Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: ABSTRACT: The Subject of Adorno
�David Sholle, Miami University (Ohio)

The millennial moment has past; the postmodern moment (1968?) is now a faint glimmer; Capitalism�s next war, however, looms in the future. Yet, in Cultural Studies it is the same old new game� modernity must be churned under to make way for the new subject. Under the heading Late extra, Adorno writes,
�The cult of the new, and thus the idea of modernity, is a rebellion against the fact that there is no longer anything new. The never-changing quality of machine-produced goods, the lattice of socialization that enmeshes and assimilates equally objects and the view of them, converts everything encountered into what always was, a fortuitous specimen of a species, the doppel-ganger of a model. The layer of unpremeditatedness, freedom from intentions, on which alone intentions flourish, seems consumed. Of it the idea of newness dreams. Itself unattainable, newness installs itself in the place of overthrown divinity amidst the first consciousness of the decay of experience. But its concept remains chained to that sickness, as its abstraction attests, impotently reaching for a receding concreteness. . . Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal. . . Mankind, despairing of its reproduction, unconsciously projects its wish for survival into the chimera of the thing never known, but this resembles death. Such a chimera points to the downfall of an all-embracing constitution which virtually no longer needs its members.�

In these terse lines Adorno expresses a desire to move beyond modernity�s aporias, while at the same time recognizing that goal as unattainable. Contemporary cultural studies has tended to altogether dismiss such a goal and the conception of the subject upon which it is based. The critique of modernity and in particular the Cartesian cogito is presently the assumed jumping off place for cultural studies� notion of the subject. Predominantly, this involves accepting the so-called poststructuralist1 �death of the subject�, and concurrently the rejection of dialectics in favor of the immediacy of the particular and the dispersion of forces.
Why bother with the �subject�? Because, how we conceive of the subject impacts the entire project of cultural studies: particularly, its conception of the limits of the present capitalist social formation and its strategies for social change and the support of freedom.
But how has Cultural studies taken up the subject? I will first describe two counterpoised projects within cultural studies in regard to the �subject�: 1) a populist cultural studies approach which, although positing a fragmented subject with floating identities, nevertheless anchors this subject in an active agency. 2) a contemporary cultural studies approach which unhinges the subject even further in favor of the notion of pure multiplicity. I will then counter this with Theodore Adorno�s approach to the subject which I claim avoids both alternatives: it neither accepts wholesale the active autonomous self, nor does it eliminate entirely the terrain of subjectivity.
I realize that I am carrying out a cultural heresy here, for it has by now become almost a requirement for every primer on cultural studies to contain a statement ridiculing Adorno and the Frankfurt School for their elitist, mandarin, modernist position which chastises the audience while monolithically positing a homogeneous deterministic mass media. Where Adorno is taken up it is to re-interpret aspects of his work in some poststructuralist guise, whether Derridian, Deleuzian, etc. It is the argument of this paper that Adorno is still valuable, not despite his �modernism�, nor because of some forced affinities with contemporary French theory, but precisely in and through his �modernist� defense of the �subject.�
A. Cultural Studies: Two Approaches
I. Populist�
The work that I will describe as �populist cultural studies� is a particular configuration of the cultural studies position that is part of a larger movement in audience study originally identified with John Fiske and others. This "reading for resistance" approach was ceremonially2 dismissed in the 90�s, but the conceptions of audience, subject, resistance and play upon which it was based persist in the �more sophisticated� versions that have followed. Within this approach, it is the �knowledge� that the audience possesses that is at question, and so the �discipline� constructs knowledge of a knowing subject (a subject that it, itself, has constructed). I will attempt to show how such a position mirrors empirical social psychology in constructing a particular kind of subject-- one invested in producing its own subjectivity.
By employing a complex vocabulary of �discursive positions,� �multiple subjectivities,� �nomadic agency,� �articulations,� �polysemic textuality, �forms of empowerment,� and so on, cultural studies submerges its mirroring of the possessive individualism of liberal pluralism and the resulting rejection of Marxist class analysis.. But here, contradictions abound. Cultural studies, when emphasizing the multiplicity of subject positions that make class a secondary category, uses precisely the notion of the �split subject�; but when that subject becomes a popular audience member �in activity,� all of a sudden, the subject is whole and self-reflective in a rather transparent way. One way of overcoming this contradiction is by shifting the focus from cognitive activity to �affective� activity. I will attempt to show how this move simply replaces one side of the supposed modernist binaries (identity/difference) with the other.

