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Book part
Publication date: 12 October 2012

Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction

Albrecht Wellmer

Purpose – Appreciating the continuing relevance and contribution of Theodor W. Adorno's work requires acknowledgement of the difficulty to grasp his philosophy in a way…

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Purpose – Appreciating the continuing relevance and contribution of Theodor W. Adorno's work requires acknowledgement of the difficulty to grasp his philosophy in a way that is consistent with that which is to be understood, as the necessary first step to achieving concordant understanding.

Design/methodology/approach – To assay an understanding of Adorno's quest for the object beyond the concept, it is best to undertake a journey through the complexity of his thinking, beginning with the book he wrote with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Findings – The difficulty to capture the substance of philosophy in a manner that allows for representation arises from the inherently processual character of philosophy, which is always both unfinished and without secure summation of report at any step along the way. Indeed, the difficulty is all the greater with respect to Adorno, in light of his postulate that philosophy “must strive, by means of the concept, to transcend the concept.”

Research limitations/implications – Adorno's obsession to overcome the compulsion of identity made him perceptive and blind at the same time. To liberate his insights from their reconciliatory-philosophical shroud, one would have to expose the concept of rationality to the same obsessive gaze under which false generalities dissolve in Adorno's philosophy.

Originality/value – The inherently processual character of Adorno's philosophy makes his writings especially germane to present conditions of modern society, as they highlight the importance of efforts to develop theories that are sufficiently sensitive to the dynamic character of modern society, including its inconsistencies and its contradictions.

Details

Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2012)0000030007
ISBN: 978-1-78190-034-5

Keywords

  • Adorno
  • critical theory
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment
  • contradictions
  • identity-thinking
  • instrumental rationality

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Article
Publication date: 6 February 2007

The disavowal of the military

Ryan Bishop and John Phillips

This conceptual paper is offered in place of a systematic analysis of militarization in organizations and the wider world. It proceeds on the understanding that…

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Purpose

This conceptual paper is offered in place of a systematic analysis of militarization in organizations and the wider world. It proceeds on the understanding that militarization implies deep historical tendencies that are not easy to simply avoid, especially where one wishes to observe or to analyse phenomena systematically.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper seeks out alternative means of engagement with references to the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and the poetry of W.H. Auden. The departure, however, is taken in response to a brief and questionable statement by Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) about world history and the position of reason since the end of the Second World War.

Findings

Historical analysis, it is argued, is essential for any understanding of processes of militarization but not adequate on its own.

Originality/value

Militarization means, at least in the first instance, the adoption of military modes of organization and engagement in supposedly non‐military environments. But at a deeper level, which is nonetheless manifest in both a developing technology and an increasingly technological attitude, it implies the repetition of basic attitudes to others and to life. Furthermore the very meaning of militarization is likely to undergo metamorphoses as a result of these trends.

Details

Critical perspectives on international business, vol. 3 no. 1
Type: Research Article
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/17422040710722542
ISSN: 1742-2043

Keywords

  • Organizations
  • History
  • Religion
  • Reasoning

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Book part
Publication date: 20 May 2011

Chapter 3 Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas

Harry F. Dahms

In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of…

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In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of the revitalization of Marxist theory in the early twentieth century generally known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukács in particular introduced the concept to express how the process described in Marx's critique of alienation and commodification could be grasped more effectively by combining it with Max Weber's theory of rationalization (see Agger, 1979; Stedman Jones et al., 1977).1 In Lukács's use, the concept of reification captured the process by which advanced capitalist production, as opposed to earlier stages of capitalist development, assimilated processes of social, cultural, and political production and reproduction to the dynamic imperatives and logic of capitalist accumulation. It is not just interpersonal relations and forms of organization constituting the capitalist production process that are being refashioned along the lines of one specific definition of economic necessity. In addition, and more consequentially, the capitalist mode of production also assimilates to its specific requirements the ways in which human beings think the world. As a result, the continuous expansion and perfection of capitalist production and its control over the work environment impoverishes concrete social, political, and cultural forms of coexistence and cooperation, and it brings about an impoverishment of our ability to conceive of reality from a variety of social, political, and philosophical viewpoints.

