The Transformation of the Concept into the Dialectical Image

This should probably contain a section at the end on the inadequacy of the image as against the Concept, because it's not a one-to-one translation by any means. I think both are useful in different contexts. Anyway, this is a paper I wrote for a comp lit class.

The Transformation of the Concept into the Dialectical Image

I. Introduction

Time is an important concept for all those who would claim descent, positively or negatively, from Hegel's dialectical philosophy. In the first place, dialectical thought is that which moves by way of the dissolution of the fixed rigidity of conceptual thought, already in fact implying a temporal character of some kind. In the second place, dialectical thought is immanently historical by the extension of this change to encompass the totality conceived of as social. The problem arises when one attempts to explicate the exact nature of this temporal and historical character: according to Kojève's interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, this temporal character of the Concept (the axial dialectical category) is that it is time itself, which therefore is always historical time; for Benjamin, time as time (and therefore as history) cannot be the whole story (so to speak) of time, and thus it is transposed onto space. The major consequences of this spatialization will be seen to be a radical mediation of the immediate and mediation, and a dissolution of the remnants of reification in Hegel's system, of which Reason's march in universal history is the greatest. So these two interpretations of the importance of time—time as time and time as space—overdetermine the concept of history, the former resulting in undialectical Reason and the latter in a dialectical dissolution of Reason itself. The exposition of the dialectical image will be a conceptual one, showing in fact the superiority of the image by the Concept's own immanent demands.

II. Hegel: The Negativity of Time as Time

To understand Hegel's fixation on the negativity of time, we must first relate it to the Concept (Begriff). In his own words, “Die Zeit ist der daseiende Begriff selbst”, and “Die Zeit ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist” (qtd. in Kojève 101). In other words, time is the empirically existing Concept itself, that Concept which is there. In interpreting these phrases, we must keep in mind Hegel's view of negativity as that which is the negation of the given, which negation is none other than the Concept, that immanent anti-given movement of the object. As Kojève summarizes, “The conceptual understanding of empirical reality is equivalent to a murder” (140). The Concept of something is nothing but the always-occurring nihilation of that very something, the constantly-changing negation of that something, whether one believes that change comes from subject or object, or as Hegel believed, from both at once. Time as time for Hegel is Concept, because the subject-object divide of reality which creates movement in the proper sense only comes with the appearance of the Concept on the historical scene, with the advent of human (self-)consciousness. Therefore, Hegel's notion of time is applicable only to historical time—strictly speaking, nature has no time, though this does not discount the possibility of some kind of change. As nature does not have an inner telos, Hegel (according to Kojève) will say that it is not time but space.

The first important consequence of the manifold equivocation of time, Concept, and history is that Hegel's is ultimately a social philosophy. Ignoring for the moment his botched attempt at a philosophy of nature, Hegel proclaims the fundamentally historical nature of all thought and of all human being—indeed, the two are posited to be identical (if only in their immanent movement and not in their present givenness). Further, there can be no society without history—the past of a given social moment distinguishes the possible future in the present from dream or utopia. However, the relation of the temporal modalities of past, present, and future is not in Hegel a simple progression of past to present and then on to future. Rather, Hegelian Time is a movement from future through past to present. In other words, the “Project”, the Concept with a focus on the future, is determined by the historical past, and then becomes the moment of negation of the given in the present. Or again, Desire is Desire to negate the given real, which in that negation becomes past; this manner of past being formed through future (Desire/Concept) is what determines the present. Taken in this way, the temporal modalities cannot really be separated, but the moments are yet analyzable, the present turning upon the tension between future as desire to negate the given and past as that negated no-longer-given.

Time must be in space, and indeed the two mutually presuppose each other in good dialectical fashion. However, for Hegel, time is the primary contradiction, being that which is, however abstractly, opposed to the inert space of nature. Due to the necessary historical nature of time, that time must occur in a historical world, in other words, in space. However, the tension between the two is obvious—the moments of time are not for Hegel transposed onto a spatial world, because of the association of time with history and space with nature. Only insofar as nature exists in relation to social humanity and its history can the sub-categories of time be applied to it. Verstand is the name given to that spatial thinking that is philosophically inferior to Vernunft, one of whose primary categories is the Idea, the utter interiorization of Concepts (this interiorization being the very definition of Kantian or Bergsonian time) which, no matter how contradictory, are always already under the aspect of identity. Space, which is defined primarily by its exteriority, obviously cannot fill this gap (so to speak).

III. Benjamin: The Negativity of Time as Space

Benjamin's project can in some ways be seen as an internalization of what were in Hegel only externally related, namely time and space. Benjamin's preference for space over time is well-noted, as when he positively states, “The task of epic theater, according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions” (150). Here the development of actions corresponds to Geschichte, (narrative) time, whereas representation seems to signify a spatial construction. Geschichte is disparaged, along with all perceived teleologies, as bourgeois ideology. Therefore, rather than deal with time as Geschichte, Benjamin transposes temporal characteristics onto space itself. The dialectical image is the result: it emerges out of the past, but its form and features can only be seen or understood in the non-narrative present, out of its temporal context. Here, though, we learn only about this present from it, not about the past. As an image it is spatial, and as dialectical it is philosophical, the spatialization of the Concept-as-time that was so important for Hegel. However, the transition, the translation from time to space is one whose character is yet to be established.

The obvious change is that from narrative to non-narrative, and this is the ostensible reason for the translation, but yet another consequence is the retention of a certain temporality. Benjamin holds onto notions of past and present and future, moments that are made both intimately internal to one another and at the same time absolutely external. For example, in describing the storyteller, what we may rightly take as a dialectical image, Benjamin writes, “Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him, just as in a rock a human head or an animal's body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision” (83). This distance Benjamin speaks of is a temporal distance, although not only that. Internally-related, the dialectical image contains it's own pastness as an element, related, to be sure, to its future, which is now the present. The present is where the knowledge is gained, where action can take place, where mediation meets immediacy as Hegel proclaimed was necessary. On the other hand, these concepts of past, present, and future are external to space and to each other, in the sense that their relations are dissected and their organs exposed. The death of the narrative is thus assured in this spatial constellation, wherein the immediacy of the present is privileged against the mediation of time. To remain historical, the dialectical image is temporal, but it is certainly not time itself, as is Hegel's Concept.