II. Poststructuralist Cultural Studies

The critique of the epistemic subject engendered by Marx (through Hegel) is rejected by poststructuralist cultural studies. For Marx, the spectator model of the self is replaced with the notion of the producing self that fabricates objectivity through its own historical activity. As Benhabib notes, Marx, �sees the task of reflection neither as the withdrawal from the world nor as access to clarity and distinctness, but as the rendering conscious of those unconscious forces of history and society which have shaped the human psyche. Although generated by the subject, these forces necessarily escape its memory, control and conduct. The goal of reflection is emancipation from self-incurred bondage.�
Poststructuralist Cultural Studies unhinges this mode of critique by replacing the reflective (the realm of consciousness) with the linguistic (the realm of language). Thus, the subject is replaced by a system of structures, oppositions and differences which are not viewed as products of a living subjectivity at all. Here we have the full �death of the subject.� In this light, the various poststructuralisms from Foucault to Derrida have been instrumental in uncovering the forms of domination latent in Western culture�s conception of self and other. For this, we can be thankful, but often the way this critique of the subject is carried out leads to a dead end, which I hope to show lies in a proto-metaphysics or ontology.
At any rate, I will agree with Adorno, that the Subject that should be critiqued is not simply the subject of discourse, but the subject formed in relation to social historical conditions. So for Adorno, yes, the subject is enclosed by the objective, but he refuses to denounce subjectivity as inherently dominative. Yes, the historical conditions within which the subject has formed have led to a compulsive identity, but the way out is not through a simple renunciation of self-identity. As Dews points out, Adorno held that the undifferentiated state before the subject�s formation was the dread of the blind web of nature, that if the subject is liquidated rather than sublated in a higher form, the effect would be regression.
Poststructuralist thought in taking the oppressive self-enclosure of consciousness to be the only possibility for subjectivity remains trapped in the philosophy of consciousness, for the only option is the chaotic affirmation of the diffuse and heterogeneous. Such dispersion of the self merely enacts what Adorno takes to be the central aspect of capitalist sociality�the compulsive self is opened up only to be reinscribed in the indifference of the commodity form. The dispersed, transnational, flexible capitalism of the 21st century no longer needs a fixed subject, in fact, it needs a decentered one�a �subject� characterized by openness to ambiguity and the ability to carry out multiple individual projects in a mode of anti-collective, anti-sociality.

ADORNO
What is evident in Adorno�s work is his constant critique of the self-standing subject and of the liberal pluralism upon which it is based. Adorno is in agreement with post-structuralism in his criticism of the illusory autonomy of the bourgeois subject. Adorno's refusal to surrender subjectivity in the face of his strenuous critique of it distinguishes Adorno from poststructural theory and provides the basis for the continued relevance of his thought.
As Zuidervaart attests, Adorno's Theory is crucial in developing a critical understanding of the task of imagining the world differently, other than it is: "There can be no horizon for dramatic historical change unless people can imagine and enact something other than the prevailing modes of reality and reason. And for such imagination and such enactment, there must be semblances of subjectivity.�

