Publication details
Ideal Type or Real Abstraction? On Adorno's Method
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The paper deals with interpretation of Adorno’s sociological method vis-a-vis Honneth’s and Sohn-Rethel’s work. The starting point is Honneth’s reading of Adorno’s 1931 inaugural lecture The Actuality of Philosophy. In Honneth’s interpretation, Adorno’s early methodological proposal of “figures” and “models” builds on Weber’s conception of ideal type. Adorno outlines such a methodological approach intended to critically penetrate the idea of capitalist culture. With these conceptual means, Adorno attempts to discover the social process of deformation of reason. According to Honneth, Adorno’s application of ideal-typical method denudes the capitalist re-naturalization of determinate social conditions and reveals the progression of pathology of reason. Against Honneth, the paper argues Sohn-Rethel’s conception of “real abstraction,” an abstraction derived from a non-intentional layer of practical human action, is more appropriate methodological device for interpretation of Adorno’s method. Drawing on the longtime (from 1930s to 1960s) debate between Adorno and Sohn-Rethel, the paper stresses Adorno’s grasp of exchange as historically conditioned and determinate “fatality of humankind.” In both The Positivist Dispute and Negative Dialectics (and in many essays and lectures), Adorno poses the abstract equivalent, upon which the market exchange process is predicated, as social essence mediating all the social practices and phenomena. With this demarcation of his critical theory, Adorno explicitly stands up for the methodological foundation of social analysis as “anamnesis of genesis”: his treatment of the exchange process uncovers the historically constituted capitalist conceptuality that proceeds “behind the backs of individuals, yet it is their work.” That is why Adorno’s method is to be conceived as utilization of Sohn-Rethel’s critical Marxist conception of “real abstraction” – rather than Honneth’s proposition to understand Adorno’s method along the lines of Weberian “ideal type.” |
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