There remain two questions relating to the dialectical image, that of its immediacy and that of its critical negativity. The immediacy of the dialectical image is, on the surface, problematic. As an image out of context it is obviously not mediated in the same overt fashion as the Hegelian Concept. Context, according to Benjamin, destroys the dissimilarity of the object at hand: “[Proust] lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of resemblance” (205, italics mine). The similarity of things or processes to one another, be it a phenomenal similarity or, perhaps more importantly, a contextual similarity, is false. So we have a theory in which mediation, under the aspect of identity, is distorting and false. But this identity is only a partial one, remaining focused on the mediation of time. Indeed, systemic mediation may avoid the entire problem for Benjamin, in that the constellation of bourgeois society remains for him an important reference point. Following Hegel's dictum that there can be no immediacy without mediation and vice versa, Benjamin takes it upon himself to extract the true kernel of mediation from its time-bound shell. This results, not surprisingly, in the messy mediation of the present, that spatial relation in which the lack of time-context is at the same time the placing of the image into what may be interpreted as its true context. Again, Benjamin is utterly historical though he repudiates history as such, though he opposes immediate context qua context. The immediacy of the dialectical image thus becomes its true mediation. Corresponding to the fragmentation of society, the utter falsity of the bourgeois ideology of progress, Benjamin's fragmented spatial dialectics are wholly justified. From this its critical negativity follows, insofar as the new “immediacy” is in some sense the truth of the old, if only (and it assuredly is) negatively.

IV. Conclusion: The Ideology of Progress and Critical Temporality

The following remark by Kojève appears as the antithesis of Benjamin's understanding of both dialectic and time: “It is by historical memory that Man's identity preserves itself throughout History, in spite of the auto-negations which are accomplished in it, so that he can realize himself by means of History as the integration of his contradictory past or as totality, as dialectical entity” (232, italics Kojève's). It would not be off the mark to level the charge of bourgeois ideology against Kojève, left-Hegelian though he may be. However, the temptation to do away with him on this account must be resisted, and in the name of Hegelian thought itself.

Benjamin writes, “Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past” (262). A better example of historicism could not be found than Hegel himself, in whose philosophy history receives its proper ordering only after the fact, and in which strictly phenomenological knowledge of history and consciousness only emerge in the post-historical world (Kojève 183-4). Hegel's eternal past is one that cannot adequately develop even into an image thereof, not because of the negating-negativity of the Concept, but because of Hegel's hypostasis of History predicated on the undialectical nature of his notion of Reason. Indeed, there is nothing in the character of the dialectic itself that would proscribe the type of transformation that Benjamin has wrought from time to space, as long as that space is properly historicized.

But to what extent is Benjamin's dialectical image capable of the destruction of ideology, particularly that of bourgeois progress? Benjamin writes, “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time” (261). Dialectically, things change not by continuous progress, but by violent break—concepts don't approach their opposites slowly and thereafter “run together” until they are unrecognizable; rather, they crash into each other as mighty waves, as the furious demolition of a storefront via molotov cocktail. An obvious “artistic” parallel is the montage, the spatial decontextualization-as-proper-contextualization. This spatial time thereby pointed to is one absolutely antithetical to the Hegelian philosophy of history, which viciously betrays the very character of dialectical thought itself. Only such a gradualist model could declare the “end of history”, or the related claim of the reformists that the groundwork has already been laid, and that all that is left to do is wait for utopia. Hegel claimed not more than this!

Finally, in the spirit of remaining political, we may say a few concluding words about the importance of a spatialization that is both historical and preservative of critical negativity. First, as historical, the dialectical image retains the social mediation of the Hegelian Concept and the Marxian insistence on economic and social practice. Second, as critically negative, the dialectical image leaves behind the problematic Hegelian and vulgar Marxist teleology which would subordinate the particular to the already-assumed individual as universally-mediated particular, which is nothing other than the system of capitalist oppression itself, in all its bloody self-denial.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Print.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Print.

All material copyright Nick Beard (except the cited sources).

To The Things Not-in-Themselves!

Positivity is bad faith--this could be the slogan of our times, the latter designation applying to the post-WWII world. Everything turns upon this negation.

The positive as that which is itself in itself, or rather even for itself, cannot be but is. We cannot help doubting the utter inconceivability of something complete, even as we strive for it in all branches of thought, positive or negative as they may be. This is the great paradox, that thought as universal becomes its dialectical opposite, that negation of which the determinateness of all being is constituted. Positivity being bad faith, where does that leave negativity? One cannot be utterly negative, try as Adorno did. The time for that striving for completeness in incompleteness has come and gone. But this criticism is not just one blindly putting forth the positivity in all things due to their givenness--this Hegel destroyed in the very first deduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Rather, what we are left with is the quality of positivity as concreteness. It is the only positivity that still makes sense. But how exactly is it positive?

The concrete is "positive", in that the particularity of the given is constituted by determinate negation. Not that the negation of the negation is positive, but that, on a surface-level, objects are constituted concretely by determinate negation. There is no longer the question, as there was for Hegel, as to whether essence appears and is that very appearance. Rather, our question is different, given our immediate discounting of the question of essence. We ask whether the surface phenomena do not themselves preclude the possibility of themselves, not just of their essences, having a really determinate existence. In other words, we no longer believe in the whole, whether a Concept/Notion (Begriff) or the totality itself, and rightly so. We need a new relation to the whole and especially the totality, a negative and contradictory one. It cannot be such that it is a self-positing subject, as it was for Hegel. Rather it will be a self-negating, truly dialectical totality. It is thus a dialectic that will never cease--the prospect is scary. As Marcuse said: Reason is the truly undialectical element of Hegel's philosophy (paraphrased from Reason and Revolution).

So how to synthesize this with my previous thoughts on the totality relating to the theory of mysticism? Inevitably it has something to do with the nature of determinate negation and its relation to non-duality, and that would work it in nicely with revolutionary politics. So, onward! To the things not-in-themselves!

Thinking the Non-Conceptual in Zhang Ailing's "Love in a Fallen City"

Thinking the Non-Conceptual in Zhang Ailing's “Love in a Fallen City”

Zhang Ailing's technique of uneven contrast can be thought of as a model for non-identity thinking. Specifically, uneven contrast bears a striking resemblance to Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics. In order to analyze this similarity, and further to contribute a synthetic development which is a true advance on the already existing works in their mutual separation, the particularities of Zhang's use and understanding of difference will be conceptually isolated and then critiqued. First, the capability of uneven contrast to think the non-conceptual will be analyzed, along with the same capability of negative dialectics; then these two will be brought into critical tension and analyzed from the other's perspective; finally uneven contrast and negative dialectics will be applied to the question of causality, which makes a prominent appearance in the ambiguity of the title of Zhang's story “Love in a Fallen City” (alternatively translated as “Love that Fells a City”).


