Silent Marxism, or, a Marxism of NegativityAdorno and Althusser’s Negative, or Open, Dialectics and Totality

Leo Deng

3/6/24

Professor Jeffrey Williams

76898-Marxisms

An Investigation towards a

Silent Marxism, or, a Marxism of Negativity

Adorno and Althusser’s Negative, or Open, Dialectics and Totality

Introduction

No two predominantly Marxist academics have affected the theoretical landscape of the humanities as much as Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser in the post-World War era. From aesthetic theory to sociological analysis to dialectical thinking, both thinkers captured the full breadth of the Western Marxist reaction to the waning of Marxist-Leninist movements by the 60s and through the May ’68 uprising in France. Although both were largely unaware of each other,[1] their ideas have shocking similarities despite being from very different traditions (critical theory and structuralism); nevertheless, a critical analysis of their most integral ideas shows a cohesiveness from a shared motivation of taking a recourse into theory amid many practical mistakes done in the name of Marxism (both the Soviet bloc and the PRC by the 60s). The standout similarity is the ‘negativity’ of their thought, i.e., their thorough criticism of the positivism rampant in both Soviet economic reductionism and bourgeois enlightenment empiricism. Thus, through an analysis of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1967) and Althusser’s Reading Capital (1965), I will briefly outline the significance of a negative dialectics, open totality, and overall Negative Marxism that only the unity of Adorno and Althusser can form most completely. For this short exegesis, their theoretical applications on artwork will be used as a concrete example.

Recourse into Theory: For Negativity

            Both Adorno and Althusser emphasize the importance of theory after half a century of the first nation-scale application of Marxist socialism. Adorno proclaims, “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed,”[2] asserting the failure of Marx’s XIth thesis on Feuerbach—that philosophy was supposed to change the world, but the Soviet Union did not realize that in Adorno’s mind. Likewise, Althusser states, “the theoretical future of historical materialism depends today on deepening dialectical materialism, which itself depends today on a rigorous critical study of Capital.”[3] Like many theorists after Marx, a return to Hegel became warranted by Marx’s claim that his dialectic was the “direct opposite” of Hegel’s; Hegel’s dialectic “is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again.”[4] The shift from dialectical idealism to dialectical materialism was rightfully seen as a pertinent juncture of investigation for the dialectical method, especially in light of the economic reductionist experience of the Soviets that definitively lost any remnant of dialectics by the time Adorno and Althusser were writing.[5] Thus, Adorno returned directly to Hegel’s nonidentity for this novel negative attitude towards dialectics, whereas Althusser had the more mediated path of Lacan’s ‘lack,’ which is distinct but influenced by Hegel (with Sartre as a notable mediator between Hegel and Lacan).

            Adorno and Althusser’s shared interest in negativity is fundamentally founded on the desire to renew dialectics and totality to a less rigid, closed, and positive character—rather towards a dialectic that is always in motion and thus, an open totality. Both dialectics and totality were not supposed to be determined by the ‘iron laws of history’; on the contrary, history is the active movement of dialectics and a totality that necessarily always changes in its ‘ensembles’ and ‘constellations’ of agents and structures that defines it as radically open.

Negatities[6] in Negative Dialectics and Reading Capital

            In Negative Dialectics, Adorno ruthlessly criticized the Marxist dialectic to a new rupture where dialectics was forced to take on an absolute openness—Adorno enforced the primacy of the negative aspect of the dialectic, that the resolution of a contradiction was always in motion to the next (there was no stop or ‘positive resolution’). The positive dialectic as a logic of progress between conflicting ideas (Hegel) or material entities (Marx) as contradictions, in both cases, held on to an ability to be “resolved,” especially in historical epochs. Hegel’s absolute knowledge (Geist) as the Prussian State and Marx’s communism as the end of history were the utmost examples of a positive resolution in the dialectical method.[7] The Hegelian retrospect echoes in Adorno as “dialectics say no more… than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder,” and “contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity.”[8] Simply, identity and nonidentity are the positive and negative attitudes towards objects that the thinking individual has; a=a is the identity that deems “a” as a positive object, while a≠b is the nonidentity or difference that distinguishes the two objects and gives them the potential to be separate identities at all. Adorno’s point is that identity is fundamentally predicated on nonidentity, and that nonidentity is necessarily a relational state of affairs—to relate ‘a’ to ‘b’ is to negate them in some way. One cannot identify anything as peculiar, special, or unique if there is no notion of difference, of things being nonidentical; without nonidentity, everything is one and can never be divided. [9]

