special issue on theodor w. adorno || a marxism for the postmodern? jameson's adorno

A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's AdornoAuthor(s): Peter OsborneSource: New German Critique, No. 56, Special Issue on Theodor W. Adorno (Spring - Summer,1992), pp. 171-192Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488333 .

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A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno

Peter Osborne

Fredric Jameson is by general acclaim the leading Marxist critic in North America. Author of a series of books that set the pace for radical literary culture in the United States during the 1970s through their reception of European theoretical trends (Sartre, German Marxist cultural criticism, Russian formalism, and French structuralism), he turned in the 1980s first to the elaboration of a distinctly political form of narratology (The Political Unconscious),' and then, most famously, to a theorization of postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism" - a pioneering if ambiguous Marxist appropriation of the concept of postmodernism that has provoked wide-ranging critical discussion.2

Late Macrxism: Adomrno, or, the Persistence .of

the Dialectic3 continues Jameson's search for a Marxism fit for a postmodern age by way of a rereading of Adorno in the context of current debates. In this respect, it is very much an intervention - against poststructuralism and the poststructuralist attack on the concept of totality in particular, but also

1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981). All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text.

2. See, for example, Douglas Kellner ed., Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (Washing- ton, D.C.: Maisonneuve, 1989). Jameson's reply to his critics, "Marxism and Postmodernism," which concludes the volume, is reprinted in New Left Review 176 (July/Aug. 1989): 31-45. Jameson's original essay, "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," was published in New Left Review 146 (July/Aug. 1984): 53- 92. This analysis is expanded and updated in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991).

3. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text.

171



172 A Marxism for the Postmodern?

against Habermas and the restoration of an Enlightenment concept of reason. It is the only book-length study of Adorno so far in English that aims to be more than an introduction to his thought, and the only one at all to pay serious attention to Aesthetic Theory, Adorno's great posthumous work.4

Twenty years ago, when Adomno's work was largely unavailable in English, Jameson first wrote on Adorno in the first chapter of Marxism and Form,5 and the long essay concluding that book, "Towards Dialecti- cal Criticism," shows a marked influence ofAdorno's methodology in its critical practice. Late Marxism marks a return to that text in the after- math of a predominantly poststructuralist period in American criticism to which Jameson was himself a significant if critical contributor. In the meantime, nearly all of Adorno's main works have been translated into English (a dozen books and numerous essays), and a diverse secondary literature has slowly begun to develop. There have also, of course, been significant changes in the wider social coordinates of left theory in what Jameson once dubbed the "overdeveloped" countries. It is in relation to these changes - theorized elsewhere under the twin rubrics of "postmodernism" and "late capitalism" - that Jameson now makes a claim for "the special relevance of Adorno's Marxism, and of its unique capacities" (12). What was of "no great help in the previous periods," he suggests, "may turn out to be just what we need today" (5). Hence the book's title, Late Marxism, and the fact that its reading of Adorno ultimately cannot be disengaged from the diagnosis of global develop- ments from which it sets out. In this respect, Jameson's reading of Adorno offers us a case study of the character ofJameson's, as much as of Adorno's, Marxism - a test case of the compatibility of some kind of Marxism with some kind of "postmodern" analysis of the present.

Late Marxism offers detailed readings of three major works - Nega- tive Dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Aesthetic Theory - considered as "parts of a single unfolding system" (3), with additional material (primarily Minima Moralia) used to support the interpretation. Four

4. The two introductory volumes in English are Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W/ Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978) and Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984): Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialec- tics: Theodor W Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977) has too narrow a focus to count as a full-scale work on Adorno as such.

5. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories on Litera- ture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) 3-59.

6. The reference is to Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1975).



Peter Osborne 173

short concluding chapters summarize the argument for Adorno's work as "a dialectic model for the 1990s" (251). I shall look first at aspects ofJameson's readings before turning to some of the wider issues that they raise. The interpretation comes under the sign of "celebra- tion of the dialectic as such" (11) and is by turns incisive and illuminat- ing, contentious and flagrarit in its disregard for distinctions between different philosophical positions. It is characterized, methodologically, by two main features: the displacement of philosophical by rhetorical analysis and an associated pragmatic reduction of judgment to the pa- rameters of a conjuncturalist conception of hegemonic intervention into current theoretical debates. In its creative combination of seem- ingly incompatible philosophical sources in the construction of a new critical project, Late Marxism constitutes a particularly problematic example of what Jonathan Arac has called "the deliberate scandal of Jameson's method".' However, whereas previously, in the case to which Arac refers (The Political Unconscious), the problem was the apparent incompatibility of sources, here it takes the deeper form of an incompatibility between Jameson's method of reading and the philosophical position (namely, Adorno's) it is deployed to defend. In this respect, Late Marxism may be read not just as a test case ofJameson's and Adorno's Marxism, but also as a case study in the problematic relationship of "literary" to "philosophical" theory more generally.