The primary task of modern philosophy is to think the non-conceptual, to deal with that which is outside it, that which is outside itself. Adorno wrote, “Dialectics represents the attempt to incorporate into philosophy whatever is heterogeneous, philosophy's other... [I]t wishes to import the non-conceptual into philosophy” (Lectures on Negative Dialectics 57). There are those equations of disparate elements, such as Hegel's equation of thinking and being, which seek to avoid the problem. The non-conceptual, though, cannot be done away with one and for all, if the method of this vanquishing is simply the repeated conceptual proofs showing the problem to be a non-problem. Rather, the things which are disparate must be shown to be such, in line with their immanent objectivity. Form must follow content, and only thereby can substance be retained. But the question of the necessity of thinking the non-conceptual is easy to resolve, in contrast to the question of how to do so. Objectivity must be retained, hand in hand with rigor, while continuing to observe non-concepts and making space for them within the descriptive scheme of thought. Uneven contrast is a literary method that points to just this possibility, the deconstruction of concepts by their opposing concepts and the eventual decomposition of the conceptual itself.

Zhang says of this, “...I still use the method of uneven contrast to show the reality in the emptiness, the simplicity in the ornamentation, of contemporary people” (“My Writing” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought 439). The emptiness of the concept, known so well by Hegel in his initial being-nothingness derivation, is here put forth as the false, the non-real. It is that which is to be taken back up into reality, to be revitalized by unevenness. The sterility of the self-same concept, the endless analytical tautological system of deduction, the logical equivalence of disparate entities, must be cast aside if the reality is to be found beneath the layers of abstraction and of abstractness. That the even contrast of pure opposites denotes an unacceptable level of abstraction is apparent in the ideological “ornamentation” of reality by grand theories of the pure concept. This occurs not just in the obvious case of German idealism, but even in philosophies claiming anti-idealism, such as Heidegger's. The symbolic realm of language is the very sphere whose existence necessitates the problems of concept-object contradiction. Language thus cannot be the level at which the problem is resolved, at least as a theoretical object, and at most as a restrictive horizon of pseudo-activity. The key is the uneven, the heterogeneous, the multiple-level, that of the multiplicity and of compulsive reaching-past. Thought is content neither with its external demarcations nor with those self-imposed barriers to fluidity that constantly seek to reduce the movement of thought to binary opposition. The logical negation of a so-called proposition is, without the non-conceptual, the same thing as that original proposition, as of course is clear in Hegel. What is different is the non-conceptual, and to get to that no amount of formalism can help us. Substantive philosophy as well as sound literary theory need what cannot be had, the unthinkable.

In what is perhaps the most powerful example of uneven contrast, Zhang writes, “Countless thousands of people dead, countless thousands of people suffering, after that an earth-shaking revolution... Liusu didn't feel there was anything subtle about her place in history. She stood up, smiling, and kicked the pan of mosquito-repellant incense under the table” (Love 167). To use an almost too obvious example, the logical negation of “countless thousands of people dead” is “not countless thousands of people dead” or something equivalent. The difference, however, the heterogeneity of the two predicates, cannot be thought in a formalism. Unevenness cannot be captured in a structure that does not reach past itself. The problem is the spuriousness inherent in any negation that is not a logical negation, leaving unevenness to the random. A striving for escape from the confines of the concept pushes Zhang's narrative into something which appears distorted from the conceptual standpoint, but which is really the unfolding or reconstitution of what was always already deformed. Reality as the uneven, that which seeps into conceptual categories and undoes their self-declared legitimation, is the very stuff of a negative dialectics.

Concept and object are thus related in a fundamentally uneven way. On this Adorno writes, “Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way the object enters into the subject” (Adorno Negative Dialectics 183). Furthermore, everything may be an object without being a subject, but the reverse is not the case. The asymmetry is introduced in and through consciousness, and it is important to keep the unique nature of abstraction in mind when dealing with that asymmetry. Nothing remains simply as it was in the beginning, either, for “Mediation must, of course, take place” (Marx 171). What this means for unevenness is that the heterogeneity of the elements is not a simple difference that can be decided or outlined by a process of elimination. Indeed, the other cannot be filled in at all. It's asymmetry all the way down, without any gaps. Taking the other into the structure of the original problem doesn't solve anything, because there is yet more asymmetry, this time between the new structure and yet another other. In fact, that asymmetry is the very direct result of the process of structuralization itself. The Bergsonian concept of virtuality, the heterogeneous multiplicity “behind” the actual, describes the process quite well, although from a non-dialectical standpoint (Deleuze). The importance of this phenomenon, and the mechanism whereby nothing is self-identical, is, as previously noted, well described in Adorno's works.

The determination (of concepts, subjects, objects, etc.) is always mutual, always two-way, and always acausal. Here the importance of the double-movement, concepts entering into objects and objects entering into concepts, is paramount. Both are the active, and both the passive. The one is never truly isolated from the other, no matter what kind of distortions the structure of their interrelations undergoes. The system is always deconstructed by the non-formalizable, but at the same time there is an equal striving for system itself. System is never truly escapable, but it is at the same time never complete and self-contained. The systematic impulse is systemic. In Zhang, this takes the determinate form of the striving for relation between the non-relatable, formalized as much as possible within the straight-jacket of language.

The simplest relation of naïve ontology is that of cause-and-effect between homogeneous unchangeable substances. This, I believe, is what Zhang seeks to critique, although her writing has much broader applicability. Specifically, Zhang writes, “Hong Kong's defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause from effect?” (Zhang, Love 167). This is compounded quite powerfully by the ambiguity in the translation of the title of the story. As one scholar noted, “...the original Chinese phrase for 'love in a fallen city' can also be read as 'love that topples cities'...” (Wang). This beautiful inversion of cause and effect is not only that, not only a simple reversal, but an uneven reversal, a veritable repudiation of cause and effect in the philosophical sense. A systematic inversion, one dealing with the structure, and not simply with the terms contained within that structure, as an uncritical reversal would be. At this point, a more in-depth look at cause and effect is in order, especially as it relates to this deconstruction.

Cause and effect are names for the relations into which pure isolated substances enter. The thing stands on one side, unaffected in its essence by neither the other thing nor by the peculiar operation of the relation itself, and certainly not by the combination of thing and action. This is not to say that nothing changes in a cause and effect view of the world, but rather it is to say that what changes is separate from the relation into which that changing thing enters—in other words, separate from cause and effect. The change is left to the ephemeral, to the appearances, whereas substance is itself impervious. This means that there are homogeneous elements, things, which interact homogeneously with other things in something we might call a causal chain. This is a mechanical, reversible process that most certainly does not reach past itself and most certainly does not create structures which think the non-conceptual. The external relationships put forward as ubiquitous by the cause and effect view of reality lead to the straight-jacket of formalism, that kind of bad philosophy upheld by the post-Wittgensteinian “philosophers of language”.

