SUBJECTIVITY AND TECHNO-SCIENCE IN THEODOR ADORNO ...

Ciprian Bogdan, pp. 7-28 Annales Philosophici 5 (2012) 

SUBJECTIVITY AND TECHNO-SCIENCE IN THEODOR ADORNO 

7 

Ciprian Bogdan 

Romanian Academy – Iaşi Branch 

bogdanciprian@euro.ubbcluj.ro 

Abstract: By turning Marxist analysis from the critique of political 

economy towards the critique of techno-scientific society, Theodor 

Adorno also engages in a broader philosophical enterprise of 

unveiling the reification of Western subjectivity. Against the 

abstractness of (modern) techno-science and subjectivity, Adorno 

seems to offer the alternative of, what we would like to call, an 

embodied virtual. In other words, Adorno rethinks the Kantian 

autonomy of an enlightened transcendental subject as an embodied 

utopia oriented towards the future activation of repressed historical 

possibilities. 

Keywords: subjectivity, techno-science, autonomy, utopia, 

embodiment, virtual 

Acknowledgement: This paper is supported by the Sectoral 

Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), 

financed from the European Social Fund and by the Romanian 

Government under the contract number POSDRU/89/1.5/S/56815. 

Why “techno-science”? 

In the same fashion as his great rival, Heidegger, Adorno seems to be driven by the 

philosophical desire of unveiling the secret, almost unconscious alliance between abstract 

(science) and applied knowledge (technology) and the principle of a socially determined 

hegemonic subjectivity, an alliance that seemingly has put its spell on almost entire history of 

Western civilization. No wonder that Adorno and also Critical Theory shift the focus of 

Marxist analysis from the critique of political economy towards the critique of scientific and 

technological society. Thus, (modern) science and technology are not neutral or even positive 

forces of history as in the Marxist standard version, but the main social instruments in 

dominating internal or external nature. By using the term “techno-science”, we simply follow 

Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s statement that “technology is the essence of this (modern, 

scientific, our specification) knowledge” 1 . Science exists only in the horizon of its application. 

However, by linking techno-science with a social hegemonic tendency and not to some pure, 

disinterested enterprise, Adorno aims at pointing to a more pervasive phenomenon: the 

distortion of humans by a society which reduces them to an abstract subjectivity obsessively 

1 Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, 

Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam, 1989, p. 17.

Annales Philosophici 5 (2012) Ciprian Bogdan, pp. 7-28 

focused on survival and control. The (hi)story of this type of subjectivity becomes the 

(hi)story of techno-science as the very expressions of the human “progress” in domination and 

suffering. 

Following Sade or Nietzsche, the “dark writers of the bourgeoisie” 2 , Adorno’s 

tendency is to relentlessly unmask the bleak heritage of Western civilization. But we shouldn’t 

let ourselves be deceived by it or by the usual critique against Adorno’s overly pessimistic 

thinking. His “melancholy science” expresses not only a heightened sensitivity towards the 

dominating potential of Western world, but also the hope inscribed in it for a utopian 

evolution 3 . One of the main contentions of this paper is that by emphasizing the virtual or 

utopian dimension of society, Adorno looks for a way out from both universalism and 

relativism since the latter is just the “brother” of the former 4 . Adorno makes it very clear: he is 

neither a transcendentalist nor a positivist evaluating individuals according to some 

unhistorical, scientific standards, nor a radical historicist who bluntly reduces techno-science 

and subjectivity to a particular culture, in this case Western culture. Adorno struggles to offer 

a new understanding of human subjectivity, techno-science and of their relationship based on, 

what I would call, a virtual or utopian autonomy oriented towards expressing the real 

possibilities “sedimented” in history that would allow us to overcome the real suffering 

caused by past and present domination. As such, this type of utopian autonomy is not simply a 

fiction, an imaginary projection, but something activating concrete possibilities in the future. 

Such a utopia can be only thought as embodied utopia. 

What is your name? My name is “No-body”! 

From its very beginning, “critical theory” (Max Horkheimer) tries to leave behind the 

metaphysical or positivist core of “traditional theory” by taking further Marx’s revolutionary 

idea of a socially rooted techno-science. Reflecting on techno-science becomes inextricably 

linked with the reflection on contemporary society and, more radical, with its emancipating 

potential 5 . The understanding of techno-science must be accompanied by flashes of a utopian 

world. Critical Theory, however, deviates from the straight (all too straight) line of Marxist 

thought. Adorno’s impact on Horkheimer only accelerates this movement. Thus, “it might be 

said that if Marx offers a political economy of reification based on alienated labour, the 

Dialectic of Enlightenment outlines a genealogy of reification based on alienated nature” 6 . 

Critical Theory replaces political economy with anthropology. Labor is no longer the locus of 

2 Ibid, p. 137. 

3 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science. An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, 

London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1978, p. ix. 

4 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften 6, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 

1997, p. 44. In translating from German, we have also used the online English version of the book 

translated by Dennis Redmond. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 2001, 

www.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html. 

5 David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno. The Dialectics of Subjectivity, New York: State University of 

New York Press, 2007, p. 203-204: Adorno’s philosophy “is actually a reflection on society rather than 

science”. Some consider that Critical Theory offers only a social critique without going further towards 

a critique of nature and technology. See, for example, Gernot Böhme, Alexandra Manzei, “Vorwort” in 

Gernot Böhme, Alexandra Manzei (Hrsg.), Kritische Theorie der Technik und der Natur, München: 

Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003, p. 7. 

6 Darrow Schecter, The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas, New York: The 

Continuum International Publishing, 2010, p. 94. 

8


human emancipation (Marx), but the very expression of hegemonic subjectivity. The 

“pathologies” 7 of instrumental reason become visible only by connecting philosophical 

anthropology or “anthropology of knowledge” (Habermas) with the utopian impulse towards 

an emancipated society 8 . Thus, techno-science should look for its own conditions of 

possibility in an anthropology gravitating around a historically and socially mediated human 

nature. In this sense, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a strange, fragmentary book written in 

1940’s by Horkheimer and Adorno, determines not only a radicalization of early Critical 

Theory by extending the menace of techno-scientific domination to the whole of Western 

society and even history, but it also provides an original description of the anthropological and 

historical dialectical premises of both techno-science and social emancipation. This kind of 

radicalization entails an unusual approach: the book doesn’t limit itself to simply describe the 

recent history of human subjectivity in its relation to (modern) techno-science and capitalism, 

but it makes the much stronger claim of identifying the evolution of modernity as being rooted 

in an Ur-history of subjectivity going back to the first human societies and mythological 

world-views. 

Now, let us have a glimpse of the dark side of Western world by following the 

anthropological narrative developed in this strange, prophetic book 9 . At the beginning is fear: 

the basic human ingredient is nothing but an instinctive fear in the face of nature, the frightful, 

menacing Other. In a sense, human (Western) culture is constructed around this primordial 

fear or, more precisely, around the two capacities inscribed in human biology 10 of coping with 

it: mimesis and rationality. (a) Apparently, the first humans observe that by “assimilating the 

self to its Other” 11 , by non-violently merging into nature, their anxiety also reduces. Since it 

no longer expresses a radical Otherness, nature can become now a relative source of 

psychological comfort. Among humans, children are seemingly the most exposed to these 

mimetic impulses 12 . Mimetic traces of early childhood still determine rational adulthood since 

“human reason develops by way of childlike imitation of loved ones; only the mimetic 

7 Axel Honneth thinks, however, that Critical Theory (Adorno included), is committed to a quasitranscendental 

ethical position that could provide a basis of evaluating the “pathologies” of rationality 

in capitalist societies. In order to criticize these pathologies, Critical Theory needed a firm ground, an 

“intact” rationality untouched by hegemonic or power tendencies. See Axel Honneth, Pathologies of 

Reason. On the Legacy of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 24. 

8 Axel Honneth, “Bisected Rationality: The Frankfurt’s School Critique of Science”, in Garry Gatting 

(ed.), Continental Philosophy of Science, Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, p. 296. 

9 By sketching the anthropological background underlined in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, we 

should, however, bear in mind that, at least at the level of philosophical intent, the book is not 

committed to a transcendental or analytical account, but to a historical and dialectical one. For the sake 

of clarity, we shall, on the other hand, proceed in a rather analytical manner by using, if needed, also 

references from other Adornian texts. 