Twelve-tone Philosophy: Another Kind of Writing Part one is on Negative Dialectics. It consists of a threefold insistence:

on the indispensability of the concept of totality; on the Marxian basis of Adorno's critique of identity; and on the centrality to Adorno's writings of the question of philosophical form. Identity, Jameson argues in characteristic style, is Adorno's "word for" the Marxian concept of exchange-relationship. His achievement is "to have powerfully generalized, in richer detail than any other thinker of the Marxist or dialectical tradition, the resonance and implication of the doctrine of exchange- value for the higher reaches of philosophy" (26). The concept of totality enters as at once corrective and victim to the impulse to identity. Totality is a corrective or antidote to "identity-thinking" (a form of thought for

7. Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 261. See also Cornel West, "Ethics and Action in Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics," Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986) 123-44.




which concepts are understood to gain their meanings from one-to- one correspondences with objects) insofar as it draws attention to the open multiplicity of suppressed or forgotten relations through which individual concepts are constituted. Yet, it is a victim of it, in permanent danger of regression to it, insofar as it is itself construed as a positive representation, however complex, of some independent whole. Exact- ly this reification of totality, which Adorno detects in the closure of the Hegelian system, is the ultimate conceptual effect of the logic of equiv- alence structuring the exchange-relationship, and the basis of the idealism of all systematic philosophy. In opposition to such thinking, Adorno offers us the relentless negativity of a "new dialectial objectivity" (35), based upon the methodological axiom (oddly never cited by Jameson) that "universal history must be both construed and denied": the idea of negative dialectics.8

This means that a totalizing idea like "late capitalism" cannot appear in Adorno's work as an "object" to be theorized or interpreted as such (except abstractly, in the merely summarizing concepts of political economy), but only as an unrepresentable negative totality, the comprehension of which must take the "micrological" form of the concrete dialectics of identity and nonidentity that make up critical experi- ences of its constitutive parts. As Jameson puts it,

Interpretation as such - the reading of the particular in the light of the absent universal - is dialectically transformed and "sublated": producing a new mode of interpretation in which the particular is read, not in the light of the universal, but rather in the light of the very contradiction between particular and universal in the first place. Interpretation now means turning the text inside out and making it into a symptom of the very problem of interpretation itself. (32)

Thus, we are led directly to the third strand of Late Marxism's presenta- tion of Adorno's methodology: the question of philosophical form and of "philosophical writing as linguistic experiment" (11). For in grasp- ing the imperative that totality must be at once "construed and denied" we have already entered the terrain of modernism as the self- consciousness of a crisis of representation.

8. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik [ND] (1966; Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) 314; English edition, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) 320. Page numbers to both the German and English editions will be given in further references with the German edition given first, e.g., ND 314/320.



Peter Osborne 175

Jameson firmly stands against the idea that the modernism of Adorno's texts might be assimilated to "the aleatory free play of postmodern textuality," since there is still "a certain notion of truth" at stake: "the referent itself.., survives, albeit problematically" (11). The problem is how this referent is to be represented once the underlying realism of the systematic philosophical text is eschewed on account of its final identitarian closure. At this point, the difference in Jameson's reading of Adorno from the first chapter of Marxism and Form stands out most clearly. Whereas he earlier had judged Negative Dialectics a "massive failure" on the grounds that it represents "a kind of hypercon- scious abstraction of that genuine totality of thought which Adorno's works taken as a whole embody,"9 he now is far more sensitive to its methodological self-consciousness and prepared to read it not just as the theory of a practice of conceptual modeling, but in terms of its own practice of modeling as well. Even the form of its sentences, he insists, must be read "as a form of philosophizing in its own right" (69).

The problem of philosophical form is broached in two ways: historically, in terms of the influences at work on Adorno's thought (Benja- min and Schoenberg); and immanently, through an attempt at an exposition of the "mimetic component" of Adorno's sentence-structure. Both approaches are enlightening, but each raises difficulties sympto- matic of a problem with the book as a whole: a tendency to break off the internal investigation of Adorno's thought at precisely those points at which it approaches the fundamental philosophical issues at stake and displace it with "translations" into other, generally more recent, critical idioms deriving from quite different philosophical traditions.

Thus, for example, Jameson suggests that it is "perfectly proper" to associate the "timelessness" of Benjamin's and Adorno's constellations or conceptual models with the name of "the synchronic," and that "having gone this far, we might as well identify ... [Adorno's] account of causal networks and constellations with Althusserian structural caus- ality" (60). This is a collapse on a major scale. It would seem that having established that Benjamin's and Adorno's thought is deeply historical, Jameson simply has no other conceptual means at hand to reconcile this with the reference to timelessness. He simply ignores that Althus- ser's thought is located not only in a quite different philosophical tradition, but also in a quite different political and intellectual context

9. Jameson, Marxism and Form 58.




(debates within the French Communist Party about Lenin's theoretical legacy). The quick fix of comparative reference (for which the laconic "we might as well" serves simultaneously as a covert disclaimer and mark of bad conscience) replaces the apparent contradiction that might otherwise act as a stimulus to a deeper inquiry into the treatment of temporality in the thinkers in question.

Nor is there any serious attempt to distinguish the philosophical structure of Adorno's constellations from Benjamin's. Following Buck- Morss,'o Benjamin's influence on Adorno's initial (1931) formulation of his project is taken as the ground of a lasting similarity in their thought. Jameson never refers to Adorno's critique of Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image, and privileges the commonality of their search for a new mode of philosophical representation (Darstellung) over their sub- stantial philosophical differences. These appear only as differences between "languages," readily amenable to Jameson's interpretive translations. He deploys the model of a structuralist hermeneutics that con- cluded The Prison-House of Language" - of truth as an effect of translations - not only to interpret, but also purportedly to valorize the thought of a thinker whose own philosophical assumptions about truth stand in direct contrast to it. Thus, if for Adorno, "We must resist the all but universal compulsion to confuse the communication of knowledge with knowledge itself, and to rate it higher, if possible... [when] at present each communicative step is falsifying truth and selling it out,"'2 for Jameson, as indeed, ironically, for Habermas, truth would never appear to remain an effect of communication; communication is an effect of translation.