The mutual determination of concept and object precludes the causal relations which are the hallmark of homogeneity. Instead, dialectics puts forth the heterogeneity of elements, meaning they cannot be subsumed beneath such a simple and uncritical schema. Not just the relation, not just the particular arrangement of elements, of causes and of effects, is under scrutiny, but also the very concepts themselves. The concepts whose movement generates such friction are not just any concepts, however, but our concepts, created and utilized in our world, that of capitalism and, especially in Zhang's case, of imperialism and colonialism. It may sound silly, but the importance of reality in the formation of our concepts cannot be overstated. As Adorno has so rightfully observed, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (Minima Moralia 39). This means that, by virtue of the way things are at the current time, we cannot have “correct” concepts in a substantive sense. Our consciousness is reified, and no amount of individual criticism can truly pierce the veil. Thus, the failure of Kantian epistemology may be identified as the misunderstanding of this very factor. The non-coincidence of concept and object is, as far as we are here concerned, inherent in system itself, inherent in language, in thought, and in living. And again, “True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves” (Adorno, Minima Moralia 192). Those thoughts which are of this world cannot be rational, because this world is not the rational. Therefore, the truth of thoughts is to be measured not by their rational coincidence with reality, but by their deconstructive properties against that reality. What lays bare the incoherence of society, in other words.

Zhang's refutation of cause and effect is ostensibly one that is akin to Jung's theory of synchronicity. The epistemological aspect of the problem, as in “who can distinguish” cause from effect, is however not the defining aspect, at least defined narrowly. The problem of exactitude in science is here paralleled by the problem of abstraction in thought in general. Where does one thing end and another begin? Substance can here play no part, being only an artificially abstracted reified thing from the sea of relations the nexus of which forms the false standard of ontological judgment. Synchronicity is obviously an aspect of Zhang's critique, the meaningful connection of love and the fall of Hong Kong being prominent on the face of the narrative. However, Zhang does not stop there, as the uneven contrast comes into play. There is nothing uneven about synchronicity, and in fact it may exist alongside cause and effect even in the rigorous philosophical sense. Synchronicity is therefore purely epistemological, and the meaningful connections it produces are simply that. Uneven contrast struggles to give voice to the ontological as well as epistemological violence present in the act of systematizing.

The outcome of a denial of system, however, is not as clear as might be hoped, even after Adorno's work on the topic. The double-movement of systematizing/deconstructing is one that leads to an uncertain outcome. Zhang, however, has a positive interpretation, one that stresses the epistemological, synchronous aspect, as seen in the final line, “...oh! Why go into it?” (Zhang, Love 167). An asynchronous movement producing synchronicity in the epistemological sphere may seem quite strange, but it is indeed Zhang's perspective. Opening up a hermeneutic space, Zhang answers the challenge of meaning through the subjective experience and conclusions of Liusu. But as noted, the deconstruction is itself not simply a subjective process, but an actually-existing one as well. Need the subsequent re-construction (whatever that might be) base itself only on the subjective? Have we missed something in the structure of uneven contrast that might answer this question?

Every positivity is also a negativity and vice versa. Negation is determination, as the saying goes. The very critique of the bad through the negating movement of concepts is a (however small) form of positivity, but this is quite mundane and not what concerns us at present. Rather, the deconstruction of concepts is the more objective the more those deconstructed concepts are real abstractions. A true grounding of interpretation is thus the analysis of those categories that govern society though they are not thoughts, thought they are non-conceptual. These non-conceptual categories, or real abstractions, are explored most prominently by Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Isaak Illich Rubin. Real abstraction is a phenomenon that arises in capitalism due to the abstract nature of human labor within that system. Multifarious concrete labors are equated only insofar as they are treated abstractly by the capitalist mode of production and exchange. In the exchange of a commodity for money, the abstract labor contained in one is equated with that in the other (see Marx's labor theory of value). Other prominent real abstractions under capitalism are the Newtonian worldview and its corresponding Kantian epistemology (Sohn-Rethel). These types of abstractions are objective, non-conceptual, real, and to use Hegelian terminology, they are the self-abstraction or self-knowledge of capitalism as a mode of production, as a system.

This new level of objectivity brings with it the possibility of interpretation that is not simply a hermeneutic exercise, a subjective deconstruction of the ideology of capitalism. Rather, this cuts much deeper. It is an objective deconstruction of not only the ideology of capitalism, but of the objective regulatory categories of capitalism itself. Zhang's deconstruction of cause and effect becomes comprehensible, as the categories making up cause and effect are seen to be real abstractions, or immediately derived therefrom, or at the very least they function here as metaphors. The cause-and-effect view we have previously considered, wherein homogeneous unchangeable substances enter into relations with one another, closely parallels the logic of a capitalist economy. Unchanging commodities, according to Sohn-Rethel, enter into relations with other commodities, the most prominent of which is money (while not actually a commodity, fiat money stands in for the universal commodity). In fact, commodities must be assumed to be identical, unchanging in the act of exchange, and equal in terms of value/price for capitalism to work at all. In other words, cause and effect is the epistemological or superstructural product (not in a causal sense!) of generalized commodity production and exchange.

While all concepts may be shown to be false, may be deconstructed by uneven contrast and by negative dialectics, it is only those real abstractions which through their deconstruction yield something more than a simple negative positivity (if that phrase may be forgiven). This product of capitalist categories themselves is nothing other than that recognized quite clearly by Zhang and explored by her in the course of her work “Love in a Fallen City”. It is not simply a negative positivity because the object of its deconstruction is not something merely existing in the ideological sphere, where it would be unclear as to its real connections, but rather it is something directly real, something which exists through the self-abstraction of the capitalist system itself. Uneven contrast is like the deconstruction of the ideology of a person, except instead of a person it is the ideology of reality. Thus, the self-understanding of society, that of philosophical cause and effect (in this case; the critique could easily be extended), is demolished, and dialectical acausality is shown to be of ontological priority. We would do well here to remember Joseph Dietzgen's work on abstraction, which in essence asks the question about the boundaries of objects being the product of mental activity. Inside and outside are mental constructions, and with Zhang they are effectively deconstructed.