10 By going back to biology, Adorno and Horkheimer do not advocate for some kind of biological 

determinism. Quite the contrary, mimetic and rational impulses are, in fact, the expressions of the 

absence of a biological determinism since these impulses are de-centered from the very beginning: 

while mimetic behavior testifies for the very openness of humans to become an Other than themselves, 

the rational impulse creates a distance from the environment, but also from the body itself in which 

reason is actually rooted. 

11 Adorno, Teoria estetică (Aesthetic Theory), Pitesti: Paralela 45, 2005, p. 466. 

12 Matt F. Connell, Body, Mimesis and Childhood in Adorno, Kafka and Freud, 

http://www.revalvaatio.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/connell-body-mimesis-and-childhood-in-adornokafka-and-freud.pdf, 

p. 67. 

9


imitation of the other's perspective affords the young child the opportunity to decenter his own 

perspective to the point that it outweighs his own, and he can thus forge ahead to rational 

judgments on states of affairs” 13 . (b) Rationality, on the other hand, imposes a distance from 

the pressures of nature. Scientific knowledge finds its roots in this primordial gap which allow 

humans to observe and understand natural processes beyond their usual fear. But with 

understanding also comes control: technological devices makes possible for humans to 

progressively subdue this nature. The puzzling distinction between subject and object 14 which 

has been haunting Western philosophy is also a remnant of this initial gap created by abstract 

reasoning for securing against external menaces. Adorno and Horkheimer imply, however, 

that there is an additional tendency in reason, namely to cover up the very gap it creates. By 

this, we are facing the most troubling and far-reaching phenomenon: reason turns into an 

“identity thinking” which compulsively identifies objects with abstract concepts. This also 

affects the way reason relates to our internal nature. With every attempt to escape nature and 

mimetic behavior, reason finds itself even more entangled with mimetic tendencies. In the 

process of eliminating the mimetic background and transforming nature according to its own 

image, reason falls prey to a strange mimetic behavior, a “mimesis of death” 15 . In other words, 

for humans to control nature, they need effectively to imitate it by transforming themselves 

from weak, dependent beings in rigid and powerful entities. Humans must become nature in 

order to control it 16 . The emancipation of reason goes, almost fatally, hand in hand with a 

violent gesture of eliminating mimetic behavior and becoming, thus, unconsciously even more 

mimetic. 

This dynamic is generalized by Adorno and Horkheimer to the entire (pre)history of 

humanity under the heading of the dialectic between “myth” and “Enlightenment”. From this 

point of view, Enlightenment is not to be reduced to an 18th century movement, but it 

becomes a fundamental anthropological ingredient of Western history already detectable in 

ancient Greece. The tension between Greek mythology and Greek philosophy reiterates avant 

la lettre the modern conflict between religious superstitions and rationalist Enlightenment. 

Adorno and Horkheimer envision, however, a more complex and refined dialectical 

relationship between the two: the world of magic and mythology is not bluntly opposed to 

Enlightenment. For instance, the narration of myths already implies a basic rational behavior 

of “representing”, “confirming” or “explaining” 17 . The practice of magic to imitate the spirits 

(through masks etc.) in order to absorb their power is just one example that proves, however, 

that mimetic behavior remains dominant in a mythological society. This mimetic dominance 

goes hand in hand with the acceptance of violence and domination as natural and legitimate 

phenomena. Thus, the social function of this mixture between mimetic behavior and seeds of 

instrumental rationality is none other than to secure the legitimacy of the existing hierarchical 

social order. Still, this type of social order needs an additional metaphysical backup in the idea 

of Eternal Recurrence of the Same in the light of which humans and things appear as being 

caught up in the same cycle of life. No doubt, the political message is clear: the world and, 

thus, social hierarchy cannot be changed. Fate, gods, or masters will not allow it. 

Enlightenment is an attempt to break this enclosed circle of fear from nature and bring the 

13 Honneth, Pathologies of Reason. On the Legacy of Critical Theory, p. 70. 

14 Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, p. 24. 

15 Ibid, p. 73. 

16 Ibid. 

17 Ibid., p. 21. 

10


hope that things can, in fact, be changed. Both (proto)subjectivity and (proto)techno-science 

are, thus, rooted in the same process of emancipation from social and natural constraints. The 

birth of subjectivity as an autonomous being that obeys only rationally justifiable laws is 

strictly correlative with the emergence of a metaphysics fighting mythology in the name of 

reason: the brutal old world made out of qualitative differences is replaced by a rational 

universe structured according to homogeneous, transparent and clear laws. Almost 

unconsciously, however, this emancipation from mythology enters a dialectical cycle in which 

the newly emerged subjectivity and science revert to mythology. They replace the old fatality 

with a new and even more powerful one based this time on a rationally pre-established order. 

Adorno and Horkheimer exemplify this kind of fatal dialectic by an original 

reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey, “the basic text of European civilization” 18 . The core 

assumption of this reinterpretation is to identify Odysseus “as the primordial model” of the 

“bourgeois individual” 19 . The adventures of Odysseus in his return to Ithaca contain, thus, a 

striking resemblance to the modern, bourgeois standard story of gaining autonomy (a coherent 

and unitary self) against the old world of absolutism, social conformism and religious 

superstitions. During these adventures, the main weapon used by Odysseus is not his physical 

strength, but his sharp mind. Unlike other heroes, he manages to survive by fighting the 

mythical beings that he encounters on his way home solely through his intelligence. As such, 

the very identity of Odysseus, his subjective core becomes wholly identified with thinking 20 . 

But according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the text of Odyssey contains another crucial shift: a 

new understanding of sacrifice. While the old mythological sacrifice is an external human 

gesture to appease the gods and also to manipulate them in reaching some ends 21 , the sacrifice 

performed by Odysseus is an internal sacrifice 22 . The famous episode of the Cyclops perfectly 

embodies this change. In order to escape Polyfemus, the famous one-eyed Cyclops, Odysseus 

uses a trick. When asked by Polyfemus: “What is your name?”, Odysseus replies: “My name 

is “Nobody””. By this, he intelligently exploits the ambiguity of the Greek word Oudeis 

expressing both “Nobody” and (phonologically) “Odysseus”. After being blinded by 

Odysseus, Polyfemus goes to the other Cyclops telling them that he was blinded by 

“Nobody”. By this very trick, however, Odysseus seems to exemplify an entire dialectic of 

European civilization: in order to survive, he must change his name and, thus, sacrifice his 

real, concrete identity (Odysseus) in the name of a new, abstract one (Nobody or, even better, 

No-body). The victory against mythology becomes a victory à la Pyrrhus, it ends up in defeat, 

the result being that a new split emerges between an abstract, ghostly self and a concrete and 

instinctive one. The abstract unitary self that, in a way, already anticipates the unitary 

methodology of modern science, pays the high price of renouncing his natural, bodily identity 

relegated to the domain of chaotic, irrational and regressive impulses. Odyssey, in a way, 

already tells us the story of the unconscious process of virtualizing human identity, the story 

of becoming a ghost (the abstract self). In this sense, modern science is fundamentally a 

“science of ghosts” (Derrida), or perhaps, a “techno-science of (producing) ghosts”. 

Ghost in/as the Machine 

18 Ibid., p. 60. 

19 Ibid., p. 58. 

20 Ibid., pp. 60-61. 

21 Ibid., p. 64. 

22 Ibid., pp. 68-70. 

11


Adorno and Horkheimer remain, however, cautious enough not to simply transform 

Odysseus in the expression of modern Enlightenment, a sort of (proto)container for all the 

contradictions and tensions crossing modernity. Despite his cunning intelligence, Odysseus 

preserves a superstitious attitude towards mythological forces 23 , they still haunt him. But in 

17th century, European civilization engages in a new and more systematic attack against 

obscurantism and mythology. Modern science comes with a radically new formula: physics 

and mathematics join together to pave the way for a science that seemingly can, as never 

before, accurately describe and predict natural phenomena. The universe is no longer a 

mystery to human understanding. And as a symptom of human ignorance, old mythological 

fear vanishes into thin air. Meanwhile, philosophers try to keep up with these major changes 

by pushing the limit of human subjectivity to being almost no-thing, a totally disembodied 

entity, a “ghost in the machine”, as Gilbert Ryle plastically formulated in order to capture the 

Cartesian self in the new context of mechanized techno-scientific imaginary 24 . Adorno and 

Horkheimer turn, however, to Francis Bacon, the “father of experimental philosophy” 

(Voltaire) 25 and the first who bluntly formulates the essence of this new science: knowledge is 

power. Modern techno-science is no longer driven towards the ideal of reaching truth, but of 

developing an “effective method” which can be translated in an enhancement of “action and 

work” 26 . Thus, it renounces “meaning” and “concept” in favor of “causality” and “rule”. The 

material world must be entirely submitted to the unity of science because the “system” is the 

very culmination of a scientific enterprise. What cannot be digested by the system becomes 

irrational, mythological, speculative etc. Adorno and Horkheimer combine these bleak and 

harsh assessments inspired mostly by Max Weber with Marxist analysis of capitalism 27 . 