This is not to say thatJameson's "translations" are not at times productive, once shed of their philosophical self-understanding. But they are always problematic. The clarification of the concept of mimesis undertaken by way of the "substitution" of the "more recent terminol- ogy" of narrative, as a prelude to the analysis of Adorno's sentence- structure, is a good example (66-67). This substitution is connected to an unhappiness about the centrality of mimesis to Adorno's thought that is only partially explained by the inherent difficulty of the concept. Jameson claims that mimesis in Adorno is "never defined nor argued but always alluded to, by name, as though it had pre-existed all the

10. Buck-Morss. 11. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism

and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972). 12. ND 41/50. This passage appears in a paragraph entitled "Privilege of Experience."



Peter Osborne 177

texts" (54). But this is misleading. First, mimesis is given an explicit theoretical definition in Aesthetic Theory, at least with regard to its result, as "the non-conceptual affinity of a subjective creation with its objective and non-posited other"'" - more of a definition of truth in representation than of narrative as such. Second, to say that mimesis is "never argued" is to ignore that in one sense all three books under discussion, as a whole, constitute little less than a single massive argument for it. To be perplexed by its apparent preexistence of Adorno's texts means to be perplexed by either the philosophical prehistory of the concept (its place in the history of philosophy prior to Adorno's modi- fication of it) or Adorno's claim for its objectivity as a natural-historical, ontological, or at the very least, anthropological category.

The substitution of the "language of narrative" certainly dispels such perplexity - but only by removing the discussion from the field of Adorno's philosophical concerns. The gain, in drawing attention to the temporality of mimesis as an activity - the fact that "the mimetic possibilities of... individual sentences can be grasped only as the way in which they tend to form themselves into micro-narratives, and as it were act out the content of what is in them abstractly grasped as philosophical thinking or argument" (67) - does not require any such metonymic substitution. The cost requires treating the whole of Adomo's dialectical anthropology as what the Russian formalists called "a motivation of the device": "a belief that justifies your own aesthetic after the fact" (68). As a strategy for interpreting Adomo's anthropology, it has something of the logic about it of burning the village to save it. If this is the price of Adomo's relevance to contemporary theory, irrelevance begins to seem the more critical option. But Jameson does not stick with this approach for long. When in his reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment he does come to confront Adomo's anthropology more directly, he is still loath to meet its philosophical claims head-on and opts instead for an analysis of its rhetorical structure. Once again, however, such a strategy carries with it philosophical implications of its own.

13. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie [AT] (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) a6; English edition, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) 80. Further references will be given to both editions with the German edition given first, e.g. AT 86/80.




Dialectic of Enlightenment: Another Kind of History The central issue here is the idea of natural history. Jameson inter-

prets it in Russian formalist terms as a "reciprocal defamiliarization of the two incommensurable poles of the dualism of Nature and Histo- ry" (99) and understood to demand an "alternation" of natural and social histories "neither of which contradicts each other, but which ceaselessly recode the findings of each in an incompatible language" (108). He reads Dialectic of Enlightenment as the product of a "rewriting strategy" (rewriting the social as the natural and vice versa) that "'serves as a reminder of natural history rather than a new theory in its own right" (109-110), shunting to one side the vexed question of the book's relation to Marxism. (The Marxian paradigm, Jameson insists in a re- vealing turn of phrase, is left "intact" [231].)

The reading is ingenious. Whether it is true to Adorno's thought, or convincing in its own right, is another matter. A whole series of difficulties present themselves, of which I shall comment here on just three: the alleged incommensurability of nature and history; the slip- page from a nature-history dualism to a natural history-social history dualism; and the question of Adorno's Marxism.

The claim that for Adorno nature and history are "incommensurable" can be straightforwardly textually refuted. The "'Natural Histo- ry"' section of Negative Dialectics to which Jameson refers concludes with an account of "the moment in which nature and history become commensurable [kommensurabel] with each other."'4 This is the "moment of passing" (Vergdngnis) in which, in Adorno's words, metaphysics is "transmuted" into history. Jameson refers to this passage at the end of his discussion when he says that a language of Vergdngnis "would deem to lead us out of history altogether, whether natural or social, into the realm of metaphysics itself" (110). But the passage insists upon the opposite: "the transmutation of metaphysics into history," or the "secularization" of metaphysics via the category of "decay" (Verfall). It is one thing to dispute the idea of history that is thus produced, quite another to ignore Adorno's claim for it as a historical idea

14. ND 353/359. Jameson quotes the sentence before this on p. 98 of his text, al- though in offering his own translation he not only departs radically from the German iwhere the published translation is more or less literal), but also fails to register the fact that the second half of the sentence is a quotation from Adorno's 1932 Kant Society lecture, "The Idea of Natural History" - an unfortunate slip in a book prefaced by a long complaint about Adorno's published translators.



Peter Osborne 179

- especially when just such a transmutation of metaphysics into histo- rv is at stake in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Dialectic of Enlightenment does not just "remind" us of natural history, of history as nature; it gives an account of it via "the concealment of history's natural growth by history itself''5 - the myth of enlightenment

an account that by simultaneously presenting myth as enlightenment, doubles back upon itself to expound nature as history. This is no simple "alternation" of incompatible but translatable languages (as- suming it is possible to make philosophical sense of this idea), but rather dialectical mediation of the tensest and most fundamental kind: mediation without reconciliation. To reduce such mediation to "alternation" is to remove the moment of identity, which alone turns non-identity into contradiction and thereby makes the unity of thought "the measure of heterogeneity" in the object.'6 Late Marxism purports to "celebrate the dialectic as such," but its interpretive practice serves only to efface it.