Details

The Vitality Of Critical Theory
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000028007
ISBN: 978-0-85724-798-8

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Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2019

Back to Adorno: Critical Theory’s Problem of Normative Grounding

Karen Ng

This chapter offers a review of Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2016) and presents the book as having both a…

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This chapter offers a review of Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2016) and presents the book as having both a negative and positive aim. Its negative aim is to offer a critique of the Eurocentric narratives of historical progress that serves the function of normative grounding in the critical theories of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. Its positive aim is to provide a new approach to the normative grounding of critical theory that eschews Eurocentric narratives of progress through the idea of metanormative contextualism. For Allen, metanormative contextualism is developed through an engagement with the works of Adorno and Foucault. This chapter raises some critical questions concerning the position of metanormative contextualism, arguing that there are significant differences between Adorno and Foucault that render the position unstable. Specifically, Adorno’s normative conception of truth, alongside his critical naturalism presented through the notion of natural history, makes him ill-suited as a representative of Allen’s metanormative contextualism and complicates the contributions of Foucault’s genealogical analyses. The chapter concludes that a careful consideration of Adorno’s views reveals him to be opposed to the two central tenets of metanormative contextualism as defined by Allen.

Details

The Challenge of Progress
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-120420190000036009
ISBN: 978-1-78714-572-6

Keywords

  • Critical theory
  • progress
  • decolonization
  • Amy Allen
  • Theodor W. Adorno
  • Michel Foucault
  • Jürgen Habermas
  • Axel Honneth
  • Rainer Forst
  • metanormative contextualism

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Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2019

Progress, Normativity, and the “Decolonization” of Critical Theory: Reply to Critics

Amy Allen

My response to the thoughtful and insightful critical discussions of my book, The End of Progress, offered by Reha Kadakal, George Steinmetz, Karen Ng, and Kevin Olson…

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My response to the thoughtful and insightful critical discussions of my book, The End of Progress, offered by Reha Kadakal, George Steinmetz, Karen Ng, and Kevin Olson, restates its motivation and rationale to defend my interpretive claims regarding Adorno, Foucault, Habermas, Honneth, and Forst by applying standards drawn from the first two theorists that are consonant with postcolonial critical theory to the perspectives, claims, and theoretical contributions of the latter three theorists. Habermas, Honneth, and Forst presume a historical present that has shaped the second, third, and fourth generations of the Frankfurt School they represent – a present that appears to be characterized by relative social and political stability – a stability that only applies in the context of Europe and the United States. Elsewhere, anti-colonial struggles, proxy wars, and even genocides were related to the persistent legacies of European colonialism and consequences of American imperialism. Yet, critical theory must expand its angle of vision and acknowledge how its own critical perspective is situated within the postcolonial present. The essays of Kadakal and Ng express concerns about my metanormative contextualism and the question of whether Adorno’s work can be deployed to support it. Steinmetz challenges my “process of elimination” argument for metanormative contextualism and asks why I assume that constructivism, reconstructivism, and problematizing genealogy exhaust the available options for grounding normativity. Olson calls for a methodological decolonization to complement the epistemic decolonization I recommend. Critical theory should produce critical theories of actually existing societies, rather than being preoccupied with meta-theory or disputes over clashing paradigms.

Details

The Challenge of Progress
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-120420190000036012
ISBN: 978-1-78714-572-6

Keywords

  • Critical theory
  • progress
  • decolonization
  • Theodor W. Adorno
  • Michel Foucault
  • Jürgen Habermas
  • Axel Honneth
  • Rainer Forst
  • metanormative contextualism

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Book part
Publication date: 28 July 2008

Herbert Marcuse and contemporary social theory: Beyond the consumer society

Philip Walsh

Herbert Marcuse's vision of liberation from the ‘affluent society’ constitutes one of the most significant interventions into public life of any philosopher in the last…

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Herbert Marcuse's vision of liberation from the ‘affluent society’ constitutes one of the most significant interventions into public life of any philosopher in the last half of the 20th century. Yet his major works are little read today in philosophy departments in North America, where, if first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory is on the menu, it is usually represented by the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Within North American and, to a lesser extent, European sociology, on the other hand, Marcuse is still generally acknowledged as an important influence, although the extent and nature of his legacy remains unclear. This article examines the relevance and applicability of some of Marcuse's theories to recent developments within sociology, and especially to the growing and influential critical literature within the sociology of consumption, in which ideas that originate in first-generation Frankfurt School theory are clearly operative, but rarely acknowledged.1 The scope of the paper is restricted to three of Marcuse's most influential theoretical claims: (1) An underlying ‘performance principle’ has become a primary determining factor in shaping the economic, social and cultural systems of advanced industrial societies. (2) Resistance to the general developmental tendencies of these societies is being contained and weakened through a process of ‘repressive desublimation’; and (3) The human activity of play, understood as a distinct field of free (i.e., unalienated) human activity, is threatened by the ascendancy of instrumental rationality. These claims are evaluated in terms of their applicability to the problem of self-experience and the threat to individuality that is a principal feature of contemporary consumer capitalism.