Techno-science becomes, therefore, entangled with the capitalist development of “relations” 

and “forces of production” based on the “exchange principle” and “division of labor”. While 

the exchange principle points to the capitalist tendency of reducing the concrete “use value” of 

an object to the abstract “exchange value” of a commodity, the division of labor imposed by 

technological reasons (forces of production) points not only to the growing differentiation of 

human labor, but also of human subjectivity. The bourgeois autonomous subject, reaching his 

peak in the faceless Kantian transcendental subjectivity, is strictly correlative with this 

growing tendency towards abstraction and differentiation of capitalist and techno-scientific 

society. Thus, we face again a new (and old) dialectical twist: the subjective ground of technoscientific 

objectivity (the human need to control nature) must be eliminated in the very name 

of this objectivity rendering it, however, even more vulnerable to subjective, capricious and 

irrational attitudes. By ignoring the need for self-reflection, the most valuable accomplishment 

of Enlightenment, knowledge ends up again in mythology. It remains stuck in the same cycle 

of mythic violence and fear that it was hoping to escape. What resists being integrated in the 

system must be violently rejected and devalued as some kind of potential threat to the perfect 

functioning of the techno-scientific machine. 

In Die Idee der Naturgeschichte, an early text written under the influence of Walter 

Benjamin, Adorno advocates for a dialectical understanding of history and nature. While 

23 

Ibid., p. 75. 

24 

Albrecht Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach Adorno, 

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 143. 

25 

Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, p. 16. 

26 

Ibid., p. 18. 

27 

Honneth, Pathologies of Reason. On the Legacy of Critical Theory, p. 31. 

12


history is natural being, the essence of nature is historical 28 . In itself, nature is not simply 

objective reality, untouched by human construction, but is also a “second nature” (Georg 

Lukács) in which objects are already transformed by human activity. The increasing alienation 

of humans from these socially produced objects, a process interpreted by Lukacs as 

“reification” 29 , can be overcome only by following Benjamin’s suggestion, that nature itself is 

historical and transitory. Objects are “sedimented history” 30 , they encapsulate various 

possibilities accumulated and repressed by instrumental reason through time. Getting in touch 

with this background of latent, non-realized historical possibilities becomes, in a sense, the 

main task of a social theory. In the light of this early text, we would contend, however, that 

under the faceless, abstract identity of modern subjectivity, Adorno and Horkheimer also point 

to a double phenomenon of unconscious virtualization of the self. (1) The first one is 

explicitly underlined in the small subchapter from the Dialectic of Enlightenment called Zur 

Theorie der Gespenster (On a Theory of Ghosts). In this concentrated text, the ghostly 

appearance of the modern subject is the end-product of repressing history and memory as 

major social coordinates. Entirely dislocated from any particular history, the modern subject 

seems to be made out of intermittent “now’s” lacking any consistent memory that would bind 

them together 31 . Death becomes the equivalent of total oblivion and anonymity as the practice 

of remembering and mourning is repressed by modern society. Perceived by the natives as 

being “ghosts”, immigrants themselves are constrained to forget their own past and origins 

when settling in a new country 32 . Adorno’s famous “intolerance of ambiguity” (or, we might 

add, of ghosts) as the very expression of “authoritarian personality”, points to a more 

paradoxical dynamic in which the Other (the Jew, for instance) becomes simultaneously 

associated with both abstract and concrete or heterogeneous features, the Jew is both the 

expression of cold capitalism 33 and that of idiosyncratic, unchangeable cultural or even racial 

28 

Helga Gripp, Theodor W. Adorno, München: UTB Schoningh, Paderborn, 1986, p. 60. See also 

Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 

2008, p. 183, p. 193. 

29 

Certainly, the problem of reification is much more complex: “Lukács’ starting-point is that the 

transformation of labour power into commodities through the wage system creates a reified 

consciousness in producers and consumers alike, that is, what Simmel describes in sociological terms as 

the drifting apart of subjective and objective culture. There are two major consequences that follow. 

The first is the spread of instrumental rationality to virtually all areas of social life, that is, what Weber 

analyses in terms of rationalization and disenchantment, and in any case, its spread well beyond a 

determinate sphere that might be demarcate from others as the economy. The second is that reification 

induces producers and consumers to misconstrue fluid social relations between people as natural 

relations between things with an autonomous life of their own”. See Schecter, The Critique of 

Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas, p. 53. 

30 

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 165. 

31 

Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, p. 239. 

32 

Ibid., p. 239. 

33 

In capitalist society, the Jew as the economic mediator between higher and lower strata proved to be 

one of the most powerful sources of antisemitism. “The economic activity of the Jews is largely 

restricted to commerce and finance because of their exclusion from the immediately productive 

occupations. With the increasing significance of the market in capitalist economy, the importance of 

trade and finance increases too. A market economy accentuates the differences among the various strata 

of society. The lower strata become aware of their miserable conditions not so much through 

intercourse with those who are really mighty (the leaders of industry and politics) but through contact 

with the middleman, the merchant and banker. Their hatred of these middlemen explodes in the 

13


traits. Enlightened European intelligentsia (from Kant or Herder to Fichte or Zola etc.) fits 

perfectly this profile of (intolerance of) ambiguity when emphatically talking about abstract 

universal human rights while, in the same time, abruptly negating this universal rights in the 

“special” case of Jewish people 34 . 

The Kantian transcendental subject proudly stating his emancipation from any form of 

heteronomy proves to be also an interesting case study. In Adorno’s reading, Kantian 

philosophy goes in tandem with the ever growing influence of modern science 35 . In a sense, 

Kant’s main concern is to justify philosophical enterprise in a scientific deterministic universe 

governed by eternal laws. However, in this very differentiation from science, Kant secretly 

adopts scientific assumptions: the transcendental as such is an a priori, eternal structure 

detached from empirical experience. But the repression of time and genesis from this 

subjective structure in perfect analogy to the usual habit of modern science is not entirely 

straightforward. Kant is actually more ambivalent because “on the one hand, synthetic 

judgements are supposed to be timelessly valid a priori, yet, on the other, are constituted by 

the spontaneous activity of consciousness, and thus, finally, by the work of the mind; so that 

something supposedly timeless has a temporal moment as the condition of its possibility” 36 . 

Nevertheless, the transcendental subject remains caught up in his abstraction and eternity. 

What should have been a statement of power, that of a free subject beyond the determinism of 

nature, proves to be a sign of “powerlessness” 37 and of the reproduction of the very 

determinism it wants to escape. The transcendental subject reaches autonomy only as 

legislating subject, only by obeying his own a priori laws. Thus, freedom is fatally entangled 

with “absolute domination” 38 or is nothing but a “special case of causality” 39 . 

(2)The second symptom points, however, to the repression of both nature and the 

relationship with the Otherness of nature. The transcendental subject proves to be again a 

perfect example. As Adorno notices, the universality of the Kantian subject must be located in 

the “functional relations of society” that operates as a “whole” leveling all individual qualities 

and spontaneities according to the exchange-principle 40 , but also to the constraints of modern 

techno-scientific standards. In other words, while Kant rightly adopts the mediation of 

objectivity (in this case, society as second nature) through subjectivity, he misses, however, 

the possibility of the other move around, that of mediating subjectivity through objectivity 41 . 

By translating it in Kantian jargon, the mediation of the transcendental subject through the 

empirical, individuated subject. But Kant would have, probably, entirely rejected such a 

suggestion because it would have endangered the very autonomy of the subject. Therefore, the 

Kantian subject is condemned to remain split between transcendental and empirical with no 

real, ontological common ground for them. However, the transcendental subject must, 

according to Kant, determine objects by synthesizing some non-qualitative multiplicity 

direction of the Jews who symbolize this element”. See Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth 

and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, London, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 152. 

34 

Ibid., pp. 142-147. 

35 

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, pp. 213-214. 

36 

Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics. Concept and Problems, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 

California, 2012, p. 45. 

37 


38 

Ibid., p. 248. 