The covert shift from discussion of the nature-history relation to that of natural history-social history is a case in point. For whereas the former

.the nature-history relation) thematizes the emergence of temporality,

and thus involves the paradoxical idea of nature "before" time (and hence a decidedly non-"synchronic" concept of timelessness), the latter (the natural history-social history relation) takes place within historical time as a relation between different temporalities. Yet only the perspective of the former (the nature-history relation) gives metaphysical and dialectical substance to this latter relation by its doubling of nature as at once a historical and an ahistorical object. Only on the basis of this doubling can natural history (and hence a materialist concept of social history) be thought at all. The idea of"reciprocal defamiliarization" does not begin to touch the philosophical substance, complexity, or implications of these ideas.

Jameson is similarly disinclined to investigate their relation to Marx- ism. It may indeed be "unnecessary to suppose" that the presence of non-Marxist forms of explanation in Dialectic of Enlightenment "mark a move beyond Marxism or a renunciation of the Frankfurt School's essentially Marxist programs of the 1930s" (108). But this leaves the matter at the level of supposition. It hardly constitutes a reason for foregoing an investigation of the conceptual relations between its different elements

15. ND 351/358. 16. ND 17/25.




(Marxian, Nietzschean, Weberian, and Freudian) when its status as a Marxist text is so disputed. Given his "rewriting strategy" of reading, Jameson seems to think such an investigation beside the point. Yet he fails to see how seriously it threatens the basic premise of his whole approach to Adorno's Marxism - namely, that identity is Adorno's "word for" the Marxian concept of exchange-relationship (26) - that there is a simple identity of identity and exchange.

Jameson is careful, in his distancing of Adorno from poststructuralist appropriations, to refer to Nietzsche as little as possible. Yet the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment cannot be understood without at least a nod in his direction, since, unlike that of the early LukStcs, Adorno's use of Weber draws directly upon the Nietzschean underpinnings of his thought. For Adorno's concept of identity, which Jameson treats exclusively with regard to the exchange-relationship, has independent and explicitly Nietzschean roots in the idea that the impulse to identity inherent in thought is an expression of a will to self-preservation. The connection of the Marxian critique of exchange-value to the philosophical concept of identity, whichJameson highlights as Adorno's great achievement, is made on the ground of a Nietzschean anthropology. From this connection comes both the originality and the difficulty, the achievement and the aporia, of Adomrno's thought. (Jameson's account of Adomo on philosophy and exchange-value fails to differentiate him from Sohn-Rethel.) Dialectic of Enlightenment forges this unique combination of Marxian and Nietzschean themes into a new kind of history. It is hard to see how someone commit- ted to the recommendation of Adomrno's Marxism, of Adorno's thought as a distinctive kind of Marxism, could fail to be interested in its relation to the philosophical structure of Marx's own concept of history. To read it as myth, as Jameson tends to, just begs the question. Once again, the fix- ation on "translation" and the language of "languages" reveals itself as an evasion of theory, or more precisely, ofjudgment.

"Culture": The Missing Term?

This tendency to avoid points of dispute whenever Adomo's thought runs against the grain ofJameson's own theoretical predilections is most striking in Late Marcism's treatment of what is probably the best-known part of Adorno's work: his writing on the culture industry. Recently, these writings have been the object of a renewed critical interest. Jameson does not refer to these debates, but dearly his work on postmodernism makes him unlikely to be sympathetic to a renewal of the Frankfurt School



Peter Osborne 181

approach, however reworked, since it presupposes the division of the cultural realm into two distinct interacting spheres ("high" and "low"), which Jameson insists no longer exists."7 How is this to be squared with the idea of Adorno's work as a dialectic model for the 1990s?

Jameson's solution is as dramatic as it is dubious. It is also deeply undialectical. It has two main strands: first, a denial that Adorno ever had a theory of mass culture "as such" in the first place - a move that displaces criticism with a strange kind of apologetics, already seen at work in the treatment of Adorno's anthropology; and second, a histor- icist restriction on the validity of his critique of the culture industry to a period now definitely past. Not much survives so radical a pruning. Yet he offers little direct critique, little engagement with the claims of the work itself. Jameson takes for granted a highly contentious interpretation of recent cultural history (his own theorization of postmodernism) and never considers that Adorno's thought might pose a legiti- mate challenge to this interpretation.

Thus, Jameson interprets Adorno's famous remark about the torn halves (that "the dialectic of the lowest" and "the dialectic of the highest" culture are "torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up")'s to refer, not to high art and mass culture, "but only to high art and light art, whose initial differentiation is itself elimi- nated by commercialization" (133). The "Culture Industry" chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, he argues, is not only about art, it is not about culture either "in any contemporary sense." It is "the theory of an industry, of a branch of the interlocking monopolies of late capitalism that takes money out of what used to be called culture" (144, second emphasis added). It is therefore "a mistake to suppose that Adorno's 'elitist' cri- tiques of the 'Culture Industry' in any way define his attitude or position toward 'mass culture,' grasped..,. not as a group of commercial products but as a realm of social life: irrespective of the enormous changes

17. "The one fundamental feature of all .... postmodemrnism," Jameson writes, is "the effacement in them of the older (essentially high modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modemrn, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adomrno and the Frankfurt School," "Postmodemrnism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," 54-55. This running to- gether of Adomrno with Leavis and the New Critics as "ideologues of the modemrn" is characteristic of the reception of the Frankfurt School in cultural studies.

18. Adomrno to Benjamin, 18 'Mar. 1936, trans. Harry Zohn, Emrnst Bloch, et al. Aes- thetics and Politics (London: New Left, 1977) 123.




and mutations undergone by 'mass culture' since wartime Hollywood and on into postmodernism" (107, emphasis added). In an)y case, Adorno's critique of cultural as commercial produce is "now historical," since the products of the culture industry have undergone "a properly postmodern commodification" (143), which supposedly places them beyond its scope. To the extent to which Dialectic of Enlight- enment does explain "the deeper power and attraction of a mass culture that has none of the power and attraction of Art," it explains it "too eas- ily and naturalistically... thereby forestalling... more complex lines of speculation and inquiry" (150). What are we to make of this reading?

