Eric Oberle

Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Identity has become a central feature of national conversations: identity politics and identity crises are the order of the day. We celebrate identity when it comes to personal freedom and group membership, and we fear the power of identity when it comes to discrimination, bias, and hate crimes. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between positive and negative liberty, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity argues for the necessity of acknowledging a dialectic within the identity concept. Exploring the intellectual history of identity as a social idea, Eric Oberle shows the philosophical importance of identity's origins in American exile from Hitler's fascism. Positive identity was first proposed by Frankfurt School member Erich Fromm, while negative identity was almost immediately put forth as a counter-concept by Fromm's colleague, Theodor Adorno. Oberle explains why, in the context of the racism, authoritarianism, and the hard-right agitation of the 1940s, the invention of a positive concept of identity required a theory of negative identity. This history in turn reveals how autonomy and objectivity can be recovered within a modern identity structured by domination, alterity, ontologized conflict, and victim blaming.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. August 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503606074
• Artikelnr.: 58615636

Autorenporträt

Eric Oberle is Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1"Jazz , the Wound": Negative Identity, Culture, and the Shadow of Race
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 offers a revised interpretation of the infamous jazz controversy
and Adorno's first confrontation with the idea of race and the American
concept of culture. Chronicling Adorno's missteps in applying a theory of
the commodification of musical universalism developed in Weimar Germany to
the substantially different conditions of American society of the 1930s,
this chapter reconstructs the political and cultural situations in which
these essays were written and published. By examining the history of
critical theory through the story of Adorno's understanding-and
misunderstandings-of jazz and through Adorno's postwar consideration of his
own Jewish heritage and that of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, this
chapter explores Adorno's intellectual development in relation to the
historical trajectory of twentieth-century attitudes toward culture between
the worlds of ethnicity and the avant-garde.
2America; or, the Stranger
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 looks at how Adorno's early experiences in America shaped his
commitment to a Kantian vision of science, ethics, and universalism that
would also accommodate individual expression, observation, and resistance.
The chapter's central focus is an important 1940 lecture at Columbia. It
explores how Adorno used Simmel's model of the sociological Stranger to
understand America and American academic sociology's emphasis on
assimilation and adaptation as the essence of truth and progress and also
how, for an émigré scientist, personal alienation might lead to theoretical
innovation. Considering what it meant for Adorno to be a Kantian Marxist
and Nietzschean universalist, this chapter argues that during these years
Adorno engaged with the problem of the relation between universalism and
particularity in a way that laid the grounds for his turn toward the social
dynamics of subjective identity in relation to racism and authoritarian
politics.
3Negative Identities of the Subject in Wartime America
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 introduces a long argument developed across Chapters 3 through 6.
Examining Adorno's most famous, or notorious, philosophical work, Dialectic
of Enlightenment (cowritten with Max Horkheimer), it challenges several
persistent scholarly assumptions about Adorno's intellectual biography:
that the war years marked a "retreat" from empirical research to theory;
that the esoteric philosophical speculation of Dialectic of Enlightenment
and Minima Moralia represented the "true" Adorno; that Adorno and
Horkheimer were "pessimists" or "nihilists" during this period; and that
the empirical study of The Authoritarian Personality was a distraction from
Adorno's real concerns. Countering this narrative, these chapters argue
that this period can all be read in terms of an ongoing attempt, when
Adorno had become Horkheimer's closest intellectual interlocutor, to
realize the work envisioned by the 1931 programmatic essay "Traditional and
Critical Theory": creating a social-psychological model of
interdisciplinary inquiry that devolved into neither positivism nor social
Darwinism.
4Critical Theory Goes to War: The Critique of Positive Identity and
Positive Science
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 explores how Adorno's work and that of the Institute for Social
Research were shaped by a schism over the introduction of the term identity
by its then most prominent theorist, Erich Fromm, in his 1941 Escape from
Freedom. Showing how he articulated the language of identity as
nonalienated subjectivity, which was almost immediately rejected by other
members as Romantic and uncritical, this chapter argues that the struggle
over the identity concept made the problem of subjective rationality a
central concern for the institute; that it reshaped intellectual
relationships within the institute, leading Adorno to become Horkheimer's
chief collaborator; and that it set the institute on the path to developing
a different understanding of its interdisciplinary project. It further
challenges a long-standing misconception of the relationship between theory
and practice in the institute, arguing for a dynamic interplay between
private theorization and publicly engaged practical science.
5Negative Modeling: Objectivity, Normativity, and the Refusal of the
Universal
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 offers a reexamination of The Authoritarian Personality, the
massive, multiauthored empirical study that constituted the capstone of
Adorno's collaboration with American social scientists and the beginning of
discussion on the study of prejudice, racism, and authoritarian politics.
The standard account of Adorno's career suggests that the time Adorno spent
on empirical psychological research was time lost for work on critical
theory; it emphasizes tensions between Adorno and his American colleagues
and implies that Adorno was ineffective at social-scientific collaboration.
This chapter contests these myths by showing how Adorno's critical,
multidisciplinary intelligence was important to this groundbreaking study's
construction of Weberian ideal types for the study of racism: Adorno became
a key architect of the way The Authoritarian Personality studied how
irrational projection shaped society and politics while critiquing the
false essentialism of race.
6Subject/Object and Disciplinarity
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 concludes the story of how the confrontation with identity
transformed the institute's theoretical concerns and shaped its career in
America by showing how Adorno and Horkheimer arrived at a quite different
understanding of the institute's interdisciplinary project than they had
started with. This allowed them to articulate a new notion of social
objectivity, reason, and legitimate authority that was explicitly
understood as a negation of theories of subjective identity. In pure
theoretical terms, it argues that Horkheimer and Adorno came to see
themselves as defending an "orthodox" Freudianism and Marxism and a
"heterodox" Kantianism and Weberianism. Politically speaking, the critical
attitude toward the sciences of man contained in these orthodoxies and
heterodoxies positioned Adorno particularly well to contribute to the
reconstruction of postwar German culture.
7Conclusion
chapter abstract
The conclusion summarizes the philosophical value of exile, negative
identity and non-identity. It considers why critical theory's invention of
the concept of identity, and its subsequent philosophical negation, emerged
out of the experience of exile and racism, and it reflects on this history
and ideas should remain part of the problem of identity, the critique of
science, and the notion of interdisciplinary analysis. Finally, the
conclusion discusses the politics of Adorno and Horkheimer's return to
Germany and the precariousness of their position within both the German
academy and German society.
Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction narrates the rise of the identity concept in the twentieth
century, arguing for a distinction between two types of identity. Just as
Isaiah Berlin, following Erich Fromm, suggested the terms "positive" and
"negative" liberty are necessary to understanding the double-sided logic of
freedom in the modern world, the concept of identity must be approached
through the tension between its "positive" and "negative" dimensions.
Positive identity is familiar: the expressive, creative, and emancipatory
language of what the self might become. Negative identity is its shadow:
unwanted or imposed, rupturing the universal, expressing injuries inflicted
on the self or imposed on others. Arguing that Adorno sharply criticized a
one-sided, implicitly positive notion of identity, the Introduction
establishes positive and negative identity's intertwinement from its
origin, showing how Adorno's approach to this new language of selfhood
offers an overlooked resource for understanding identity's complexity in
the twenty-first century.