The ability of uneven contrast to think the non-conceptual is its great contribution to thought, closely paralleling that of Adorno's negative dialectics. This ability becomes all the more powerful and useful when it is applied to the deconstruction of society's own self-understanding, on a non-individual level, as in the deconstruction of real abstractions and their immediately traceable products.




Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Seabury Press, 1973. Print.

Adorno, Theodor. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Print.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour : a Critique of Epistemology. London: Macmillan, 1978. Print.

Xiaoping Wang. "Eileen Chang's Cross-Cultural Writing and Rewriting in Love in a Fallen City (《倾城之恋》)."Comparative Literature Studies 49.4 (2012): 565-84. Print.

Zhang, Ailing. “My Writing.” Modern Chinese Literary Thought :Writings on Literature, 1893- 1945. Ed. Kirk A. Denton. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. 436-442. Print.

Zhang, Ailing. Love in a Fallen City. New York: New York Review Books, 2007. Print.

Truth in Marxist Theory

Here is an essay I wrote last semester, which, while I no longer agree with much of it, is still somewhat interesting.

Truth in Marxist Theory: The Problem of the Totality as The Problem of Universals: 

A Dialectical Reconsideration 

I. Introduction

The concept of truth is a problematic one for modern Marxist philosophers. Throughout the development of Marxian thought, metaphysical concepts have been subjected to intense criticism, and most conceptions of truth are indeed metaphysical. Thus, it has been the task of Marxism to establish a concept of truth that is consistent with materialist dialectics; this is not an easy thing to do. First, the concept must be compatible with the critique of commodity fetishism in particular and reification in general—it cannot simply be a concept denoting what is; it must also take account of the dialectical principle that what is is rather what it becomes, and must further be able to look beyond the surface phenomena to discover the real relations that make up reality and are obscured by hypostasis.

A number of thinkers have attempted to solve the problem of Marxian truth, and thus will be referenced in this connection. A coherent theory of truth within the context of a philosophy of internal relations, such as Marxism, must reference the logical outcome of those relations, namely the totality—the complex of all social relations at all levels of abstraction including emergent properties. The theory of Georg Lukács, espoused in History and Class Consciousness (1923), used the concept of the totality as a major re-appropriation of G. W. F. Hegel for Marxism; hence the prominence of both Hegel and Lukács in our discussion. Lukács posited a totality that was knowable, or at least that the material conditions for that knowledge could be created through practical activity. However, Theodor W. Adorno, a great critic of “identity thinking” (the subsumption of particulars under necessarily ill-suited universals), disputed the concept of the totality on a number of grounds, and thus some of his works and ideas have been included for elucidation of this critique. Adorno's work led to the raising of two main points in this context: (1) all-encompassing concepts (concepts having the quality of totalization) are abstract and meaningless; and (2) descriptions of the totality's specificities are misguided.

In this paper, I will first present the problem of universals for Marxian theory, and then apply this to the specific case of the Marxian totality. Through this exposition, I will mount a defense against the so-called immanent negative theory that would deny the cogency of the totality, while taking into account the valid aspects of its criticism. The defense against the above-mentioned (1) will be based primarily on the manner of conceptual genesis employed—how it differs between totality and Absolute Spirit—and therefore how the type of universals is different. After establishing the need for the totality as a concept and arguing for that concept's coherence, the defense against (2) will take the form of a grounding of the concept in materiality in order to protect it against subjective determinations and idealism. In addition to this, a new conceptual scheme involving multiple totalities—objective, subjective, and conceptual—will be developed and applied for the defense of Lukács.

II. Abstract and Concrete Universals

All thought is abstraction.1 The human subject is bombarded with a mass of sense-data which is “in itself” unstructured. It is the work of the mind to structure this data, putting relevant data together to form discrete objects and present a comprehensible world to one's consciousness. Some data is ignored—for example, at any given moment one does not “see” everything that is in one's field of vision; all data is structured, pressed into categories and objects (Ollman 44-46). The problem is presented by German philosopher Joseph Dietzgen as follows: “Where do we find any indivisible unit outside of our abstract conceptions? Two halves, four fourths, eight eighths, or an infinite number of separate parts form the raw material out of which the mind fashions the mathematical unit. This book, its leaves, its letters, or their parts, are they units? Where do I begin, where do I stop?” (Dietzgen 84).

In other words, particular packets of sense-data are interpreted by the mind, forming a mental representation of the material world.2 There is also another kind of abstraction, however, namely the abstraction of “universals” or “concepts” from these existent objects. It will be helpful to keep in mind that the object is a variable conception, but in general we will assume a given or “fixed” field of objects, and concern ourselves primarily with this second form of abstraction from those objects. Thus the object, as a particular, whatever its boundaries, gives rise to universals. Take the following example: I may abstract the quality of “color” from various colorful objects. “Color” is here our universal, our concept, as opposed to the myriad colorful objects, which are our particulars. Universals, as the direct substance of thought and the locus of discussions of truth, must receive an in-depth analysis.

Following Hegel's lead (and thus that of Lukács), we will here consider two basic types of universals: abstract and concrete. It might help here to review Hegel's philosophical project.3 First and foremost, Hegel was a rationalist and an objective idealist, meaning he attempted to deduce the categories of existence from a “first principle”. However, this first principle couldn't be just any concept; it couldn't be arbitrarily chosen. It had to be the first principle both objectively and necessarily. He reasoned that the pure idea of Being had to be this first principle—whatever we say about anything, we must first say that it in some sense is. But what would it mean to deduce something from something else, namely from Being? One way to think about it is this: The first concept contains what is to be deduced within itself implicitly, and deduction makes the deduced aspect explicit. Hegel's program is to make all that is implicit in Being become explicit. Concepts further on in the system (as he goes on deducing from Being) are more explicit, meaning they show more and more of the truth in themselves. A way to say this is that Being is abstract, whereas, say, Becoming (a subsequent concept) is concrete. Being is abstracted from the differences between everything, leaving only what was the same about all of them, their pure Being. Hegel's process is then to negate Being (supposedly a purely logical operation yielding Not-Being) and subsequently combine the two, yielding Becoming. Becoming contains what is similar and what is different about the earlier concepts—it is thus concrete. It contains the similarity—things that are totally dissimilar obviously cannot be deduced from each other (this amounts to Hegel's belief that ideas contain their opposites within themselves)—and the difference—Being and Not-Being were posited as opposites, and we have subsumed them within Becoming. Although the specifities of Hegel's philosophy were shown to be flawed,4 we might abstract from it and put the distinction the following way:

An abstract universal is a universal that excludes what is different about its species, and includes what is similar. For example, “color” includes what is the same about red and blue, but it does not contain what is different about them. We may abstract (deduce) “color” from the specific colors red and blue, but we cannot deduce the colors red and blue from the idea of color. It is in this sense that we say we “abstract away” this difference. A concrete universal, on the other hand, is a universal that includes what is different between its species and what is the same. In Hegel's philosophy, concrete universals are what allow him to deduce his system of categories—otherwise he couldn't have deduced anything from Being because it was the most abstract concept. Thus, concrete universals were developed so deduction could go both ways, from abstract to concrete and from concrete to abstract:

An abstract universal is a genus which does not contain its species within itself. A wholly new conception of the nature of universals has to be evolved if deduction is to be possible, a conception according to which the universal, the genus, contains its differentiae and its species within itself, so that they can be extricated from it by a logical deduction. Such universals are called by Hegel concrete universals. (Stace 84)

There is, in the above conception, and in the subsequent theorizing of Lukács and Adorno, the assumption that concrete universals are in some sense better than abstract universals5. An abstract universal is empty, whereas a concrete universal is meaningful and useful. Abstract universals exclude the concrete particularities of the historical situation, and thus are not very useful for sociohistorical analysis, which is the self-appointed task of Marxism.

This is particularly important when we add the quality of totalization to our universals. To take an example: Hegel's Absolute Spirit was supposedly the most concrete universal—it lay at the end of his deductive system, it was the most explicitly true category, and as such it contained its entire makeup—all previous concepts in the system—explicitly within itself. To put this idea another way, the Absolute Spirit has no Other, meaning it is total. No categories exist against which it is opposed. This is seen to be necessary because having an Other would permit a further synthesis or inclusion—in other words, the Absolute Spirit would not be so absolute after all; it would be incomplete. Instead of being mediated, this totalized concept is a new immediacy, utterly self-identical. It is here that a problem arises, according to Adorno: “Following Hegel's own argument, such an entity which is not mediated by an other, another concept or real object, is abstract: it is totally indeterminate and empty, something you can arbitrarily attribute properties to—and as such certainly different from the many particular determinations and specific entities it is supposed to contain” (Baumann).

This problem is one with the concept of totalization itself—the absolute inclusion of everything within a supposedly self-identical whole. As Lukács's concept of the totality is a totalized universal, does it then follow that the totality is subject to the same criticism as Adorno mounted against Hegel's totalized universal, namely that it is abstract?

III. Problem (1): The Totality as Universal: Abstract or Concrete?

Lukács was explicit in his belief in the importance of the totality: “Only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality” (Lukács, History 8)6. Even Adorno admits this, or at least something similar, writing “To comprehend a thing in itself... is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection with others” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 25). In other words, the totality is the key to understanding the truth of the objects. Without it, epistemic truth is impossible—we would have nothing against which we could in theory measure the truth of a statement. We get, in a rare methodological explanation by Marx himself, a glimpse of this importance: “Even a history of religion that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical” (Marx 494). Critical thought thus lies in the relation of things to materiality—in other words, it lies in their concretion. Note that the following discussion will be limited to the totality's coherence as a concept, due to its importance for truth, and the question of the “filling-in” or description of that totality will be left to the subsequent section.

The totality, as has been said, may be understood as the complex of all social relations, on every level, including emergent properties. Thus, the totality is simply the idea of context (Marx's “material basis”) taken to its logical conclusion—the entirety of something's context. The totality is, much like Hegel's Absolute Spirit, the totalized concrete universal. But what makes the totality properly Marxian as opposed to the idealist Absolute Spirit? Lukács criticized Hegel along the following lines:

Having failed to discover the identical subject-object in history [Hegel's philosophy] was forced to go out beyond history and, there, to establish the empire of reason which has discovered itself... [From that vantage point] History is not able to form the living body of the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in the “absolute spirit”, in art, religion, and philosophy. (Lukács, History 147)

Thus, the totality is not simply context (as things are) but historical context (as things were, are, and will be, “things” being understood as relations or processes). As opposed to this, Hegel's context was an idealist context—not material and social relations but rather conceptual interactions within a closed system of thought; the closed thought was equated with a closed reality, rightly understood as inside that thought.

The question thus presents itself: Is the totality empty and abstract, or is it concrete and meaningful? To answer this, we must analyze the method of conceptual genesis of universals. As Dietzgen pointed out, this method is of the utmost importance. Universals are not simply givens, but are mediated by complex mental processes both conscious and unconscious. In what manner do we form our conception of the totality, and is that manner different than the way Hegel formed his Absolute Spirit? If it is different, can the manner of conceptual genesis we employ save the totality from the allegations of emptiness and pure abstraction that have plagued Hegel's philosophy?

First, Hegel's deductions were of a purely formal, conceptual character. Abstracting from differences, he began with a purely abstract conception of Being. Deduced from this starting point, his further concepts could only ever remain abstract. In contrast, the totality begins with the objects in their multiplicity, and does not deduce things purely logically, subsuming them within further concepts that do violence to the multifarious differences within them. The totality is formed by a conglomeration of processes, a successive concretization not based on subsumption but on an interaction of “contradictory” tendencies, or tensions. For example, Marx's economic analysis progresses from simple reproduction to expanded reproduction, drawing on the mathematical relations of the former to better understand relations in the latter, though the former is not an existent condition (Marx 711-32). In other words, Marx's further concepts are not synthetic unities; rather, they retain the tension of the previous concepts, as the social and material tensions of commodity exchange are not resolvable by thought alone, but only in practice. Lukács saw this and laid the basis for a “scientific” view of the totality, which will be looked at in more detail in the next section. Remember that we do not need to be able to delineate how we are actually capable of discovering the truth of the totality for the concept to be useful, in the sense of providing for a concept of truth, at least hypothetically.

As further concepts are added, as the analysis becomes more and more concrete, the approximation of reality becomes more and more sophisticated. However, as we continue this task of expanding our theory to include more and more relations, a paradox makes itself clear to us: once we contain all relations in our explanation, once we have totalized our social concept, we lose all meaning according to the criticisms, and have gone from concreteness over into abstraction. It is apparent here that something has gone wrong. What in the quality of totalization makes a concept lose its meaning? In light of this, we must look more closely at the term “totalization”.