39 

Ibid. 

40 

Ibid., p. 180. 

41 

Gripp, Theodor W. Adorno, 1986, p. 72. 

14


coming from outside, in this sense, the subject actually depends on an objective moment. The 

activity of the subject is not “purely subjective”, thus, “the triumph of the sovereign subject is 

hollow (our emphasis)” 42 . At larger scale, the process of metaphysical, scientific or economic 

abstraction is constantly assisted by a division of labor expressing the technological 

advancement of the forces of production. The Kantian difference between reason (theory), 

will (morality or practice) and feeling (aesthetics) is only the preamble of this internalized 

social phenomenon of rigid capitalist differentiation. The social control over individuals can, 

thus, be pushed to the limit: the abstract social totality abstractly differentiates, thus, almost 

entirely reifying and manipulating individual energies in order to reproduce itself. 

However, the magnitude of this process of reification and manipulation can be 

accurately understood only by turning for a brief moment to Adorno’s critique against 

“positivism” and “culture industry”. By doing this, we must leave behind the bourgeois 

(ghostly) self, hypostasized as autonomous transcendental subject. For Adorno, the 19th 

century ideal of individual autonomy turns into a farce when facing 20th century totalitarian 

tendencies. The “ghost in the machine” is almost entirely caught up in the machine, the 

ghostly shapes of the old subject become almost invisible to the eye as the new subject is only 

meant to fulfill various, predetermined social functions. In a sense, the “ghost in the machine” 

has turn into a “ghost as the machine”. The positivist project developed by Carnap catches the 

“spirit” of the time: science is meant to relegate every remnant of metaphysical thinking 

(meaning, interpretation, searching for truth etc.) by sticking only to “facts”. However, 

positivism infiltrates not only the domain of hard sciences, but also the realm of social 

sciences. In this way, individuals become reduced to objects of statistic investigation and 

quantitative measurements. Every spontaneity or singularity that doesn’t fit the scientific 

standards is relegated to the realm of chaotic, irrational impulses. So we are facing a striking 

paradox: “scientism certainly regards the res—the individual objects—as the sole true 

existent, but thereby dispossesses them of all their determinations, as mere conceptual 

superstructure” 43 . Positivism entirely disregards the fact that “theoretical reflections upon 

society as a whole cannot be completely realized by empirical findings”. Ironically, “they seek 

to evade the latter just as spirits evade para-psychological experimental arrangements. Each 

particular view of society as a whole necessarily transcends its scattered facts (our 

emphasis)” 44 . Therefore, positivism stubbornly misses the subjective character of a scientific 

enterprise in the name of an entirely objective method and becoming, thus, even more 

subjective. In the end, the facts themselves are not important, these are important only insofar 

as the theoretical assumptions are confirmed. Consequently, positivism fulfills a precise social 

function, that of legitimizing through scientific reification the social control over individuals, 

after all, “within a reified society, nothing has a chance to survive which is not in turn 

reified” 45 . 

Reification, however, is deepened by the rising and expansion of a new social 

domain: culture industry. Marx himself couldn’t have imagined such an evolution in which 

industry (“base”) and culture (“superstructure”) would come together as a powerful 

42 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 142. 

43 Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralph Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, Harald Pilot, Karl R. 

Popper, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 

1976, p. 44. 

44 Ibid., p. 69. 

45 Ibid., p. 7. 

15


instrument of social control. According to Marxist standard version, these two domains should 

have become even more alienated from each other. And at the end: communist revolution. But 

for Adorno, culture industry, containing generally speaking the media: television, radio, 

newspapers, advertising, movie industry etc., is actually a part of an integrated system in 

which technology and culture are effectively taken by economic and political interests. As 

noted by Adorno and Horkheimer, if the old Kantian transcendental formalism still implied an 

active role on the subjective side, culture industry almost entirely eliminates this autonomous 

moment 46 . However, the manipulative force of this new social domain doesn’t consist in 

simply making people react, like in Pavlov’s experiments with animals, to certain stimuli: 

culture industry goes even further by manipulating the “repressed mimetic impulses”. For 

example, a product is not simply a stimulus, but the reaction model to non-existing stimuli 47 . 

The culture industry acts as being one of the clients of a cultural product simulating in 

advance the very reaction that the product should activate in someone. Like parents who 

become falsely excited by an ugly present trying, thus, to trigger the same reaction in their 

children 48 . As such, culture industry embodies the very functioning of ideology or identity 

thinking: every qualitative difference or non-identical moment must be reduced to the same 

formula. Adorno and Horkheimer sarcastically notice that everybody knows from the very 

beginning how a movie will end, who will be punished, rewarded, forgotten. Instead of being 

irritated by this, the modern spectator feels satisfied precisely because everything went 

according to the plan 49 . Thus, contrary to art, ideology imitates reality while masking its 

contradictions 50 . People are supposed to be happy just like in an advertisement. And up to a 

point, they feel happy, signaling the fact that ideology has managed to reify not only their 

body (as in the past), but also their soul 51 or more precisely, their most inner emotions 52 . This 

is precisely the background for totalitarian movements: the annihilation of the subject or ego 

(psychoanalysis) which in turn annihilates any conscious filtration of emotions or mimetic 

impulses by leaving them entirely at the disposal of a charismatic leader, a social entity or a 

superego (psychoanalysis again). But this process of reification through advanced technology 

generates, furthermore, a sort of pathological relationship between life and death: being alive 

becomes an instrument of the negation of life 53 . More precisely, the subject’s life expressed in 


47 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia. Reflecţii dintr-o viaţă mutilată (Minima Moralia. Reflections 

on a Damaged Life), Univers, Bucureşti, 1999, pp. 216-217. 

48 Ibid., p. 216. In a sense, Adorno’s insight anticipates Slavoj Žižek’s observation regarding the 

background laughter from TV Sit-Coms: "[...] the Other - embodied in the television set [...] - is 

laughing instead of us. So even if, tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing but 

gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of 

the other, we had a really good time." (Žižek 1989: 35). See Slavoj Žižek apud Robert Pfaller, 

„Interpassivity and Misdemeanors: The Analysis of Ideology and the Žižekian Toolbox” in 

International Journal of Zizek Studies, Volume One, Number One - Why Žižek?, ISSN 1751-8229, p. 

36, http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/19/69. 


50 Ibid., p. 179. 

51 Ibid., pp. 152-153: Alexis de Tocqueville already observed the modern shift from simply 

manipulating bodies to manipulating souls. 

52 Ibid., p. 189. 

53 Adorno, Minima moralia. Reflecţii dintr-o viaţă mutilată (Minima Moralia. Reflections on a 

Damaged Life), p. 250. 

16


his mimetic impulses comes to be reduced to the sole purpose of survival. The subject is a survival 

machine, he doesn’t live, but sur-vives. As such, we might even say that the modern 

subject looks very much like an undead person, someone inhabiting a place between life and 

death, a ghost which has forgotten even his ghostly status by pretending, instead, to be 

actually an autonomous, authentic self. 

(Dis)embodying the virtual 

Adorno’s own alternative to this process of reification (or, why not, unconscious 

ghostification) is not a nostalgic, reactionary return to some kind of authenticity waiting to be 

discovered. Even though Jaspers and Heidegger, for example, are very much aware of the 

danger of contemporary depersonalization, they end up in hailing a heroic, authentic subject 

and reversing, thus, the abstract processes of modernity. Authenticity is strictly correlative to 

abstraction or universality as two faces of the same coin. Authenticity appears only in a 

capitalist and techno-scientific society as a compensation for its abstract processes 54 . In order 

to really fight ideology or identity thinking, a more subtle and radical approach is necessary, 

one which doesn’t simply invert ideology, this would also be ideology, but tries to make 

abstractions concrete. In a Hegelian jargon, that would mean working with “concrete 

universal”. By doing so, Adorno actually engages the “method” of, what we would like to 

call, the embodiment of the virtual. The unconscious virtualization of human subjectivity 

through which subjectivity comes to be reduced to a disembodied, apparently non-ambiguous 

abstraction (virtual) is transformed in a conscious embodiment of this very virtual. Adorno 

calls this method “negative dialectic” indicating, thus, a strong Hegelian blue print. As 

modern dialecticians, both Hegel and Adorno recognize the centrality of negation and, 

moreover, the social origin of subject and science. They both share more or less the same 

criticism against Kant’s dualism between empirical and transcendental, phenomenon and the 

thing-in-itself etc. However, these similarities are also accompanied by sharp differences as in 

the problem of negation: while Hegel operates with the “negation of negation”, Adorno rejects 

it as a metaphysical assumption. Negativity should indeed be thought as “determinate 

negation” (still Hegel) in the sense, however, of a purely immanent and finite negativity 55 . 

