Adorno, Truth, and International Relations

Fluck, Matthew

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_6

Matthew Fluck²

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Abstract

This chapter draws on Adorno to outline an account of truth as objective, unintentional, and emphatic. For Adorno truth is to be understood in terms of the expression of objectivity rather than correspondence or consensus. This conception of truth presents a means of drawing together the insights of Post-Positivists and Critical Realists. Adorno shows that anti-objectivism, not the concern with truth per se, is a source of abstraction. Thus, critical International Relations (IR) theorists have been right to address a critical epistemological problematic. Their efforts to do so can be rejuvenated with by abandoning the intersubjective conception of truth in favour of an objective Adornian conception.

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Notes

1.
Hilary Putnam, ‘Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind’ The Journal of Philosophy 91, 1 (1994), pp. 445–517, reference pp. 447–448.
2.
Ibid., p. 445.
3.
Shannon Brincat, ‘Dialectics and World Politics: The Story So Far…’, Globalizations 11, 5 (2014), pp. 587–604, ref. pp. 594–595. But see Christian Heine and Benno Teschke, ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Dialectical Awakening: On the Potential of Dialectic for International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 25, 2 (1996), pp. 399–423; Shannon Brincat, ‘Negativity and Open-Endedness in the Dialectic of World Politics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 34, 4 (2009), pp. 455–493.
4.
Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, p. 171.
5.
Ibid.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 102.
9.
Martin Jay, ‘Vico and Western Marxism’, in Fin de Siècle Socialism and Other Essays, ed. Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 49–59.
10.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 149.
11.
Ibid., p. 262.
12.
Benno Teschke and Can Cemgil, ‘The Dialectic of the Concrete: Reconsidering Dialectic for IR and Foreign Policy Analysis’, Globalizations, 11, 5 (2014), pp. 605–624, ref. p. 607.
13.
Ibid.
14.
Jay, Totality, p. 105.
15.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 112 & p. 145; Hayward Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 210–211; Richard Devetak, ‘A Rival Enlightenment? Critical International Theory in Historical Mode’, International Theory 6, 3 (2012), pp. 417–453; Schouten, ‘Cox on World Orders’.
16.
Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 50.
17.
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 112; Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 49.
18.
Jay, Totality, p. 108.
19.
Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 54.
20.
Alker, Rediscoveries, p. 207.
21.
Robert Cox, ‘Influences and Commitments’, in Approaches to World Order, ed. R. Cox and T. Sinclair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 19–38, ref. pp. 28–29; Schouten, ‘Cox on World Orders’.
22.
Devetak, ‘Rival Enlightenment’, p. 422.
23.
Schouten, ‘Cox on World Orders’.
24.
Cox, ‘Influences’, p. 30.
25.
Devetak, ‘Rival Enlightenment’.
26.
Ibid., p. 443.
27.
Cox, ‘Influences’, p. 30.
28.
Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 27.
29.
Jay, ‘Vico’, p. 55.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Ibid., p. 56; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 376.
33.
Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 188.
34.
But see Levine, Recovering and Brincat, ‘Negativity’.
35.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 9.
36.
Ibid., p. 3.
37.
Adorno, Minima Moralia.
38.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 502.
39.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. xx.
40.
Ibid., p. 41.
41.
Theodor Adorno, Gerhard Richter, trans. & ed. ‘Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno’ in Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010; (1969)), pp. 227–238.
42.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 3.
43.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 21. As Yvonne Sherratt points out, the history outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment is ‘ideal’ rather than empirical. Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 79.
44.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xvi.
45.
Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, p. 46.
46.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 28.
47.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 11.
48.
Ibid.
49.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 6.
50.
Ibid., p. 8
51.
Ibid.
52.
Ibid., p. 9.
53.
Ibid., p. 18.
54.
Ibid., p. 25.
55.
Ibid., p. 10.
56.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5.
57.
Levine, Recovering International Relations. p. 33.
58.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 13.
59.
Ibid., p. 10. Frederic Jameson emphasises this aspect of Adorno’s philosophy, arguing that ‘exchange value’ is ‘strictly identical with “identity”’. Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism, (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 23–24. See also Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967), pp. 43–47.
