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November 13, 2010
In 'Negative Dialectic as Fate Adorno and Hegel' in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno J. M Bernstein address the idea of dialectics at a standstill and the category of non-identity.
The former is understood thus:
Instrumental reasoning, as the rational expression of and means for securing the desire for self-preservation, misrecognizes itself when it reifies the process of abstraction through which it proceeds, when it comes, finally, to think of itself as reason as such. In so doing, it separates itself from anthropomorphic nature, conceiving itself as independent and separate, and nature as its alien other – an other whose shape, as a system of objects governed by mechan- ical laws, shares nothing with it. In denying the anthropomorphic life of its other, it liquidates its own life; reification is literal and not metaphorical. Finally, what it suffers in terms of fate, now the debilitating consequences of rationalized modernity, our iron cage, is still the “reactive force of a life that has been suppressed and separated off.
Reasson, which has become completely instrumental, devoid of self-reflection and reflection on what it has disqualified, must inquire after the meaning that it itself has expunged. How can reason inquire after the meaning that it itself has expunged? Negative Dialectics is intended as a response to this dilemma. The beginning to an answer to this question is to recognize that reason as such cannot undertake this inquiry, not on its own or in its own now stifled voice.
The concept of non-identity provides the answer. Bernstein says that:
Dialectics can commence only by understanding the dominant logical mechanism of reason from a reverse angle. Under standard conditions, contradictions are signs that reason has failed and hence a spur to seek a better, more consistent, and more unifying account. But if the unity and so consistency of the phenomena facing us is the problem, a sign that we have imposed an order on it, then the emergence of a contradiction signifies differently; it means that some- thing has slipped through the unifying net, which is to say that contradictions testify to antagonisms in reality (between what is demanded of things and the things). What slips past the unifying net is nonidentical with the concept that was supposed to grasp it.
Negative Dialectics is structurally the experience of contradiction, the recognition of guilt and the need for reparation, and the reflective activity of reparation – call it critique of the rationalized concept of the concept.
Negative dialectics, austerely thought, is nothing other than the reflective version of the experience of contradiction; it is that experience raised to the level of the concept. What makes this dialectic negative is that it nowhere claims or even attempts to state the truth of an indigent item; rather it is riveted to the moment in which the object appears as “more” than what its covering concept has claimed it is.
Dialectics is the reflective comprehension of the experience of contradiction; contradiction now occurs because there is an antagonism between the social system, rationalized society as formed through the demands of capital, and the particular subjects and objects formed. Contradiction, when it occurs, points to the claim of the particular, the nonidentical, against its social identifications. Since contradiction is the moving force of negative dialectics, negative dialectics will continue only so long as domination continues.
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