There is no (immortal) Spirit in the machine, only (mortal) ghosts. As such, the negation of 

negation as a “positive” 56 synthesis is but a “trick” of introducing through the back door of 

philosophy the very identity thinking that Hegel seems at first to reject. Against the Hegelian 

“identity of identity and difference”, Adorno endorses the formula of “non-identity of identity 

and non-identity” 57 . This already shows us that non-identity is the focal point of Adorno’s 

philosophical attention and pathos. In this regard, Adorno refuses from the start a clear cut 

philosophical definition: non-identity is not a concept, but also not something beyond a 

concept. We seem to be stuck in a contradiction, already a good sign, according to Adorno. 

Let us tackle the problem by using three levels of analysis. First of all, we should remember 

that identity thinking works by using the copula “is” between a subject and a predicate as a 

54 Ibid., p. 166. 

55 As we know, Hegel’s novelty is to bring the infinite Absolute Spirit down to earth, the metaphysical 

infinite expresses only in the finitude of historical and social world. Adorno denies, however, that 

(social) totality bears the feature of infinity. See Adorno, Albert, Dahrendorf, Habermas, Pilot, Popper, 

The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, p. 38. 


57 Sherman, Sartre and Adorno. The Dialectics of Subjectivity, p. 240. 

17


“terminological mask”, namely, the subject tends to identify (this is …) an object with certain 

conceptual properties 58 . The object seems to be entirely caught up in the concept, the very 

distance allowing the subject to refer to something outside himself has been covered by the 

illusion of an underlying identity. Thus, non-identity points to this distance between subject 

and object which, however, is made possible precisely through the relationship, or mediation 

between subject and object 59 . There is no non-identity outside mediation. This doesn’t mean, 

however, that non-identity is entirely conceptual mediation. For Adorno, mediation still needs 

some sort of immediacy (for instance, emotions), without such immediacy, mediation would 

be an “absolute tautology” lacking any non-identical moment 60 . Secondly, the non-identical is 

not something simply beyond the concept, it is immanent to it. That is why, philosophy, 

according to Adorno, should paradoxically try to seek the non-conceptual trough the 

conceptual, or as Wittgenstein put it, “to say what cannot be said” 61 . The “compulsion” of 

identity thinking expresses itself not only by eliminating the distance between subject and 

object, but also as an overstatement of the concept itself as being capable to reach totality 62 . 

On the contrary, non-identity operates as an awareness of this very excess within the 

concept 63 , as the awareness of the illusionary nature of this overstatement. Therefore, nonidentity 

as precisely the excess within the concept, as that which cannot be entirely grasped by 

the concept allows the immanent critique of rationality through self-reflection. Such a critique 

is explicitly paradoxical looking very much like Baron Münchausen’s attempt to drag himself 

out of the swamp by pulling his own wig 64 . Thirdly, a philosophy of non-identity is inherently 

a utopian thinking. Adorno comes up with an example of how could be envisioned this 

utopian potential: the judgment “someone is a free man”, despite its apparent clearness, 

ambiguously points towards the concept freedom. This concept is “more” than what is 

predicated of that man while this same man, by having other determinations, is more than the 

concept of his freedom 65 . Both concept and its object are the bearers of an excess, of 

something more: the concept says not only that it could be extended to other individuals, but 

also that these individuals could have qualitatively different attributes from the present ones 66 . 

Thus, every judgment contains not only identity, but also an element of “impossibility” 

(utopia), a “contingent and secret thing” which fuels every identifying judgment 67 . Moreover, 

Adorno believes that a thinking which tries to eliminate its irreducible distance by looking for 

correctly identifying an object and leaving, thus, “the medium of the virtual, of anticipation” 

58 Gripp, Theodor W. Adorno, p. 164. 

59 While Kant and Hegel advocate for a “mediated unity” (between humanity and nature, form and 

content etc.) and Heidegger for a “unmediated non-identity”, Adorno gravitates around the idea of a 

“mediated non-identity”. See: Schecter, The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas, 

pp. 96-97. 




62 Claudia Rademacher, Versöhnung oder Verständigung? Kritik der Habermasschen Adorno-Revision, 

zu Klampen, 1993, p. 46. 




65 Ibid., p. 153. 

66 Ibid., pp. 153-154. 

67 Ibid., p. 154. 

18


ends up in affirmation and ideology 68 . By acknowledging the non-identical in thinking, the 

subject becomes aware of historically sedimented real possibilities, till now repressed, within 

external objects and his own body. After giving up the illusion of mentally “creating” the 

objects, the subject qualitatively changes his perception by simply starting to really “look” at 

these objects 69 . The utopian or virtual thinking enlightens, thus, the irreducible richness of the 

objects. Last but not least, this virtualization process also changes the relationship between the 

thinking subject and his body. The “utopian dimension of somatic pleasure”, its lack of 

intentionality 70 offers the subject a way out of his compulsive tendency to reduce mimetic 

impulses to his own thoughts. As such, the virtual is inherently linked to embodiment. 

Adorno’s wrestle with idealism (of course, Hegel included), with the view of a 

spiritually constructed reality, makes him defend an apparently strange philosophical stance: 

the “priority of the object” over the subject. Adorno advocates a materialist position by no 

means to be confused with its socialist counterpart, dialectical materialism. While both 

Adorno and idealism would agree on locating the essence of the subject in abstract thinking, 

idealism, however, would not acknowledge a further move, namely, that the subject is also 

object. After all, abstract thinking while different from natural mimetic impulses, is still a 

sublimated impulse. The priority of the object comes from the fact that while the subject is 

object, the object cannot be said to be a subject. This is the reason behind Adorno’s statement 

that the subject is the “how”, a phenomenal entity while the object is the “what”, the essence 

itself 71 . By this move, Adorno paradoxically “disempowers” the old subject while injecting 

objectivity with “more subject not less” 72 . This “more” comes from the subject’s capacity of 

experiencing things since only individuals can have experiences 73 . As such, experience 

testifies for a subjective moment that, however, pursues the non-identity between subject and 

object by “experiencing it in the thing” 74 . Thus, experience makes possible for the subject and 

object “to penetrate each other” 75 . In a somewhat different register, Adorno mentions Georg 

Simmel’s remark that humans tend to forget the underlying suffering of historical evolution. 

Only the winners are remembered, but not the very high price to be paid for their victory. 

From Schopenhauer and Nietzsche onward, no philosopher invests suffering with such an 

importance in his own reflections than Adorno. In a reified world, the moment of truth, that of 

separating the essential from inessential should be located in the very experience of 

suffering 76 , the symptom of non-identity in the repression exercised by identity thinking. 

Therefore, mimetic impulses or emotions are the very locus of immediately experiencing 77 the 

objective, mediated contradictions which cross through society and individuals. Abstract 

68 

Adorno, Minima moralia. Reflecţii dintr-o viaţă mutilată (Minima Moralia. Reflections on a 


69 


70 



71 

Gripp, Theodor W. Adorno, pp. 82-83. 

72 


73 

Adorno, Teoria estetică (Aesthetic Theory), p. 368. 

74 


75 

Ibid., p. 142. 

76 

Ibid., p. 172. 

77 


19


mediation which entirely erases the embodied, non-mediated moment of suffering or emotion 

ends up in tautology, in the pure reproduction of abstract thinking. 

