific arrangements that one moves about to form constellations, inherently a subjective arrangement in some sense, can be understood in terms of objectivity:

These are subjectively produced, but they work only where the subjective production is submerged in them. The subjectively created context—the “constellation”—becomes readable as sign of an objectivity: of the spiritual substance (Adorno 165).

To see the relations, the context, in which an object stands, is to understand the object—not to deny quality or the “something” of phenomenological experience. Conceptually speaking, however, an object is its context. Therefore, to understand what arrangement of elements has been made suitably is to better understand the object in question: “Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it” (Adorno 163). This is thus a negative, critical moment.

I will continue to read and post my thoughts as I come to think about the topic in more detail, and I will definitely need to fix the numerous errors I'm sure I've already made in this short explanation.

Source: Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Seabury Press, 1973. Print.