A number of objections spring to mind. First and most obvious is the scant textual basis either for Jameson's reinterpretation of the "torn halves" or for the highly restrictive reading of the critique of the culture industry associated with it. While the passage quoted in support of the new interpretation (133) does indeed refer to "light art," and comes from Dialectic of Enlightenment, the "torn halves" formulation occurs in Adorno's letter to Benjamin of March 1936, in the context of a discussion of the latter's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion." The example of the "low" offered there by Adorno is "the Amer- ican film." It is true that he conceptualizes the halves as "'autonomous" and "dependent" (or at one point "utilitarian") art but, because, for Adorno, mass culture is a form of dependent art. On this basis, and this basis alone, he constructs his dialectic of cultural forms within which, in classical dialectical fashion, each "half" is understood to be internally structured as a dialectic by virtue of its mediating relation to the other ("the dialectic of the lowest" and "the dialectic of the highest"). Adorno may sometimes use the term "art" as an abbreviation for "autonomous art," in contrast to "mass culture," but as the frequent qualification "autonomous" suggests, he did not think that all art is by definition autonomous. Instead, he did think that a claim to autonomy, inherent in the form of the object, is necessary to all art of whatever kind. Depen- dent art negates that claim, but it does not annihilate it.

The introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Adorno and Horkheimer insist that their analysis of the culture industry "keeps to the products' objectively inherent claim to be aesthetic images which accordingly embody truth," confirms this reading.'9 That it goes on to

19. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979) xvi.



Peter Osborne 183

show "the nullity of social being in the nihilism of that claim" is not a denial of its "objective inherence" but a demonstration of its immanent negation by the countervailing force of commodity relations. (The issue, it should be noted, is not the commodity-form as such - "high" art has been commodified as long as it has been autonomous. Rather, it is the predominance of the commodity-form within the productive logic of the work: the concession to conditions of reception that are structured by interests and needs other than those for truth. Hence, under different conditions of reception, works can be produced anew by their critical refunctioning.) Jameson's troubling reading, on which the products of the cultural in-

dustry are neither "art" nor "non-art" but are suspended in an untheo- rized void somewhere between the two is thus not just textually implau- sible; it severs the dialectic at the heart of Adorno's cultural theory. The separation of mass culture as "a realm of social life" robs the critique of the former of its social significance. To complain, as Jameson then does, that Adorno's work structurally excludes the dilemma of "the middle round" between commodity and aesthetic categories (137-38) misses the point not only of his cultural theory but also of dialectical thought more generally. The demonstration of the specific mediation of commodity and aesthetic form within each particular cultural product ("high" or "low") forms the goal of Adorno's cultural analysis, not a simple pigeon- holing of products into two basic types. Whether Adorno's own analyses always, or even often, meet this goal in their specificity and sense of contradiction when they deal with the products of the culture industry is another matter, albeit an important one. (The charge that the analysis of the attractions of mass culture is too easy and naturalistic is well- grounded.) But Jameson fails to make this distinction. He thinks instead that the development of "more complex lines of inquiry" requires a whole new beginning - and refers us to Raymond Williams's work. Yet Jameson's own idea of "postmodern commodification" looks very much like an (inverted, celebratory) extension of Adorno's work on the commodification of culture. Either way, Jameson's treatment of Adorno's critique of the culture industry seems evasive and all too familiar from other recent work in cultural studies.20

20. For an extended version of the above analysis, see Peter Osborne, "Torn Halves and Great Divides: The Dialectics of a Cultural Dichotomy," News From Nowhere, Special Issue on "The Politics of Modernism" 7 (Winter 1989): 49-62.




Art, Nominalism, and the Eclipse of the Subject It might seem strange that, having dismissed the division between

high art and mass culture as historically redundant, Jameson should go on to attribute such significance to Aesthetic Theory, Adorno's greatest work on the dialectics of autonomous art. But this would be to under- estimate the depth of Adorno's challenge to traditional aesthetics, the role of the crisis of modernism in his later writings, and Jameson's ca- pacity for appropriation. For however blind he may be to the moment of autonomy within Adorno's concept of dependent art (mass culture as a form of dependent art), Jameson is highly attuned to the moment of dependence so central to his account of its autonomous counter- part. The "desubjectifying" aspect of this analysis impresses him most. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that in its antisubjectivism Aesthetic Iheory "offers a recapitulation, if not a summary, of the concerns and commitments of a varied tendency of criticism and theory today, probably the dominant one" (125) - an extreme claim that would be a mistake to take too seriously. But it does indicate Jameson's strategy: namely, to insert Aesthetic Theory into a critical context in which the original materialist impulse behind the "critique of the subject" has become increasingly displaced by more or less openly idealistic tenden- cies. However, Adorno's materialism, tied up with a concept of experi- cnce and a residual concept of subjectivity, poses a problem for this strategy. Jameson's solution is to so emphasize the historical dimension of Adorno's account of the crisis of modernism as to undermine the "ontological aesthetic of non-identity" connected with it. Once again, the strategic deploymnent of specific aspects of Adorno's thought against current critical orthodoxies takes precedence over consideration of its integral philosophical structure; consideration that would throw into doubt Jameson's whole method of strategic deployment.