At this point, more explanations are required. What is, after all, the embodiment of the 

virtual? Why using this terminology which seems slightly foreign to Adorno’s texts? (1) Let 

us begin with the virtual. There are two, we believe, predominant meanings that more or less 

ambiguously entangle when referring to virtuality in Adorno’s case: the first one is the virtual 

character of the abstract subject. By this, we shouldn’t, of course, understand virtuality as a 

simple copy or image of reality, but as a paradoxical moment which implies simultaneously 

existence and non-existence. The subject “is not” in the sense that is “abstracted” from nature, 

but “is” as a part of nature in the form of a sublimated impulse. Subjectivity is, thus, a ghostly 

apparition, an in-between entity inclined to repress his paradoxical and ambiguous status 

through reification. What is the compulsion of identity thinking, if not a symptom of 

desperately trying to cover his weakness by overstatements of power? And what is intolerance 

of ambiguity, if not an attempt to mask through a radical separation between spirit and body 

the ambiguous core of this subjectivity, its mixture of mimetic and rational tendencies? 78 The 

second meaning works mainly by associating virtuality with potentiality, more specifically, 

with utopian possibilities. Consequently, the virtual means anticipating the future of an 

emancipated world by remembering the real, historically sedimented possibilities within the 

objects. In a way, utopian thinking still preserves the in-between character of the subject: 

anticipating the future means to operate simultaneously on possibility and reality, on abstract 

and concrete. (2) And now, the embodiment. Here too, we think, there are at least two 

meanings implied. The first one indicates the very rootedness of abstract thinking in 

underlying somatic processes. As in Nietzsche’s case, the objective human body is the very 

locus of subjective knowledge. Human consciousness appears and evolves during a process of 

relative differentiation from the “libidinous energy” of humanity 79 . As such, “consciousness is 

a function of a living subject” 80 . The only emancipation worth defending is one in which the 

subject becomes reconciled with his own mimetic background. Emancipated rationality is to 

be accepted only as mimetic rationality. The second meaning concerns, however, a more 

complex issue emphasizing the dynamic character of embodiment. While the basic mimetic 

tendency would consist in non-violently embodying the Other in the sense of becoming like 

this Other, the idealist tendency would, however, imply to “embody” or appropriate nature by 

an abstract spirit or subject. The rationalist-idealist compulsion ends, as we already know, in a 

mimesis of death, the Other becomes simply a copy of reason. Thus, the Other is literally 

swallowed by thinking. Adorno goes so far as to speculate on this absorbing tendency of 

idealism as being rooted in the Ur-history of animal species in which a predator needed a 

supplement of “rage” against his victim in order to swallow it unhesitatingly. Apparently, 

humans have been sublimating this rage in the reflex of blaming the victim as an expression of 

78 We should also notice Adorno’s interest in occultism, in this “science of ghosts” (Derrida) which can 

proliferate only because of the abstract character of capitalist and techno-scientific world operating with 

a radical difference between spirit and body and, thus, fatally reducing spiritual world to “a thing 

among things”. The extraction the spirit or mind from society is, thus, an ideological move which 

“explodes in occultism: it is Idealism come full circle. Just by virtue of the rigid antithesis of being and 

mind, the latter becomes a department of being”. See Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other 

Essays on the Irrational in Culture, p. 129, p. 132. 



80 Ibid. 

20


“evil” 81 . As such, it can be easily devoured, it causes no digesting problems. Adorno’s 

alternative to this “idealism as rage” doesn’t mean simply going back to mimesis by avoiding 

the negative moment of reason. That is not really an alternative, it is just regression to nature. 

Therefore, the only way out is to envision a negative process of embodying the virtual. It’s 

like embodying the Other without swallowing or sacrificing it and, thus, without the rage. 

More precisely, the Other is embodied (mimesis) and in the same time negated (reason), the 

Other is appropriated only by turning into a “ghost”. An aesthetic product, a work of art, 

perfectly exemplifies this paradoxical movement: the non-violent character of a work of art 

doesn’t mean to shut down from any relation with techno-scientific world, but actually to 

embody technology and science without their reifying effects. Instrumental reason is not 

“literally” integrated in art, but only “metaphorically”, only “modified, fragmentary, phantomlike” 

82 . Techno-science is accepted in art not as simply real, but “as-if” is real 83 . 

This could also explain the thorny issue of communication. As we know, Habermas or 

Albrecht Wellmer are considered to be the artisans of the “communicative turn” in the project 

of Frankfurt School. From this new perspective, Adorno seems to advocate an outdated mode 

of philosophizing and social critique. Is this, however, really true? In an ironically prophetic 

way, Adorno already anticipates in Minima moralia a possible critique of the later 

developments of Habermas’s theory of communicative action when talking about “the liberal 

fiction of an automatic and universal communication” 84 . As such, liberal communication goes 

hand in hand with the exchange principle and contemporary reification by disregarding 

qualitative differences inscribed in both objects and subjects. The only way to fight this 

tendency is to introduce non-identity in communication. There is no consensus to be reached 

(Habermas) because individuals are not linguistic machines, but sensuous, idiosyncratic 

beings capable of using language. By this, Adorno strives towards a “non-violent synthesis” 85 

envisioned as being simultaneously linguistic and non-linguistic. Such an experience would 

entail the awareness of the subjects involved in communication as being both embodied and 

virtual beings. By communicating, they would engage in a process of embodying the 

perspectives of the other participants without, however, simply copying or assimilating them. 

The Other is irreducibly different, the I can appropriate the Other only negatively by 

virtualizing him. As noted by Adorno in the case of Kafka or Proust, the non-identity of the 

Other has a “defamiliarizing” effect on the subject 86 , thus, the Other looks very much like an 

unsettling “ghost” for the I. As such, this very Other becomes, in the same time, a source for 

utopian thinking, for a world in which humans can communicate not in spite of, but precisely 

because of their idiosyncratic potentialities. 

Adorno is not simply against the division of labor, but against the abstract character of 

this division. A new kind of differentiation, a more concrete one is needed in order to rethink 

the relationship between techno-science, philosophy and art. This relationship cannot, 

81 

Ibid., p. 33. 

82 

Adorno, Teoria estetică (Aesthetic Theory), p. 433, p. 439. 

83 

Ibid., p. 322. 

84 



85 

Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach Adorno, p. 76. 

86 

Martin Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn. Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem of 

Communicative Freedom, New York: State University of New York Press, 2001, p. 163. 

21


however, be reduced to some sort of checks and balances in the sense of mutually 

correcting/limiting or complementing each other 87 . This would be only half the story masking 

the extent of both individuation and interaction of these domains 88 . A better approach would 

point to a more complex relationship in which every domain simultaneously while in different 

degrees embodies and virtualizes itself and the other ones. Against the current hegemony of 

techno-science, Adorno believes that a future society would transform philosophy, art and 

techno-science in highly individualized social domains mutually incorporating and 

virtualizing the other’s perspective canceling, thus, the totalitarian tendencies inscribed in 

abstract universality. In precisely this sense, we should understand Adorno’s critique of Kant 

as being responsible for the relegation of philosophy in the speculative domain of 

“prescientific, apologetic intuitions of freedom” because of its attempt to secure a 

transcendental philosophical realm beyond science 89 . Instead, philosophy should be open 

towards scientific problems and try to help science whenever possible as in the case of 

“freedom”, a topic in which science has little to say in comparison with philosophy 90 . On the 

other hand, science should acknowledge the importance of self-reflection or “second 

reflection” as the most valuable gift that philosophy can offer to science for avoiding 

dogmatism and reification. In the end, all these interactions, all these reciprocal embodiments 

and virtualizations would make philosophy and science to be more aware of their own 

concreteness (their embodied character) while not giving up universality (virtuality). Of 

course, such universality is not to be understood as rooted in an absolute spirit, but rather in 

contingent, historical and natural processes. Perhaps, the most visible way of understanding 

this intricate dynamic is to go back again to the relationship between art and techno-science. 

As already mentioned, art appropriates science and technology only by virtualization, by 

disempowering them of their reifying content. In other words, techno-science comes to be 

embodied in a work of art not through a simple, direct imitation, but through a negative 

mimesis transforming it into a “ghost”, into “as if” it’s real. Art, however, is no longer the 

same after incorporating techno-science, is internally transformed while still preserving its 

autonomy 91 . By interacting with art, scientists on their part should not be afraid of losing 

themselves in nonsensical speculations because art’s capacity “to differentiate inside the 

object” itself is also a “category of knowledge” 92 . Art proves to be indispensable to science 

precisely because of its heightened perception of the complexity of objects which avoids the 

violence of identity thinking. 

According to Axel Honneth, Adorno’s radicality is most visible in his belief that “all 

serious knowledge requires the methodological inclusion of subjectivity” 93 . Of course, the 

background for such an assessment is to be found in the subject’s capacity to experience the 

87 

For example, art and philosophy complement each other. See Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne 

und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach Adorno, p. 13; Gripp, Theodor W. Adorno, pp. 120-121. In the 

same time, philosophy should correct scientific approach by pointing not only to its social and natural 

origins, but also to its “ends”. Philipp von Mussow, Logik der Deutung. Adorno un die Philosophie, 

Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007, pp. 147-148. 

88 

For instance, art is not a simple “facultative complement of science, but is critically related to it”. See 


89 


90 

Ibid., pp. 214-215. 