            In Reading Capital, Althusser introduces ‘symptomatic reading’ in the first lecture “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy”[10] and uses the application of that idea in the second lecture “The Object of Capital.” Firstly, symptomatic reading is precisely the critical and negative reading of a text; critical because it reads the elements of a text and the content itself as symptoms (Freudian influenced concept) of the author’s material conditions, and negative because Althusser emphasizes the fact that one needs to also read the silence of the author. The latter means to read what the author did not say or is absent in their text to gain an interpretation of the reason for this lack, for “these reasons may in certain cases be invisible to us at first glance surely derives in the last resort from the fact that, like all radical innovations, they are blinding.”[11] Essentially, symptomatic reading is the pervasive method for the entire purpose of this seminar Althusser organized, i.e., to read Capital by analyzing “the textual mechanism which produces the sightings and oversights rather than merely recording it.”[12] By use of the method in relation to the ‘classical economists’ (Smith and Ricardo, especially for Marx), Althusser concludes that the object between Marx and them was the same—capital. However, his method made a novel rupture in economic and political theory precisely because the classical economists’ method “applied to their object was merely metaphysical, but Marx’s method, on the contrary, was dialectical.”[13] A second layer to the symptomatic method is the Lacanian psychoanalytic influence where the silence is the unconscious extracted from Marx’s text: “A ‘symptomatic’ reading is necessary to make these lacunae perceptible, to identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence.”[14] The ‘silent content’ he extracted was from Marx’s two methods of Political Economy—that of the concrete analysis of the concrete conditions (real people, ‘the living whole’) and abstract relations (“division of labor, money, value, etc.”)—in which the abstract relations are where one starts for a true science of Political Economy.[15] The silence is that Marx never poses why he proposes this method while accepting the continuity of the object from classical economists; this is because the ideology of empiricism presupposes those economists, meaning they start only from the concrete and thus, end only at the abstract relations derived. It is rather the nonidentity between the concrete and the abstract that emphasizes the importance of the abstract as a negative form of critique, i.e., only through starting with abstraction can we produce new knowledge of the object (knowledge is an abstraction) in which a critique of capitalism can emerge (that’s why the classical economists can’t escape a stale, ideological empiricist view of economics where abstraction of the concrete leads to the limit of ‘relations’).[16] Thus, Althusser’s methodology itself already hints at a negative dialectical lens, creating the primary link to Adorno’s method of negative dialectical thinking.

            Negative dialectical thinking for Adorno is best culminated in how he describes the operations of the Concept as such, reflecting a Engels quote Althusser utilizes. The Concept is the product of human thought that approaches an object but can never reach it—the Concept never fully apprehends its object. In a Leibnizian sense, the Concept does the job of the Monad in that the object can be defined only by defining the rest of the universe—everything that the object is not. For example, the concept of a horse is never the same as the actual horse but attempts to anoint its identity only through knowing what the horse is not. This is the operation of nonidentity.  In the aphorism on the disenchantment of the Concept by way of emphasizing its ‘infinitude,’ Adorno says:

No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of a whole. Thus the goal of philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept… yet it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds.[17]

“Works of art” are his arbitrary objects in which he is applying, in a preliminary fashion, his negative-dialectical way of thinking in so far as the Concept is not the product of a simple, positive identification of the object, but the sentiment of identification itself is necessary for “the truth of the work.” The Concept is thus, on the contrary, only possible by means of nonidentity as there is no such thing as identity without nonidentity.[18] The fact that ‘no object is wholly known’ is that the concept of an object in itself is never the same thing; the latter is at best a partial abstraction of the thing, i.e., the concept approaches the object but can never reach it. The similarity with Engels’s interpretation is unexpected, especially considering Adorno’s denigration of Lenin when Lenin’s dialectical materialism is essentially wholly taken from Engels’s[19]:

The concept of an object and its reality run side by side like two asymptotes which, though constantly converging, will never meet. This difference between the two is the self-same difference which is responsible for the fact that the concept is not immediately and ipso facto reality and reality is not immediately its own concept (MECW 50, pp.463-4).[20]