I will attempt to show that:
One� Adorno�s work avoids the irony of the poststructuralist approach, following Nietzsche, i.e., that it posits that the structures of knowledge are constitutive of the object, albeit falsely. It thus re-inscribes a kind of idealism. Adorno, attempts to avoid this, by retaining the subjective principle, while critiquing its historical form. As he says, �we must use the force of the subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.�
Two� The poststructuralist ontology is one in which the contingent and the particular are immediate, and incapable of conceptualization. But for Adorno, this opposition of the chaotic to the conceptual is false�pure singularity is itself an abstraction.
�The opposition of the stable to the chaotic, and the domination of nature, would never have succeeded without an element of stability in the dominated, which would otherwise incessantly give the lie to the subject. Completely casting away that element and localizing it solely in the subject is no less hubris than absolutizing the schemata of the conceptual order� sheer chaos, to which reflective spirit downgrades the world for the sake of its own total power, is just as much a project of spirit as the cosmos it sets up as an object of reverence.� � Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Thus, what post-structuralism mistakes for immediacy is in fact highly mediated. Some recent cultural studies has adopted the poststructuralist dismissal of mediation, seeing it under the suspect Hegelian model of the synthesis of opposites. For Adorno, mediation never synthesizes contradictions, nor is it simply the way the self preserves its identity. Rather, where Adorno sees a contradiction there is already the identity of identity and non-identity. Mediation is not a transcendental operation or an act of self-enclosed consciousness, but as Jameson says �it characterizes the way our spectatorship and our praxis alike construct portions of the world with a view to changing them.
For Adorno, the experience of the contradiction of Hegel (in which the non-identical in the object is reduced to a reflection of the subject) sparks off a second reflection in which the non-identical is no longer viewed as the isolated particular, the particular is now seen as standing in a pattern of relations to other particulars, a historically sedimented constellation. Thus, for Adorno there is no permanent antagonism between conceptual thought and reality, the problem is that within present social relations the concept is given primacy.
Three� Ultimately, Adorno wants to reconceptualize the subject as capable of acknowledging its own moment of non-identity. Poststructualism, on the other hand, in rejecting any reflective consciousness, sees the ego or self as only capable of exclusion, thus, the only option is to reject this supposed unity of self-consciousness in favor of a dispersal of intensities, a metaphysics of desiring machines, or the indifference of boundless flux. Adorno, like the poststructuralists, sees the failure of modernity in its denial of the body, the sensuous and material existence, but for Adorno the mere affirmation of these non-identical others is no solution.
For Adorno, compulsive identity must be historically situated and treated dialectically. Despite the domination that it engenders, it was necessary (as a form of self-preservation) in order for human beings to liberate themselves from blind subjection to nature. To this extent such identity contains a moment of freedom. There is a necessary interdependence of identity and non-identity in the constitution of the self. Subjectivity is a problem of social relations��the relation to the other is constitutive of subjectivity.� The problem with the poststructuralist subject is that it is so entirely dehistoricized that it cannot be called upon to take up a role in the context of revolutionary agency. The roots of this lie in the Nietzschian destruction of any relation between interest, agency and knowledge.
Four� And so Adorno�s critical theory is the antithesis of postmodernism and poststructuralism, for he calls for the intensification of self-reflection and reflective questioning. The unitary, controlling subject can be overcome only through subjectivization, not through its limiting. Adorno�s negative dialectics is the conduct of self-suspending thought, it is �the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped that context.� In this section, I will detail Adorno�s critique of identity thinking.
Further, for Adorno, the subject-object relation cannot be eliminated, it can only be reconfigured. Adorno�s tack in this regard is to give predominance to the object. The subject does not constitute the object, yet subject and object do mediate each other. A reconciliation of subject-object would involve, as Adorno says: �Neither the undistinguished unity of subject and object nor their antithetical hostility. In its proper place, even epistemologically, the relationship of subject and object would lie in the realization of peace among humans as well as between humans and their other. Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.� Thus, Adorno�s conception of subjectivity is what Martin Jay calls a three-starred constellation: collective subjectivity, individual subjectivity and the objective world each take up their rightful place in a dialectic of mutually supportive non-identity. So, it is the restoration of difference and non-identity to their proper place in the non-hierarchical constellation of subjective and objective forces that he called Peace.
Five� Adorno sees identity thinking as reflecting a social situation in which mental labor is effectively split from manual labor ( a relation which I plan to relate to current conceptions of information labor and cyberspace). When Adorno speaks of the priority of the object he is referring to the body, to the relations with others and to the material configurations of exchange and class. Adorno refers to a �rational identity� of the subject, by which he means 1)consciousness of the non-identical and 2) solidarity (through reflective memory) with those who have suffered. But Adorno would further claim that any utopian reconciliation would require first or rather simultaneously a dismantling of the social formation that has constructed the antagonism between subject and object. Adorno opens the possibility for another form of subjectivity, one that does not yet fully exist as a collective habit because the concrete form of social life to which it corresponds has not yet come into being.


�The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of truth.� --Adorno


1 I hesitate to characterize contemporary theory rooted in the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Butler, etc. as poststructuralist, because most of these theorists disclaim the term. However, within cultural studies as it exists within communication, poststructuralism is used to characterize the bulk of this work. Therefore I will use the term under this qualification.
2 I mean �ceremonially� in the sense that this was carried out in ritual form at specific occasions formally conceived as defining the field of cultural studies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this essay, I advance a reading of Genesis 34 to illuminate a long-standing, if discontinuous, dialectical tradition in IR and to reveal its limitations. Dialecticism�s periodic re-emergences in IR, I argue, serve to critique a field that is prone to theoretical and ideological reification. Yet such critiques are prone to reifications of their own; using Genesis 34 as a parable, I show how Theodor W. Adorno�s negative dialectics can help IR guard against these. Though Adorno, I argue, dialectical critique emerges as a free-standing vocation within IR: showing how singular narratives imposed uncritically onto the world create the conditions for political catastrophe; how ideas mix with material realities in ways which demand both epistemological skepticism and ethical sensitivity; and how the essential unknowability of the world poses a profound normative challenge for those dealing with the problems of violence and national security.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Teodor Adorno was hired by Paul Lazarsfeld as the Musical Director of the Princeton Radio Project, 1938-1941.
It was out of the Princeton Radio Project that network television eventually grew.
Adorno's view of how "advertising turns to terror" did not fit in with Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Project, which became the Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research.Adorno's analysis of American radio as a means of social control during WW II still has relevance today for the media of television, particularly his concepts of "standardization" and "pseudo-individuality."

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, I explore how the post-WWII American context shaped Theodor Adorno�s views on the experience of late modern alienation, explored in Minima Moralia, where "damaged life" puts on the face of "exuberant vitality." Responding to the revolutionary changes in the discipline of psychiatry in the years after WWII, Adorno saw psychoanalysis as now complicit in the problem of damaged life, where it was once a tool that might have worked against "bourgeois self-alienation." Turning from 1940s America to the contemporary era, I show the prescience of Adorno�s critique by exploring the ways the dominant tendencies that characterized psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s are still evident in the contemporary era, despite a paradigm shift.