Details

No Social Science without Critical Theory
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-1204(08)00007-8
ISBN: 978-1-84950-538-3

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Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2019

Inheriting Critical Theory: A Review of Amy Allen’s the End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

George Steinmetz

This review of Amy Allen’s book, The End of Progress (2016), first addresses the structure of the book and focuses on specific points made in individual chapters…

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This review of Amy Allen’s book, The End of Progress (2016), first addresses the structure of the book and focuses on specific points made in individual chapters, including the affinity between postcolonial theory and the approaches of Adorno and Foucault in subjecting the notion of historical progress to “withering critique,” and Allen’s alternative approach to decolonization; Habermas’ aim to put critical theory on a secure normative footing; Honneth’s stance that the history of an ethical sphere is an unplanned learning process kept in motion by a struggle for recognition; Forst’s attempt to reconstruct Critical Theory’s normative account through a return to Kant rather than Hegel; and Allen’s claim that her approach is fully in the spirit of Critical Theory and could be seen as continuation of Critical Theory’s first generation, as in Adorno, and how it is a “genealogical” approach that draws on Adorno’s negative dialectics and critique of identity thinking, as well as on Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, as developed by Foucault. The second part of my response raises three issues: (1) Allen’s partial compromise with the idea of progress; (2) whether critical theory would profit from engagement with other critical theories and theories of ethics, beyond postcolonial theory; and (3) nonwestern theories shed a different light on the question of Allen’s critique, a theme that also draws attention to the gesture of decolonizing, the distinctions between colonialism and empire, and the sociology of knowledge production.

Details

The Challenge of Progress
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-120420190000036008
ISBN: 978-1-78714-572-6

Keywords

  • Critical theory
  • progress
  • decolonization
  • empire
  • colonialism
  • Amy Allen
  • Theodor W. Adorno
  • Jürgen Habermas
  • Axel Honneth
  • Rainer Forst

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Article
Publication date: 1 March 2005

The challenge of critical theory for those in organization theory and behavior: an overview

Adrian N. Carr

The article questions what is meant by the term critical theory and discusses some common misconceptions that have arisen about the meaning of this term. The dialectic…

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The article questions what is meant by the term critical theory and discusses some common misconceptions that have arisen about the meaning of this term. The dialectic logic that was championed by the group of scholars collectively known as the Frankfurt School is outlined and a number of implications for the field of organization and behaviour are discussed.

Details

International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, vol. 8 no. 4
Type: Research Article
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-08-04-2005-B002
ISSN: 1093-4537

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Book part
Publication date: 31 October 2014

Introduction

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Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-120420140000032001
ISBN: 978-1-78441-222-7

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Book part
Publication date: 8 May 2004

GLOBAL HIGH CULTURE IN THE ERA OF NEO-LIBERALISM: THE CASE OF DOCUMENTA11

Karyn Ball

Proponents of critical global studies are committed to identifying the ways in which neo-liberal ideology and an Americanized world picture rationalize the multinational…

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Proponents of critical global studies are committed to identifying the ways in which neo-liberal ideology and an Americanized world picture rationalize the multinational exploitation of impoverished groups and their resources. The authority of this field raises untimely questions about how such a critique can itself avoid rationalization. The influence of critical global studies was manifest in the 2002 Documenta11 in Kassel, Germany, directed by Okwui Enwezor. In its aim to represent the Zeitgeist of contemporary art every five years, the Documenta is widely regarded as the most significant event in the art world. The 2002 Documenta relied predominantly on visual media to archive local instances of socio-economic inequity and persecution. The prestige of this exhibit marks the “global” Documenta11 as a crucial opportunity for studying the strategic deployment of a high cultural venue to promote critical awareness among comfortable spectators from industrialized nations. In officiating an overtly political agenda for the exhibit, the curatorial team took the risk that Documenta11 might encourage visitors to take self-affirming pleasure in their sense of “enlightened” solidarity with its aims. The exhibit was also in danger of reifying the very suffering it displayed as a means to an institutionally sanctioned end. The Frankfurt School explicitly targets the egoism of “affirmative culture” which includes the culture of critique. This case study draws on their theory of reification in order to enunciate the limits of global critique at Documenta11 while highlighting discontinuities in its format and reception that complicate a facile rejection of its archival rationale.

Details

Neoliberalism in Crisis, Accumulation, and Rosa Luxemburg's Legacy
Type: Book
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0161-7230(04)21005-7
ISBN: 978-0-76231-098-2

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