The reading revolves around two closely connected issues: nominalism and the crisis of illusion (Schein), and the "dialectical reversal of the subjective into the objective" (160). Both are extremely difficult topics, and Jameson's efforts to present them as the fruits of Adorno's thought on art are not helped by his avoidance of exposition in favor of a more free-wheeling style. Nor does the absence of discussion on the philosophical tradition within which Adorno is working make them any easier. The dangers of this absence are apparent in the way in which Jameson introduces the concept of nominalism as the distin- guishing feature of Adorno's characterization of the philosophical



Peter Osborne 185

structure of modern art. In aesthetic terms, he suggests, nominalism means "the repudiation of the universal: for example, the refusal of the Hegelian objectification of art into genres and styles" (157, emphasis added). But nominalism is a "repudiation" rather than a subjectifica- tion of the universal only from the standpoint of realism; it is impli- cated in, as much as it is opposed to, Hegelianism - a crucial factor in determining Adorno's complex relations to both aesthetic nominalism and Hegelianism.

In fact, Adorno explicitly describes Hegel's account of the relation between essence and appearance, wherein "appearance is essential" (ihr Erscheinen ist wesentlich), as a "mediation of realism and nominalism,"21' and he equally explicitly embraces a broadly Hegelian view of art as the objectification of spirit (Geist) in his much-quoted remarks on the task of aesthetics: the determination (Bestimmung) of spirit in works of art, and the judgment of their truth content via the form of spirit they embody.22 Hegel does not "objectify" art into styles and genres in the way in which Jameson suggests. He understands art as an objectification of spirit in such a way that it is classifiable into genres and styles. But the philosophical meaning of this classification is not the simple "subsumption" of particulars under universals that Jameson takes it to be (158). Indeed, the structure of Hegelian thought is prem- ised upon the rejection of'precisely that Kantian model of cognition. This is the whole point of the concept of spirit and of dialectical logic more generally.

The distinction is important, since Adorno understands aesthetic nominalism - which Jameson rightly sees as a historical event as well as a philosophical tendency - as part of the "spirit of the times" in a fairly orthodox Hegelian manner: the subjective side of a process of reification within which the individual is increasingly alienated from the conditions of his or her existence. As such, and ,as such alone - that is, within the terms of the concept of objective spirit - it is "true." An epistemologically modified or "negativized" Hegelianism underlies Adorno's appreciation of aesthetic nominalism, not some philosophical nominalism of his own. Just how little aesthetic nominalism is a simple "repudiation" of universals becomes clear if, like in Adorno's line of argument, nominalism is connected to the "crisis of illusion" it is taken to produce: an increase in the conceptual component of art and a crisis of sensuousness.

21. AT 513/473; 498/460. 22. AT 167/160.




Modern art disavows illusionism (the sensuous representation of an independently conceptually identifiable essence) and the model of universals it involves, though not universals themselves, since, for Adorno, at least, these cannot be repudiated without a .regression to

m)yth (and a myth about myth at that). This is its dilemma: it cannot, but cannot not, "represent." Though subjective, this subjectivity is of objective significance, not just as a symptom of alienation, but as the means for its expression as alienation. Alienation becomes the aesthetic means for its own critique. Hence the "reversal" of subjectivity into objectivity to which Jameson refers. The connection of this disavowal of illusion to the crisis of sensuousness in art is that, robbed of its character as illusion, sensuousness cannot but become conceptual. The nmeaning of an apparentldy purely sensuous art like abstract painting, for example, cannot be grasped without concepts: primarily, the concept of art as sensuous illusion, which it preserves in determinate negation. Universality inheres within the objectivity of the subjective. This essentially Hegelian point at issue explains how - Jameson's understanding of aesthetic nominalism notwithstanding - Adorno comes to have an "objective" interpretive category for modern art, despite the redundance of traditional generic descriptions: namely, "modernism"

that hydra-headed beast which is neither style nor genre (in any usual sense) but a dynamic of aesthetic development set in motion by artists' resistance to the reification of aesthetic forms. In attempting to separate Adorno's thoughts on " 'art' in general" from his account of the experience of individual works (128, 157), and to play the latter off against the former, Jameson does violence to both.

Jameson's oawn account of the relation of the "dialectical reversal of the subjective into the objective" to aesthetic nominalism centers on a quasi-poststructuralist account of the psychic subject's "resistance to universals" as a result of the penetration of nominalism into subjectivi-

t" and a consequent fragmentation or de-centering of the subject. This process renders the fragments of a former subjectivity "objective," and thereby constitutes them as possible artistic materials (160). Certainly, a parallel exists here between Adorno's projection of the end of the bourgeois individual and the claims of poststructuralist thought, ex- plored at length in Peter Dews's Logics ofDisintegration,23 a text to which Jameson refers. However, it is just that: a parallel. The philosophical terms of each are distinct and generally antagonistic. This was Jame- son's starting point. He set out "to instruct the enemies of the concept



Peter Osborne 187

of'totality' in the meaning and function of this kind of thinking and interpretation" (9). By the time he gets to the discussion of Aesthetic Theory, however, this commitment has become decidedly shaky. Once again, the switch to another "language," the language of poststructuralism, has philosophical effects of its own.