            Considering this shared treatment of the concept and of dialectics as negative, what are the concrete stakes of such negativity for the Marxist project? One of the most important concepts of Marxism that deals with the negative must be brought into question: ‘the negation of the negation.’ Simply, this idea as elaborated by Marx and Engels is the historical observation that capitalism undermines its own ideal— “what the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”[21] The negation of land into private property by capitalism must be negated again to attain the true establishment of individual property as socialism. The negation of negation “re-establishes individual property, but on the basis of the acquisitions of the capitalist era, i.e., on co-operation of free workers and their possession in common of the land and of the means of production produced by labour.”[22] Such a conception may lend to a conclusion that socialism is a positive result of the negation of negation. However, I argue that the Negative Marxist method advocates for an epoch of socialism that is not merely a transitional phase of logistics to communism, but it has its own dynamics and antagonisms that must be dealt with. In Adorno’s aphorism “Critique of Positive Negation,” he makes clear that “to equate the negation of negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification,” which is the positivist attitude and thus, “a [true] negation of particularities—epitomized in that whole—remains negative. Its only positive side would be criticism, definite negation…To negate a negation does not bring about its reversal.”[23] Simply, Adorno is arguing that there can never be a truly positive result of the negation of negation for that would be the idealistic creation of a new concept that has no relation to the object. All negations are not equal as they are contingent on their object and circumstance and thus, socialism should not be seen as a new concept with no relation to capitalism; rather, it is precisely the negation of capitalism that is in motion to its next contradiction. Thus, just as arguments have been made about capitalism necessarily being defined by feudalism (and its negation), or neo-feudalism,[24] socialism needs to be analyzed and critiqued in constant relation with its capitalist remnants. Hence, we return to the USSR’s mistake of proclaiming the end of class struggle. On the contrary, we must view the result of any socialist revolution and workers seizing the means of production as a result still containing negativity—a different form of struggle. Such political implications for new theory and practice render a much larger exposition, so I will redirect to a brief example of negative dialectics in art.

Concluding Discussion: Aesthetic Applications

            Both theorists have far-reaching commitments to aesthetic theory[25] that epitomizes the historic alliance between artists under capitalism and Marxism—that the precariously avant-garde artists risk all safeties of bourgeois society in order to engage with non-alienated labor.[26] The ‘restricted field’ of experimental art is precisely so autonomous in the face of capital because it defines itself in opposition to capital. For there to be authentic and meaningful art, cultural producers must necessarily exist outside or oppose the system that alienates labor: capitalism. Both Adorno and Althusser pertinently extract the political from their negative concepts—Negative Utopia and art’s distance from its politics, respectively.

            Adorno’s Negative Utopia is best illustrated by this quote:

Art’s Utopia, the counter-factual yet-to-come, is draped in black. It goes on being a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real; it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe, which is world history; it is a freedom which did not pass under the spell of necessity and which may well not come to pass ever at all.[27]

I interpreted this quote in accordance with the main aesthetic example of Gilroy’s essay that this Adorno quote is taken from—J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship. In Turner’s painting, the Utopia is clearly a negative one—the revolutionary kernel of abolition is contained within the opposite of the painting’s reality (slaves thrown overboard for the efficacy of slave-trade transportation), which must be realized through the reality of the painting’s opposite (an emancipated world). Thus, the necessarily negatively, oppositionally conceived Utopia that is this painting—which is always-already mimetic in Adorno’s philosophy—is the authoritative “counter-factual”[28] that should not be seen as mere myth. The “counter-factual” is the beauty of subjectivity that has been thwarted by enlightenment objectivity that is repressive and totalitarian;[29] not only that, this is a subjectivity that is authoritative and powerful in its own right as it is aware of the fact that objectivity[30] makes its existence and vice versa—this is the Negative Dialectics of Adorno that is always reflecting the “mimetic impulse” of Art.[31] Therefore, Turner’s painting is the perfect example of Negative Utopia that precisely is ‘the possible with a critical edge against the real.’ The revolutionary legacy to come after the historical rupture this painting is to represent—a rupture that is even more Adornian than Marxist in that it is the absolute limit of human acceptability by way of somatic suffering, in contrast to the ‘last instance’ of the dialectic being economic—is the overcoming of the real (conditions in 1840) that is Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic, becoming a positive force that emerges from this specific dialectical conflict. This last instance of the determination of revolutionary motivation is somatic suffering[32]—it is when the particularized forms of material and physical violence are forced upon those subject to colonialist, capitalist, and (or) imperialist aggressions.