The quality of totalization, of a concept or thing being total, implies that there is nothing existing outside of it. For Hegel's system, this was manifest in the total self-identity of the Absolute Spirit—it had no Other because it contained its Other within itself. It was the final link in the long chain of Hegel's deductive system, and nothing could be outside it as it was defined. For the totality, this is also the case. The reason why totalization might cause abstractness is that it yields a concept that is non-contextualized—it has no context but is existent purely in itself. However, the totality can be understood as the idea of context itself. Pure context is necessarily decontextualized in the sense of being mediated by a further idea of context; it is already and always immediate in that sense. And indeed this is the problem to which Adorno draws attention: the totality is unmediated mediation. For other concepts, for non-totalized universals, this implies that they are ideological or reified, being torn from their specific, concrete context and hypostatized by the subject.

Whether this also holds for the totality is a different question, however, and is best answered by recourse to the previous argument: the totality is mediated not explicitly by conceptual opposition from outside it or by further abstractions, but by material existence, understood in two ways: first, as the particulars contained inside it conceptually; and second, as the particulars of “reality”, of subjective experience. This first way simply means what has been said before about the method of conceptual genesis leaving the particular tensions intact. The second way implies something “outside” the realm of theory, of the qualia of subjective experience. This has the important implication that something may be outside the totality as concept, against which the concept is tested. This is the concept-object relation it undergoes during critical thinking and experience—the totality must not be hypostatized. But how does the totality as a concept relate differently to its object than the particulars of experience relate to their own partitioning? I argue that this is due to the quality of totalization. However, to make sense of this claim, we will need to develop a new way of looking at the problem.

IV. A New Conceptual Scheme

Here I propose to make a further distinction between the objective totality, subjective totalities, and totality-concepts; until now we have been speaking only of the objective variety and the concept of that objective variety, and thereby running the risk of hypostasis, of the idealism that is equating subjective experience and objective reality. The subjective totalities are the various thought-concretes that arise from mental representation, the operation of which constitute particulars in a conceptual scheme and present those particulars to the subject of consciousness. In this way, subjective totalities are the total horizons of subjectivity, and hence total in a different sense than is the objective totality. The subjective totalities are altered by the action of the forces and tensions of the objective totality. It is apparent that the subjective totalities are contained within the objective totality, as is the third type of totality, the totality-concept. The totality-concept may be that of the objective or subjective totalities, and is simply the conscious mental representation of them.

These sundered totalities are of a different type than the Absolute Spirit, which was in some sense all three types of totality in one. This lack of differentiation—caused by Hegel's equating of thought and existence, and of consciousness and unconsciousness—led him to difficulties. As against his idealism, the opposition of the three must be held, with each subsumed in the more comprehensive and less-comprehensible level. The concept of truth thus becomes a kind of isomorphism between these three levels. Whether this is possible to achieve is a different issue, dealt with in the next section. For now, we will analyze how this scheme relates to the formerly-defined categories of abstract and concrete.

Prior to our three-level scheme of totality, we had a simpler two-level scheme, which denied the antagonism of conscious and unconscious mental operation, and was hence a kind of hidden idealism, a positing of the equality of thought-concrete and real-concrete. The abstractness or concreteness of our analysis was restricted to this bare equality, which impressed upon it the inability to avoid hypostasis. Our method of conceptual genesis was in that case stunted, and concretion threatened to be limited by the unaccounted-for horizons of the individual subjectivity as opposed to that of our concepts.

V. Problem (2): The Description of the Totality

Having established the coherence of the totality and presented a new conceptual scheme for dealing with the concept, we turn now to the problem of description, the material grounding of the totality in reality. A first step was made in the above description, by the very nature of the scheme as one containing multiple levels of interaction. We must, however, consider the usefulness of this description of the totality. Lukács clearly did not view the totality as a simple theoretical object, but rather something that could be studied, yielding economic and political insights.7

The problem for both Lukács and Hegel was the finding of the “subject-object” of history, the combined knower-and-known whole, the totality. For the latter, this was the Absolute Spirit; for the former, it was the proletariat. As both the subject of history (the active doer, the would-be totality of society after the communist revolution) and the object of history (the passive “done-to”, the would-be all of society, also the totality), the proletariat was thought to have the ability to overcome the problem of truth by creating its own social conditions, since the problem of truth was essentially the problem of the given, reified particular. Thus, the totality could only be fully known when the proletarian revolution had been successful—this is one version of the famous unity of theory and practice. It is stated by Rockmore as follows: “Lukács maintains that the proletariat makes history and therefore can know it. In this way Lukács supports his claim that Marxism surpasses the supposedly fictitious Hegelian idea of the absolute to grasp the real historical subject” (Rockmore).

This is Adorno's criticism: Lukács supposes that the totality can only be known after the proletarian revolution, which is supposing some description of the totality, something that it is not legitimate to suppose. This is because he assumes that the proletariat is the aforementioned subject-object of history, which is dependent on the character of the unknowable totality. In the words of Nicholas Joll: “Adorno believes that one cannot specify the correct epistemic relation between subjects (knowers) and objects. The reconciled condition will be so novel that any anticipation of it will be marked 'by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape'. Adorno infers that 'the full object' is not to be 'positively pictured'” (Joll).

We shall see that this argument is very different from the one advanced as (1) in the previous sections. There, Adorno denied the totality due to its abstractness, where here it is denied due to the epistemic environment of current existence.8 Let us now examine this new criticism in more detail.

The idea that “Practice itself was an eminently theoretical concept” is one that sheds some light on the problem (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 144). Lukács could not seek recourse to practice because his concept of “practice” was just that—a concept. He could not say that the truth would be reached through a certain course of action because that course of action was itself articulated theoretically. The correct epistemic relation to the objects was not as easily knowable as that. But, we must ask, what is barring the understanding completely and totally from truth? Is it impossible, as Adorno alleged, to articulate a course of action that could lead to the resolution of the problem of knowledge?

VI. The New Scheme Applied: A Critical Re-interpretation of Lukács

The tripartite framework of interwoven totalities points the way to the resolution of the problem of truth. Having articulated a coherent theory of truth—the isomorphism or symbolic equation of the three totalities—we must ask how truth may be reached, and if we cannot come up with an answer, our theory will be quite useless, although still interesting. It is here that the method of conceptual genesis resurfaces; the formation of the totality-concept is related to the formation of the subjective totality, which is related to the objective totality. The formation of the concept is inseparable from both of our two previously-posed problems—form is inseparable, though distinct, from content.