The problem stems from a failure to distinguish two quite different senses of the "subjective" within Adorno's thought: one ontological, the other epistemological. Ontologically, for Adorno (as for all materi- alists), "a subject by its very nature is from the outset an object [Objekt] as well. Not even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an object. ... To be an object... is part of the meaning of subjectivity."24 This is a general point, true (if it is true) of all forms of subjectivity, however de-centered. It serves as the ground of both the possibility and the limitations of experience. For while all subjects are objects, they are also more than this: distinctive kinds of "object" endowed with the possibility of opposing themselves to other objects (Objekt) and turning them into objects of consciousness and practice (Gegenstand). In this respect - in the exigencies of this process (the unrecuperable moment of nonidentity) - all experience is of necessity limited, all practice of necessity precarious. For, epistemologically, subjectivity is not so much constitutive of objectivity (as is supposed by the transcen- dentalism of the phenomenologists) as a "block" to it: "the subjective mediation is a block to objectivity; it fails to absorb entity, which objectivity) is in essence."25

The "dialectical reversal of the subjective into the objective" to which Jameson refers is an epistemological reversal performed on the ground of an ontological shift in the form of subjectivity. But the character of this shift, as described in Adorno's "primeval history of the subject,"26 is not that of a "fragmentation" or "de-centering" of the subject so much as either a withdrawal or alienation of its subjective dimension from its (objective) conditions of existence (the w~ithdrawal of

23. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralism and the Claims of Critical Theory, (London: Verso, 1987).

24. ND 184/183. 25. ND 186/185. See also Theodor W. Adorno, "Subject and Object" (1969), The

Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizon, 1978) 497-511, and Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).

26. ND 186/185. This is Adorno's own description of the project of Dialectic of En- lightenment.




an always already de-centered subjectivity into itself), or, at worst, its dissolution, its reduction to objectivity. This withdrawal may be "dialectically reversed" in the sense that a consciousness of the objective character of the process (of the subject as object) may be produced by the objectification of alienated subjectivity as alienated subjectivity in works of art. The objectification of the standpoint of alienated subjectivity within the realm of art, rather than the ability to treat elements of subjectivity as "objects," gives the subjectivism of modern art its objective significance (as symptom and expression). The weakness ofJame- son's account, for all its talk of historicity, lies in its generalized applica- tion. Any form of subjectivity that objectifies itself in cultural products (which is to say, any form of subjectivity tout court) provides possible material for another subject's objectifications. There is nothing specific to modernism about that. Adorno's account of the change in the bal- ance of the ontological structure of artistic production (the dialectic of mimesis and rationality) reveals the distinctive quality of modernism. Yet Jameson wants to dispense precisely with this "ontological aesthetic of nonidentity." Without it, however, little interest remains in Adorno's history of art. Aesthetic nominalism turns into something much more banal: namely, that very "late positivism" - for Jameson, the philosophical structure of postmodernism (248).

Positivism, Postmodernism, Late Marxism The diagnosis of postmodernism as a new form of positivism is a

shrewd one. But it should not be mistaken for criticism. For Jameson writes from a recognition of postmodernism as the lived experience of late capitalism, a "perpetual present" within which positivism "has, like philosophy on the older paradigm, fulfilled and thereby abolished itself" (231, 248). Positivism is no longer just one orientation among many; it is the very form of experience itself. Jameson's relation to this condition is deeply ambivalent. He insists that it is "not possible intellectually or politically simply to celebrate . . . or to disavow it."27 But while this leaves the stage open for the elaboration of a more complex stance toward it, strict limits are nonetheless placed upon the form of this stance by the acceptance and characterization of "postmodernism" as a historical reality that precedes it. The first and foremost consequence of this acceptance is the alleged impossibility of critical theory itself -

27. Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism" 32.



Peter Osborne 189

an impossibility that, ironically, Adorno is enlisted to support. Adorno's relevance, Jameson suggests, does not derive from his sense of criticism so much as from his "dawning apprehension of an intellectual landscape in which the negative, or 'critical theory,' will have definitely become a thing of the past" (245).Jameson thus projects his ambivalence toward postmodernism, toward the very possibility of criticism, onto Adorno, objectified as a reflection of the incompleteness of the historical conditions under which he lived - an incompleteness from which Jameson draws considerable theoretical succor, but from which he ultimately withdraws, thus refreshed, to cast doubt in the name of present realities upon the very possibility of the form of thought he spends so much time recommending. For if we really live under conditions in which "Adorno's prophecies of the 'total system' finally come true" (5), as Jameson suggests we do, there would seem no basis left for critical thought of even Adorno's most rigorously negative variety: "the de- tection of the absent presence of totality within the aporias of consciousness or of its products" (252).

What remains of the "lesson" Adorno should teach us if we really be- lieve in Jameson's characterization of the present? Presumably, we should adopt a (negative) totalizing approach to the comprehension of postmodemrnism.28 (Adorno becomes the methodological underwriter for Jameson's recent work.) But if this is possible, then the characterization of postmodernism as a "total," subject-dissolving cultural reality must be amended. There are no two ways about it. Jameson tries to get around the problem with reference to postmodernism as a cultural "dominant," uneven and incomplete in its realization. But this considerably weakens the thesis, returning it to something very like Adorno's own account of the tendential absolutism of commodity relations. But this just raises the whole question of what is proper to postmodernism anew. Connected to this, underlying it, is the question of the sense in which either Adorno's or Jameson's work may be usefully thought of as "Marxist."

We have seen how, in order to deflect discussion of the non-Marxian elements in Adorno's thought, Jameson systematically displaces philosophical with rhetorical analysis. But he cannot put off forever this engagement, since it stands as the main point of the book: first, to reaffirm the validity of certain fundamental philosophical features of Marxism (totality, materialism/the critique of identity, dialectic), and second, to

28. Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism" 33-34.




recommend the distinctive features of Adorno's Marxism as "Late Marxism" - a Marxism that, while not postmodern, is at least "con- sistent with and appropriate for the current postmodern age" (229). But how is this Marxism to be squared with the idea of postmodernism as a "perpetual present," the realization of Adorno's darkest fears?