60.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xiv.
61.
Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, p. 81.
62.
Adorno, Minima Moralia.
63.
Sherratt suggests that Adorno associates this relationship with the Freudian id. For Jameson the connection is with use – as opposed to exchange-value. Honneth labels it ‘recognition’ and suggests that a concern with this relationship to the world can be found, in different forms, in the work of Dewey, Heidegger, and Lukacs. Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic; Jameson, Late Marxism; Honneth, Reification.
64.
Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, p. 87.
65.
Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 21, 1 (2001), pp. 1–20.
66.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 13.
67.
Ibid.
68.
Adorno, ‘Opinion Reality Delusion’.
69.
Ibid.
70.
Theodor Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, (Cambridge: Polity 2001), pp. 25–26.
71.
Ibid., p. 25; Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1993), p. 7.
72.
Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy, (Cambridge: Polity 2013), p. 41.
73.
Ibid.; Adorno, Kant, p. 25.
74.
Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy, p. 41.
75.
Adorno, Hegel, p. 7.
76.
Ibid.
77.
Adorno, Kant, p. 26.
78.
Ibid.
79.
Ibid., note 2, p. 25 & p. 244.
80.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 35–36.
81.
Adorno, Kant, p. 168; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 197.
82.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 21.
83.
Ibid., p. 44.
84.
Ibid., p. 46
85.
Ibid., p. 153.
86.
Theodor Adorno, ‘The Sociology of Knowledge and its Consciousness’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell 1978), pp. 452–465, reference p. 454.
87.
Ibid., p. 459.
88.
Ibid., p. 453.
89.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 50.
90.
Adorno, ‘Opinion Reality Delusion’.
91.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 502.
92.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 41.
93.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 507.
94.
Ibid., pp. 503–504.
95.
Alan Norrie, Law and the Beautiful Soul, (London: Glasshouse Press, 2005), p. 166.
96.
Bhaskar, Naturalism, p. 10
97.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 499.
98.
Ibid., p. 503.
99.
Adorno, ‘Opinion Delusion Society’.
100.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, pp. 498–499.
101.
Ibid., p. 498.
102.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 69–70.
103.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 505.
104.
Adorno, Minima Moralia.
105.
Susan Buck-Morss, ‘T.W. Adorno and the Dilemma of Bourgeois Philosophy’, in Theodor W. Adorno Volume 1, ed. Gerard Delanty (London: Sage, 2004); Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 77.
106.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 502.
107.
Simon Jarvis, ‘Adorno, Marx, Materialism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 79–100., pp. 97–98.
108.
Ibid.
109.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 499.
110.
Ibid.
111.
Quoted in Jarvis, Adorno, p. 227. Jarvis’s translation of this passage is clearer, but see also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 17–18.
112.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 228.
113.
Adorno, ‘Opinion Delusion Society’.
114.
Honneth, Reification, p. 57.
115.
Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, p. 77.
116.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 228.
117.
Buck-Morss, ‘Bourgeois Philosophy’, p. 39.
118.
Ibid., p. 41. As we saw in Chapter 5, Bhaskar also uses the term ‘expression’ to avoid the suggestion of ‘correspondence’.
119.
Ibid., p. 40.
120.
Ibid.
121.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 94; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 80.
122.
Cook, ‘Adorno’s Materialism’, p. 720.
123.
Ibid.
124.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 162.
125.
Ibid., p. 163.
126.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 176.
127.
Adorno, Kant, p. 32.
128.
Ibid., p. 5.
129.
Ibid., p. 18.
130.
Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1978), p. 15; Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 255; Martin Jay, Adorno, (London: Fontana, 1984).
131.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, pp. 505–506; Adorno, ‘Introduction’, 1976.
132.
Cook, ‘Adorno’s Materialism’, p. 721.
133.
Adorno, quoted Ibid.
134.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, pp. 498–499.
135.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 66.
136.
Adorno, ‘Introduction’, p. 25.
137.
Ibid., p. 27.
138.
Lake, ‘Theory is Dead’; Sil and Katzenstein, ‘Analytic Eclecticism’.
139.
Cf. Levine, Recovering International Relations.
140.
Jarvis, Adorno, pp. 44–46.
141.
Adorno quoted Ibid., p. 45.
142.
Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism, p. 36.
143.
E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, (London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 8.
144.
Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 50.
145.
Levine, Recovering International Relations, p. 97.
146.
Ibid., p. 98.
147.
Adorno identified a similar tendency in the culture industry in which consumers know that they are being manipulated but participate all the same. Theodor Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, New German Critique, 6 (1975), pp. 12–19.
148.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 166. Adorno believed identification to be necessary for thought to take place at all. On the other hand, his concern is with the identity thinking which characterises modernity, in particular in the form of the exchange principle. This is a hard line to tread. For example, in Recovering International Relations Levine presents negative dialectics as a response to the ‘crisis of modernity’, but also as a solution to the reificatory tendencies which inhabit thought as such. The present work tips the balance slightly further towards Adorno’s critique of modern ‘ways of knowing’ and their specific manifestations.
149.
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 97.
150.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968), pp. 253–264, ref. p. 256–257.
151.
Cf. Levine, Recovering International Relations, p. 101.
152.
That is not to say, of course, that Positivist theories provide no insights, or that specific positivistic theories might not provide greater insights than more ‘critical theories’ in specific cases.
153.
Ashley, ‘Human Interests’, pp. 207–208.
154.
Patomaki and Wight, ‘After Post-Positivism’.
155.
Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 22.
156.
Jean-Philippe Deranty, ‘Adorno’s Other Son: Derrida and the Future of Critical Theory’, Social Semiotics 16, 3 (2006), pp. 421–433.
157.
Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. James R. Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(E), 1991), p. 117.
158.
Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 22.
159.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 223.
160.
Dews, Logics of Disintegration, p. 53.
161.
Ibid., p. 44.
162.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 206.
163.
Ibid., p. 216
164.
Thus in Minima Moralia – the very title of which indicates this movement downstream – Adorno seeks to represent ‘the moments’ of the philosophy developed with Horkheimer ‘from the standpoint of subjective experience’. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 18.
165.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, p. 499.
166.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
167.
Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 17, p. 20.
168.
Levine, Recovering International Relations, pp. 107–108.
169.
Cook, ‘Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique’.
170.
Daniel McCarthy and Matthew Fluck, ‘The Concept of Transparency in International Relations: Towards a Critical Approach’, European Journal of International Relations, forthcoming.
171.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 6;.Alberto R. Bonnet, ‘Antagonism and Difference: Negative Dialectics and Poststructuralism in View of the Critique of Modern Capitalism’, in Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism, ed. John Holloway et al. (London: Pluto Press, 2010), pp. 41–78, reference p. 43.
172.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 202.
173.
Ibid.
174.
Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, pp. 499–500.
175.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 221.
176.
Jay, Adorno, p. 65.
177.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 221.
178.
Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, pp. 105–106.
179.
Fred Dallmayr, Between Freiberg and Frankfurt: Towards a Critical Ontology (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), pp. 117–118 & p. 122.
180.
Ibid., p. 94.
181.
Honneth, Reification.
182.
Linklater, ‘Towards a Sociology of Morals’; See also Sylvester, ‘War Experiences’.
183.
Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison ‘Fear No More: Emotions and World Politics’, Review of International Studies, 34, S1 (2008), pp. 115–135.
184.
Habermas, Communicative Action Vol. 1, p. 366
185.
Jarvis, Adorno, p. 5
186.
Adrian Wilding, ‘Pied Pipers and Polymaths: Adorno’s Critique of Praxism’ in Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism, ed. John Holloway et al. (London: Pluto Press, 2010), pp. 18–38., reference p. 25; Adorno, ‘Ivory tower’.
187.
Adorno, ‘Ivory Tower’, p. 237.
188.
Ibid.
189.
Adorno, ‘Ivory Tower’, pp. 233–234.
190.
Levine, Recovering International Relations, pp. 80–81.
191.
Brincat, ‘Negativity’.
192.
Ibid., p. 473.
193.
Shannon L. Mariotti, ‘Adorno on the Radio: Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy’, Political Theory 42, 4 (2014), pp. 415–442.
194.
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. ix.

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Fluck, M. (2017). Adorno, Truth, and International Relations. In: The Concept of Truth in International Relations Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_6

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