91 


92 

Ibid. 

93 


22


complexity and richness of external objects 94 . However, this injunction of a subjective 

moment in the objectivity of techno-science still might not seem radical enough. After all, we 

seem to witness a post-modern “revolution” today by entering in a “Mode 2 Knowledge 

Production” (Gibbons), „postacademic science” (Ziman), „post-normal science” (Funtowicz 

und Ravetz) 95 . As Bruno Latour puts it, we have passed from „science” to „research”, from 

„objects” to „projects”, from „aplication” to „experimentation” 96 . Moreover, this new technoscience 

is supposed to be rooted in society by acknowledging its dependency on orality, 

individuality, locality or temporality (Toulmin) 97 . In its most radical forms, techno-science 

goes through a process of subjectivization and relativization equating it with a human, social 

construction. Thus, techno-science is, in a sense, both embodied and virtual. It is embodied 

because, as Don Ihde observes: mathematics doesn’t involve only calculus, but also 

perceiving the world through scientific instruments 98 . It is virtual because, the same technoscience 

is the very source of the contemporay explosion of virtuality in our world starting with 

television and ending with internet or complex games allowing to simulate reality. This kind 

of virtual experience also convinces Jacques Derrida of the need to replace ontology with 

„hauntology” 99 , the „science of ghosts”: techno-scientific universe with all its gadgets has 

decisively eroded the belief in some sort of immediacy, actuality or present on which ontology 

is usually based on with that of always being „out of joint” (Hamlet), displaced etc. As 

Derrida would have put it: by talking at a telephone I am here as the person who talks but, in 

the same time, there, as the voice heard by the other. I can have a lecture and in the same be 

recorded by a machine and, in this sense, I am also in that machine. The „here” (present) is 

always already „there” (past, future, otherness). Thus, I simply cannot have a full identity, but 

only a split one, a ghostly one. 

What would Adorno’s reaction be in the face of all these developments? Surely, 

Adorno would reject the relativism of this new vision on techno-science for relativism is the 

other side of absolutism, it is not dialectically mediated. Only a “childlike relativism” would 

bluntly question the validity of formal logic or mathematics by simply pointing to their 

contingency 100 . In other words, “to reduce knowledge to its genesis is a bit like arguing that 

the validity of mathematical propositions should depend on the conditions under which 

mathematics came into being socially, or even on the psychological conditions under which 

mathematical or logical judgments are made. That, clearly, is nonsense” 101 . Relativism is a 

“childlike” reaction because it expresses the disappointment in not finding a firm ground for 

knowledge. If there is no such ground, then, the immediate, impatient reaction would be: 

“everything is relative”. Adorno resists falling into a full-fledged constructivism. Even 

though, mathematical “invariants” are “produced”, these invariants do not dissolve in history 

94 

Ibid., pp. 81-82. 

95 

Arno Bamme, Wissenschaft im Wandel. Bruno Latour als Symptom, Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 

2008, pp. 7-8. 

96 

Ibid., p. 18. 

97 

Ibid., pp. 7-8. 

98 

Don Ihde, Bodies in technology, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. XV. 

99 

Jacques Derrida, Spectrele lui Marx. Starea datoriei, travaliul doliului şi noua internaţională 

(Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International), Iaşi: 

Polirom, 1999, p. 44. 

100 


101 

Adorno, Metaphysics. Concept and Problems, Stanford University press, Stanford, California, 2001, 

p. 44. 

23


as they do in human consciousness. The real problem arises only when these invariants 

become associated with a rigid, transcendent reality because at that point, we are already in 

ideology 102 . Thus, Adorno seems to be implying that there is a sort of gradual difference 

between techno-science and philosophy in the sense of a slower erosion of the former due to 

its more abstract character. But also that techno-science ends up in ideology in the very 

moment it doesn’t inhibit its tendency toward totality forgetting, thus, its own limitations and 

contingent background. So, to be clear, Adorno is neither relativist or constructivist nor 

positivist or realist. He is, if you like, a “dialectical realist”, contemplation and construction 

should be thought together: nature exists “out there” but also “in here”, in the embodied 

subjectivity itself. This realism (contemplation) is, however, mediated by negativity and 

virtualization (construction): there is only movement containing, however, a slower (as in 

science) or more dynamic (as in philosophy or art) moments in it. And this already anticipates 

Adorno’s critique against deconstructionism and its “science of ghosts”. I believe that 

Adorno’s main charge against Derrida would be to underline his fall into the trap of a 

disembodied virtual and, thus, in being a clone of German idealism. Derrida’s dismissal of 

embodied immediacy 103 renders him vulnerable to the charge of tautology 104 . Ironical 

situation, since Derrida intends with his “différance” exactly the opposite, to secure the very 

openness towards the Other. In fact, there is no real difference (non-identity) precisely 

because everything is, in a sense, mediated by this ghostly différance 105 . As the very “engine” 

of this “science of ghosts”, différance makes sure that philosophical concepts always come 

with a moment of indeterminacy or a minimal (temporal and spatial) 106 difference inscribed in 

them. A deconstructionist identifies these almost indiscernible cracks in a philosophical 

system and plays with their multiple meanings till the system becomes fuzzy enough to 

renounce the illusion of expressing some kind of totality. As such, the non-mediate character 

of human suffering coming from repression and reification eludes deconstructionism. Even 

from Nietzsche, the one who transforms suffering and pain into the joy of affirmation, 

deconstructionism preserves only the playful attitude with our language. But as pure ghosts, 

we cannot feel suffering and, moreover, we cannot feel joy. For pleasure and joy are, 

102 Ibid. 

103 Again, Adorno’s immediacy is not to be envisioned as an irrational, abrupt moment: immediacy 

makes sense only through the sublimation of conceptual mediation. Even art needs a “theory of 

aesthetics” to avoid falling into the ideology of a direct access to some transcendent/ transcendental 

reality entirely cut off from society. 

104 Derrida recognizes in Marx, one of the forefathers of “hauntology”. However, in Derrida’s reading, 

Marx (but we can also include Adorno) seems to understand the virtual, spectral character of capitalism 

(for example, the abstract exchange value) only through its difference from the aliveness of the body 

(the use value of a product fulfilling basic human needs), or the spirit. For Derrida, Marx goes only half 

way in this hauntology since the specters are seen and criticized from the standpoint of an underlying 

spirit, body etc. See Derrida, Spectrele lui Marx. Starea datoriei, travaliul doliului şi noua 

internaţională (Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New 

International), p. 184, p. 186, p.187, p. 189. 

105 Thus, basically Derrida shares with Hegel the same philosophical background of a mediating 

negativity which dissolves any external (non-identical) reference as the human body or material objects. 

Of course, Derrida no longer retains the idea of an absolute spirit. 

106 Derrida, Spectrele lui Marx. Starea datoriei, travaliul doliului şi noua internaţională (Specters of 

Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International), p. 133. 

24


paradoxically, embodied expressions of the virtuality of a utopian world, according to 

Adorno. 

Autonomy as embodied utopia 

As many have noticed, Adorno’s utopia is close to a negative theological stance. 

Adorno himself doesn’t shy away from this kind of connection when talking about the 

“theological interdiction of image” 107 with reference to the paradoxical position of negative 

dialectic, that of imitating the the Other without its image (this Other can be appropriated only 

by transforming it in a ghostly appearance). A positively understood utopia would 

automatically turn into ideology. Adorno goes even further by pointing to St. Paul’s vision of 

the “resurrection of the flesh” in Judgment Day 108 . Of course, this resurrection is now 

materialistically interpreted: a utopian society would be realized only when humans would 

entirely fulfill their material and biological needs. Thus, “historical materialism” would 

become something else only after its own “sublimation” (Aufhebung), only after emancipating 

the spirit from the constraints of “material needs” 109 . For Albrecht Wellmer (and also for 

Habermas), this theologically colored negativity, however, is the sign of a fundamental 

weakness of Adorno’s philosophy as a whole: Adorno remains caught in the classical 

relationship between subject and object when deciding not to move further towards a 

linguistically mediated intersubjectivity. The combination of materialism or sensualism and 

messianic reveries actually empties Adorno’s utopia from any real critical power: his utopian 

society has no relation to this empirical world, it is meant to be literally impossible 110 . Two 

points ought to be made here. Wellmer seems to be forgetting that Adorno’s utopia is 

simultaneously possible in the sense of actualizing real historical potentialities and it is 

impossible, but only from the perspective of our current, reified society acting, thus, as a 

critical gesture against this society 111 . But even more importantly, Wellmer doesn’t 

acknowledge the fact that Adorno’s negativity is not some emphatic gesture of denouncing 

any possible content. The very fact that Adorno tries to cautiously sketch utopian society is 

already a sign about it. But this is not the whole story, negation is already supplemented by an 

act of embodiment (mimesis), the Other becomes actually appropriated as a virtual, ghostly 

entity. He is not simply nothing or simply an impossible Other, but he is an in-between 

“thing”. Not “pure” nothing or “pure” something, but an “impure”, “fragmented” something/no-thing. 