The peculiarity of Adorno's Marxism follows from an approach at once too orthodox and too unorthodox to be palatable form most Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Economically orthodox in its reception of the theory of value in Capital, its unorthodoxy lies not so much in its generalization of this theory into a theory of reification as in the consequences of the subsequent absolutization of the theory of reification for the relation of theory to practice - an absolutization that carries in its wake a transformation in the philosophical form of "theory" itself. Jameson is impressed by the preservation in negation of the dialectical tradition that Adorno's thought performs, but he is oddly indifferent to the notorious foreshortening of the horizon of practice from which it derives and to which it gives a fixed "philosophical" (as opposed to a more flexible historical) form. Adorno's thought hangs onto a sense of a better future through its utopian dimension alone. The hopes of the future are represented in the present only by that "subjective" theoretical standpoint from which they can be un- covered, distorted and contradictory, as apromise within even the most reactionary cultural forms. The critical impulse, found originally within the immanent dynamic of social forms, regresses to a form of experience (negative dialectics) that exists only as the afterimage of a totalizing philosophy that has lost its historical conditions of existence and thereby revealed, in practice, the inherent limitations of its original form (Hegelianism/Hegelian Marxism). Criticism survives only at the cost of a productive, informing relation to practice.

The unreserved rejection of all "positivity" is the philosophical issue on which Marxists have usually (and to my mind rightly) taken Adorno to task, on the grounds that there must be room within a materialist perspective for some redeemable notion of positive knowledge, however philosophically qualified and consequently reduced to some less re- lentlessly negative orientation of theory to practice ("resignation"). But Jameson does not opt for this approach, despite his insistence (elsewhere) on the maintenance of the category of social class and even of "the need for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of



Peter Osborne 191

kind."29 (Positivism, it should be remembered, has supposedly abolished itself in the course of its postmodern realization.) Rather, taking Adorno at his word in the projection of a totally administered society - when this was even for Adorno himself, at least in part, a provoca- tive rhetorical device ("only the exaggerations are true," as he once said of psychoanalysis) - Jameson accepts the retreat of criticism into theory and, in the early Althusserian fashion, treats it as "a genuine form of praxis" within the professions and the disciplines (7), thereby, it would seem, implicitly accepting Adorno's projection of social paci- fication everywhere except the academy. A depressingly familiar position these days. On the other hand, if we take seriously the reference to social classes and even "a new international proletariat" (again, elsewhere),30 then this retreat becomes unnecessary, and not only "negative" theory but some kind of more "positive" form of dialectical theo- rizing should be possible. On this, the central point at issue in Adorno's relation to Marxism, Jameson is systematically inconsistent. The best of both worlds (a philosophically self-enclosed hermeneutics and a sociologically and politically open form of historical criticism) is simply not available without contradiction. In Late Marxism at least, the attempt to deploy Adorno against the "enemies of the concept of total- it)y" is dialectically reversed, as the presuppositions of postmodernism undermine the position it sets out to recommend.

If we accept that some version of the idea of the "unity of theory and practice" is not just politically but also, indeed primarily, epistemologically central to the philosophical distinctiveness of Marx's thought, then Adorno's work is "Marxist" in a highly attenuated sense only - a sense that registers (as Adorno was quite conscious of registering) a crisis in Marxist tradition. Hence, one might think, Jameson's sardonic label, "Late Marxism." But this is not the sense intended. Jameson himself wants to hold onto that "deeper ideological commitment... to left politics" without which, he argues, "no future is conceivable" (251). His difficulty comes when he can no longer justify this commitment theoretically. This contradiction lies at the heart of the idea of postmodernism as the cultural logic of the increasingly implausibly la- beled "late" (spit) capitalism. At base is a contradiction between two radically different forms of time: the temporality of the "perpetual present" and the temporality of the "late" or, by implication, soon to be

29. Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism" 32, 44. 30. Jameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism" 44.




surpassed. Insofar as he accepts the perpetual present of the postmodern as a cultural-historical reality, Jameson radicalizes the critical im- passe characteristic of Adorno's thought to the point of the impossibil- it)y of "theory" in the strong (philosophical) sense, even in its negative version. "Late" Marxism becomes a grim obituary. In chastizing Adorno for an "overemphasis" on theory (252) and then appealing to politics, Jameson clearly operates with a quite different set of historical assumptions that suggest the need for a complete overhaul of Adorno's philosophy on the basis of the implausibility of its socio- historical presuppositions - a fairly classical kind of Marxism, in fact. Insofar as he holds the two positions simultaneously, he regresses to a form of economism that renders cultural theory politically irrelevant: the exact opposite of what he sets out to do. Furthermore, by protecting Adorno's Marxism from its "other," by either "translating" or bracketing his most distinctive concerns (mimesis, natural history, a dialectical theory of cultural forms, the ontological aesthetic of nonidentity) and by thus foregoing critical assessment of his work as a whole, Jameson ends up protecting poststructuralism from Adorno.

The project for an institutional hegemony of literary theory within the left academy in the United States, formulated by Jameson over twenty years ago at the end of Marxism and Form,3' has become a reality - al- though hardly in the form Jameson originally hoped. Late Marxism inter- venes in this situation by returning us to Adorno's thought. ButJameson himself is already on the new terrain. He wants to use the stringent materialism of Adorno's dialectic to counter the naive philosophisms and antiphilosophisms of Habermasians and poststructuralists alike, yet his reading is suspended in the void of a structuralist methodology unable to recognize the idealism of its own philosophical premises. The built-in resistance of Adorno's thought to the easy appropriations of contemporary theory extends beyond its antipathy to poststructuralism to question the terms of the project Jameson uses it to recommend.

31. Jameson, Marxism and Formnn 416. It "falls to literary criticism," Jameson wrote, "to keep alive the idea of a concrete future. May it prove equal to the task!"



special issue on theodor w. adorno || a marxism for the postmodern? jameson's adorno

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