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Deborah Cook
Abstract The article explores the character of Adornos materialism while eshing out his Marxist-inspired idea of natural history. Adorno offers a non-reductionist and non-dualistic account of the relationship between matter and mind, human history and natural history. Emerging from nature and remaining tied to it, the human mind is nonetheless qualitatively distinct from nature owing to its limited independence from it. Yet, just as human history is always also natural history, because human beings can never completely dissociate themselves from the natural world, nature is inextricably entwined with human history. Owing to the entwinement of mind and matter, humanity and nature, a version of dialectical materialism can be found in Adornos work. Key words body dialectics Hegel history idealism Marx materialism mind nature Timpanaro
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Adorno follows this quotation with the dialectically inected claim that the traditional antithesis between nature and history is true in one respect and false in another. The antithesis is true insofar as it expresses what happened to the natural element namely, that nature has been negated to such a degree that what now appears natural is actually social. However, the antithesis between nature and history is false to the extent that it apologetically repeats the concealment of historys natural growth by history itself (ND, p. 358). When he speaks about history concealing its natural growth, Adorno is arguing that the role that material nature has played within human history has largely been ignored. As a result, our understanding of ourselves is fundamentally awed. Adorno wants to challenge this awed self-understanding when he denes Negative Dialectics as an attempt to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity (ND, p. xx). In setting himself this task, Adorno maintains that he is only following Marx. For once Marx drew the line between historical materialism and the popular metaphysical kind, Adorno believes that historical materialism became the critique of idealism in its entirety, and of the reality for which idealism opts by distorting it (ND, p. 197). A critique of the idealist fallacy of constitutive subjectivity entails demonstrating that the mind is not primary. Indeed, Adorno argues that Hegel himself derived self-conscious mind surreptitiously from its relationship to heterogeneous matter in labour. Hypostasizing the mind, he was nonetheless barely able to conceal the origin of the I in the Not-I. Even for Hegel, then, mind originates in the real life-process, in the law of the survival of the species, of providing it with nutrients (ND, p. 198; trans. mod.). On Adornos view, this material life-process, which is impelled by the drive for self-preservation, has conditioned all our relations to external (organic and inorganic) nature. By extension, it has also contributed to the rise of the capitalist mode of production with its rapacious and exploitative relationship to nature. Exchange relations are merely the social expression of our distorted and damaged, but naturally driven, relationship to nature. These ideas will be explored in what follows. In the next section, I shall discuss Adornos claims about the relationship between subject and object, mind and nature. To cite J. M. Bernstein, Adorno views nature as the material substratum of human life,10 but he is by no means a vulgar materialist in the sense that he would reduce mind to nature. The relationship between mind and material nature is far more dialectical than vulgar materialism will allow. In the third section of the article,
Passage to Materialism
In a section of Negative Dialectics entitled Passage to Materialism, Adorno writes: It is by passing to the objects preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic (ND, p. 192). When he speaks about the preponderance (Vorrang) of the object, Adorno is referring specically to the preponderance of matter (Materie) over mind. In one formulation of it, the preponderance of the object entails that it is not part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject, though it is part of the meaning of subjectivity to be an object. Not only do material objects make subjective experience possible, there is a substantively material dimension to subjective experience as well (ND, p. 183). Experience involves the encounter of an embodied subject with an equally corporeal, physical object. This helps to explain why Adorno denies that the qualities we experience in objects (their colour, taste, smell, etc.) are purely subjective; these qualities also have an objective moment because they are borrowed from the objectivity of the intentio recta, or from the subjects own corporeal apprehension of objects. Consequently, Adorno insists that subjective determinations not be stripped from objects. To eliminate these determinations would fail to respect the preponderance of the object because it would ignore the subjects own material encounter with objects as an embodied object itself. Ironically, perhaps, the very qualities that the traditional critique of epistemology eradicated from the object and credited to the subject are due in subjective experience to the primacy of the object.11 In a characteristically paradoxical formulation Adorno writes: If the subject has a core of object, then the subjective qualities in the object are all the more an objective moment.12 At the same time, Adorno rejects nave realism, or the view that material objects are immediately given to consciousness as they are in themselves. On the one hand, an object can be known only as it entwines with subjectivity (ND, p. 186). It would be wrong to think
Adornos materialism
Adorno offers a distinctive rendering of historical materialism. As I have tried to show, his aim is to demonstrate that history and nature are dialectically entwined. Yet it should be obvious that the degree to which his version of historical materialism remains faithful to Marx is moot. Certainly many Marxists assume that Marxs claims about the material dimension of human existence refer exclusively to socio-economic processes and institutions. All too frequently, Marxists fail to consider the interaction between these processes and material nature. As Kate Soper remarks, this means that Timpanaro is right to pose the question of the extent to which Marxism either inherently or in its contemporary distortions supports a false reduction of natural to social determinants. Indeed, Soper agrees with Timpanaro that Marx is partly to blame for this false reduction. At the same time, she disagrees with him when she states that Marxs lack of clarity about the relationship between the social and the natural worlds extends to his later work as well.36 Having carefully examined the character of Marxs materialism, however, John Foster would take issue with both Soper and Timpanaro. Foster points out that, in his early manuscripts, Marx introduced the idea of a metabolic relation between human beings and nature which
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Notes
1 See Karin Bauer, Adornos Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology, Readings of Wagner (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999) for a Nietzschean reading of Adorno; see J. M. Bernstein, Adorno:
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