Let us dwell for a moment on this “imageless” “thing”, more precisely, on the brief 

images that slip like ghosts through the wall of negation rejecting any positive content 

attached to a utopian society. Beside the “resurrection of the flesh”, Adorno also draws a 

world in which the compulsion to classify (science) and to produce (technology) is gone. 

Thereby, the very violence exercised by identity thinking should be gone. Kant’s idea of a 

“perpetual peace” and that of a “freedom” which doesn’t violate the freedom of others come 

very close, according to Adorno, to the profile of this emancipated world. In such a society, 

every human being would be a “beautiful stranger” (Eichendorff) for the others 112 : 

107 


108 

Ibid. 

109 

Ibid. 

110 


111 

Rademacher, Versöhnung oder Verständigung? Kritik der Habermasschen Adorno-Revision, p. 78. 


25


“happiness” would come from the very fact that the Other remains “distant” and “different” in 

the given “proximity” of the I 113 . Meanwhile, objects themselves would be acknowledged in 

all their nuances and richness by the heightened sensitivity of a transformed subject. This 

utopian emancipation is not to be envisioned, however, as a spectacular, visible phenomenon, 

but rather as an almost imperceptible qualitative change of consciousness, sensitivity and 

attitude that, in fact, will change everything. Adorno’s message seems to be: utopia is, in a 

way, in our very vicinity, it seems impossible not because it’s far away from us, but precisely 

because is like a “stranger” in our “proximity”. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari notice in 

What is Philosophy?, Adorno’s “negative dialectic” and “utopia” are designed to connect 

philosophy with present time precisely the same way as in Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon”, the 

anagram for both “Nowhere” and “Now-here” 114 . 

Thus, utopia involves a social transformation which in turn becomes a subjective one. 

In this sense, Wellmer appreciates Adorno’s effort to relate “the open forms of modern art” 

with a “form of subjectivity, which no longer corresponds with the rigid unity of bourgeois 

subject” indicating, instead towards a more flexible, communicative structuring of personal 

identity 115 . However, Adorno remains stuck in a one-sided view of modern art: his rejection 

of jazz and other popular cultural phenomena is the symptom of an antiquated aesthetic 

elitism. At this point, Wellmer is perfectly right in criticizing Adorno’s harsh judgment on 

new popular cultural expressions (the critique of jazz remains an unfortunate moment in 

Adorno’s thinking) as pure regressions to mimetic impulses. But the charge of elitism should 

be, on the other hand, more carefully considered. Because, once again, the problem is concrete 

universality. In one of his courses, Adorno abruptly says that „you may think me an oldfashioned 

Enlightenment thinker, but I am deeply convinced that there is no human being, not 

even the most wretched, who has not a potential which, by conventional bourgeois standards, 

is comparable to genius” 116 . However, this democratic distribution of genius potential is 

always endangered, Hegelianly speaking, to remain „in itself” and not to become „for itself”. 

Human genius stays as an abstract potential, if it is not realized as a concrete universality, as 

autonomy. For autonomy is, we believe, one of Adorno’s most important, even though 

somewhat implicit, philosophical theme. In a utopian society, the subject himself would 

become the locus of concrete universality closely ressembling works of art which are 

universal precisely because of their radical concreteness 117 . In other words, “the individual 

would be a work of art ceaselessly in progress. And, indeed, it is each individual constantly 

reworking his self (and, impliedly, the collective of which he is a part), that is the essence of 

the notion of a mediating subject” 118 . Since “utopia would be the non-identity of the subject 

but without the sacrifice” 119 , conversely, autonomy would consist in negating heteronomy 

without sacrificing it in the name of identity. An embodied utopia would, thus, imply a subject 

who resists the temptation of regressing to irrationality in the face of rigid rationalism, but 

cures the thinking compulsion by self-reflection and also by reflecting on the very “desire” 

113 

Ibid. 

114 

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Ce este filosofia (What is Philosophy?), Târgovişte: Pandora, 1999, 

pp. 99-100. 

115 


116 

Adorno, Metaphysics. Concept and Problems, pp. 132-133. 

117 


118 

Sherman, Sartre and Adorno. The Dialectics of Subjectivity, pp. 281-282. 

119 


26


that constitutes itself as an Other to thinking. Only when this mimetic Otherness would be 

“dissolved, without heteronomous residues, in the objectivity of thinking, it will become an 

impulse for utopia” 120 . Paradoxically, by dissolving heteronomy, the subject also dissolves the 

violence against heteronomy considered before as irrational. Otherwise put, heteronomy 

becomes non-identity while autonomy becomes embodied utopia, or simply hauntonomy (if 

we are to play with words like Derrida). In such a state, human identity appears as being 

decentered according to the multiplicity of its own potential and that of the others 121 . The old 

repressive entity (super-ego) excluding every heteronomous moment according to its arbitrary 

rules would be dissolved in a non-violent synthetic-multiple self spontaneously using 

“constellation” thinking when approaching objects. Subjective thinking would, thus, meet an 

object not by automatically subsuming it under a concept, but through a delicate and fragile 

constellation of concepts each of them accurately denoting some objective attribute while 

enlightening together, as a “figure” (Darstellung) 122 , the complex profile of the same object 

with an excessive or non-identical moment inscribed in it. In the end, utopian autonomy 

peacefully annihilates all inner contradictions and, thus, the current need to operate in 

paradoxical manner for undermining identity-thinking while still maintaining the tension of 

non-identity alive. The end of repression and suffering is not the beginning of an eternal 

relaxation, but that of an eternal peaceful tension in which the very shadows (ghosts) of the 

subject become “natural” moments of its existence. 

Against the false bourgeois attitude of rejecting technology (and, implicitly, science) 

as responsible for destroying the “purity” of nature, Adorno indicates in scattered flashes of 

thought what would mean to integrate technology in the light of a utopian state of things. In 

Aesthetic Theory, Adorno says that in an emancipated society, technology would be diverted 

from obsessively producing more things towards a qualitative change involving an authentic 

interest for the very “nature formed by technique” 123 . After effectively eliminating poverty, 

Adorno advocates a sort of qualitative progress in which technology would try to harmonize 

with natural environment aesthetically integrating, for instance, functional buildings in such 

an environment. Anticipating contemporary artistic trends, Adorno opts for a peaceful and 

compassionate reconversion of “ugly”, “industrial” landscapes in natural and social milieu as 

the very sign of reconciliation with the repression of the past 124 . Instead of hiding or 

destroying them, these industrial landscapes can, finally, be embodied precisely as ghostly 

remnants of a violent past and, thus, as indication of a reconciled state of things. Science itself 

should go through the same therapeutic process: the quantitative approach tending to repress 

and forget the multiple facets of objects would go through a qualitative change of attitude by 

creating a heightened sensitivity towards remembering the historical potentialities inscribed in 

the surrounding objects 125 . Adorno’s philosophical complexity cannot, however, entirely put 

aside a nagging question: what is the future relevance of this utopian thinking? Despite the 

apparent soundness of recent criticism saying that (early) Frankfurt School (of course, Adorno 

included) develops only a theory of society without going further towards a theory of techno- 

120 



121 


122 


123 


124 

Ibid. 

125 

Philipp von Mussow, Logik der Deutung. Adorno un die Philosophie, pp. 147-148. 

27


science and nature, there is something missing in this critique, namely that such a new, 

extended theory would also remain more or less determined by social constraints. A theory of 

techno-science which would not acknowledge, for example, the contemporary pressures of 

neoliberal capitalism towards predominantly quantitative growth would remain caught up in 

the same vicious circle of forgetting the original, emancipatory end of modern techno-science: 

to create a better society. In the light of this, probably Adorno will still remain with us in the 

future as a critical consciousness stubbornly pointing to our deviations from the very purposes 

of our journey. 

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SUBJECTIVITY AND TECHNO-SCIENCE IN THEODOR ADORNO ...

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