The relation of the totalities is of the utmost importance. The totality-concept has epistemological access to the subjective totality, which then has access to the objective totality. This means that there are two interactions we can consider, without jumping the gap. In other words, previous attempts at truth were restricted by the fact that the totality-concept was related directly to the objective totality, when in reality it can only be legitimately related to the subjective totality. Thus, the task of discovering truth lies not in “directly perceiving” the objective totality, which is impossible, but in alteration of the nature of the subjective totality as the mediating concept between the two others. This takes us back to Lukács, except in a more sophisticated scheme—to find truth, we must establish a social order, a complex of social relations that relates the subjective and objective totalities more fully, which would then allow for the formation of a totality-concept that coincides with the objective totality isomorphically. There are thus two considerations we must make here: (a) the possibility of articulating the material and epistemic conditions for the double-isomorphism of subjective and objective totality, and (b) the conditions for the method of genesis of the totality-concept from those relations.

Lukács really sought for the triple-isomorphism without explicitly considering that there were indeed three parts. The subjective totality can be directly formulated as a concept through the theory and techniques of psychoanalysis and phenomenology. We can directly know the variations and qualities of subjectivity, simply by experience and by analysis. But how can we create the conditions of subjective socialization that correspond to reality, to the objective totality which we cannot experience? The answer lies in the deconstruction of ideology, of false concepts and of the tendency to hypostatize, the alteration of those subjective horizons. This is where Adorno once again re-enters the picture. The conditions of ideological deconstruction are those that relate the subject critically and negatively to the falsely-presented world in which she is situated. Through Adorno's negative theory, we come to understand that the world is not as our concepts would have it, and further that these concepts are mediated by our subjective totalities. His work implied that we cannot relate the objective totality to its concept, and this is true. However, a relation of our subjective totalities to our concept of the subjective totality is permissible, because we can know our subjective totalities. Knowing the relation of concept to subjective totality, we know several links of our tripartite chain. The material and epistemic conditions which yield a collective consciousness in what was previously restricted to the unconscious—in other words, what yields Lukács's subject-object—is what is to be striven for, because that is a direct creation of the conditions of existence and of subjectivity as opposed to the passive acceptance of the reified given.

Why does the conscious creation of subjectivity bridge the gap and penetrate the truth of the objective totality? The creation of subjectivity lies in the sphere of objectivity, or else all is solipsism. Thus, we come to know the objective totality through manipulation of the subjective. We cannot, in the last analysis, know the objective totality directly in the sense of conceptualizing it as it exists, but rather we act in and through it. The theory of acting in this manner is thus the theory of the objective totality. Hence we have a defense of Lukács's conception of praxis.

Something must here be clarified: how does our new understanding withstand the criticisms of the type espoused by Adorno? It withstands (1) because it's method of genesis is not one of synthesis; it withstands (2) because it works outside the realm of subjectivity, though it works on that very subjectivity. Our theory denies that we cannot know, because we can know through knowledge of and action upon our subjective totalities. The concept of practice is no longer simply theoretical or conceptual—it works not on concepts but on the psyche, and in terms dictated by that psyche; those terms may be concepts, but they are able to be directly related to their object, the subjective totality . Thus, it escapes the criticism by relating concretely to a directly knowable subjective reality.

VII. Conclusion

Without being allowed any access to the objective totality, analysis becomes an analysis of the given. An organic evolution of social relations cannot be adequately pictured, much less a truly revolutionary situation. Adorno's dialectics are, curiously, to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase, “Dialectics at a standstill” (Benjamin, qtd. In Buck-Morss 127). The concept of the subjective totality re-introduces practice, and hence true temporality, into Marxian theories of truth. The epistemological conditions that allow us access to truth must be put forth as a kind of psychoanalytic Marxism.9 An area for further theorizing would be the way the relations of society socialize its members and constitute them as subjects.10 While these theories must continually be put to trial by the critical intellect, theoretically the concepts are coherent. The totality (now conceptualized as multiple totalities) is seen to be essential for the prescriptions of revolutionary Marxism. The specifities of the conjuncture in which conscious creation of subjectivity is possible must unfortunately be left to subsequent analysis. Perhaps Adorno's saying, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly”, is true in some sense, but we must take care not to hypostatize this “wrong life” (Adorno, Minima Moralia 39). Wrong life can be made right, and not in the way Adorno refuted with the concept of theoretical practice.

Bibliography 

Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia : Reflections From Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Continuum Press, 1973. Print.

Adorno, Theodor W. “Sociology and Empirical Research.” The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1981. Print.

Baumann, Charlotte. "Adorno, Hegel and the Concrete Universal." Philosophy & Social Criticism 37.1 (2011): 73-94. Print.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics : Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press, 1977. Print.

Dietzgen, Joseph. The Positive Outcome of Philosophy. Trans. Ernest Untermann. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906.

Finlayson, Gordon. "Adorno: Modern Art, Metaphysics and Radical Evil." Modernism/modernity 10.1 (2003): 71-95. Print.

Joll, Nicholas. "Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Theme, Point, and Methodological Status." International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17.2 (2009): 233-53. Print.

Lukács, György. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. Print.

Lukács, György. Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. Trans. Nicholas Jacobs. London: Verso, 2009. Print.

Marx, Karl. Capital : a Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Classics, 1990. Print.

Ollman, Bertell. Dance of the Dialectic : Steps in Marx’s Method. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Print.

Rockmore, T. "Fichte, Lask, and Lukacs's Hegelian Marxism" Journal of the History of Philosophy 30.4 (1992): 557-77. Print.

Stace, W. T. The Philosophy of Hegel: a Systematic Exposition. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Print.

Footnotes

1 See, for example, Bertell Ollman's defense of this view in Dance of the Dialectic, chapter 5: “Putting Dialectics to Work: The Process of Abstraction in Marx's Method”.

2 Bertell Ollman has dealt extensively with this aspect of the problem in his many works.

3 The explanation given in this paragraph is in some sense a summary of W. T. Stace's The Philosophy of Hegel.

4 See, for example, Stace.

5 Take, for example, the following statement by Lukács: “By contrast [to bourgeois abstractness], in the teeth of all these isolated and isolating facts and partial systems, dialectics insists on the concrete unity of the whole” (Lukács, History 6).

6 And again, on the totality's importance for Marxism: “It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality” (Lukács, History 27).

7 For example, Lukács writes that “Nor can a single isolated event, regardless of whether it is a victory or a defeat, possibly decide [the eventual outcome of proletarian revolutionary activity]” (Lukács, Lenin 38), with the implication that the totality is decisive as against the particulars.

8 It is characteristic of Adorno that even the “good” is not posited concretely, but rather we are left with the idea that current existence is undeniably bad, “radically evil” (Finlayson). Adorno confines his critique to how bad things are now.

9 See, perhaps, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

10 For example in the work of Louis Althusser.

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.