Althusser’s focus on the distance that art creates between its representation and its content matter (that is either explicitly or implicitly political) comes from a short essay about the painter Cremonini. He praises Cremonini’s ability to paint what are not simply objects but the relations that bind objects as a ‘painter of the abstract.’[33] This appraisal shows a negative capacity for artwork—that it abstracts a world in which relations and differences become more noticeable through the means or style unique to the artist. Cremonini was able to do this because of a particularly high skill in the interplay between the ‘ideological categories of subject and object,’ which is an inescapable dichotomy for both “the aesthetics of consumption and the aesthetics of creation.”[34] This leads him to claim:

The specific function of the work of art is to make visible (donner à voir), by establishing a distance from it, the reality of the existing ideology (of any one of its forms), the work of art cannot fail to exercise a directly ideological effect, that it therefore maintains far closer relations with ideology than any other object, and that it is impossible to think the work of art, in its specifically aesthetic existence, without taking into account the privileged relation between it and ideology.[35]

His student Jacques Rancière, who seemingly finished his project in aesthetics, says it most straightforward:

Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the state of the world…It is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space.[36]

The negativity in this conception of aesthetics is meritorious precisely because of how it describes the relationships between art’s aesthetic, its content or ideology, and its audience. Rancière makes it clear that the distance created between the representation and its content is precisely the defining feature of art. There is no reason to directly convey a political message in art because that would just be activism; art rather creates a space that allows for the interpretive mode to interject on account of the audience, giving them a certain autonomy in relation to their ideology. Art’s role in politics would then be that of effectively constructing the space created to allow for ideological ruptures—spurts of class consciousness. Furthermore, because of art’s privileged position to ideology, its revolutionary potential is unpredictably latent regardless of what the artist’s intention is (although intention may be a potential factor). This echoes like Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” thesis for the art world. Nevertheless, the novel negativity here is the fact that abstraction in visual form allows for a special type of evocation to those who confront art (whether it be emotional, intellectual, nostalgic, etc.). Nonidentity as relationality, colliding with abstraction as negation, subjugates the aesthetic analytic method to a critique most pertinent for the postmodern world—one that is rampant with ideology.

[1] “One of the major blocks to a reception of Althusser here [Germany] was very simple: Althusser was ignorant of the Frankfurt School. He had some idea that it wasn’t his cup of tea, but that was about all he knew about it. There are some formulations of his in which he shows that he has not really studied Frankfurt School theorists and dismisses them in a more or less arbitrary way. This was not really justified - in fact I’ve just read a dissertation that argues Adorno, Otto Neurath and Althusser are equally useful for the renewal of Marxism.” Frieder Otto Wolf, An Experimental Discussion: the Althusserian problematic | Historical Materialism, interview by Daniel Lopez, May 31, 2019, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/interviews/experimental-discussion-althusserian-problematic.

[2] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Reprint edition (New York: Continuum, 1987), 3.

[3] Louis Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital,” in Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, by Etienne Balibar et al., Complete edition (London ; New York: Verso, 2016), 222.

[4] Karl Marx, “1873 Afterword to the Second German Edition,” in Capital: Volume One, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm.

[5] This can even be traced back to 1936 by Stalin’s claim. “In 1936 Stalin made the mistake of proclaiming that classes and class struggle had ceased to exist in the Soviet Union.” Jose-Maria Sison, On the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Sison Reader Series, Book 2 (The Netherlands: International Network for Philippine Studies (INPS), 2021), 92.

[6] Negatities is Sartre’s neologism for “realities such as absence, alteration, alterity, repulsion, regret, absentmindedness, etc.” that are experiences “by human beings and which are inhabited in their internal structure by negation as a necessary condition of their existence.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Origin of Negation,” in Being and Nothingness, trans. Sarah Richmond, Later prt. edition (New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi: Washington Square Press, 2021), 56.

[7] Frieder Otto Wolf, “Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ Lecture and Lecture Notes” (Lecture, “German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas” FUBiS Summer 2023, PPT No. 6, Freie Universität berlin, July 28, 2023). Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978). Communism as resolution is also tackled by Marx, Engels, and other Marxists as the ‘negation of negation.’

[8] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 6.

[9] “To define identity as the correspondence of the thing-in-itself to its concept is hubris; but the ideal of identity must not simply be discarded. Living in rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of nonidentity contains identity.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149.

[10] Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” in Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, by Etienne Balibar et al., Complete edition (London ; New York: Verso, 2016), 9–76.

[11] Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital,” 222.

[12] Ben Brewster, “Glossary,” in Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, by Louis Althusser et al., Abridged edition (London ; New York: Verso, 2016), 542.

[13] Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital,” 231.

[14] Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital,” 232.

[15] Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital,” 233.

[16] Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital,” 234.

[17] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 14.

[18] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149.

[19] See Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. For Adorno’s disagreement see Negative Dialectics, 205-206.

[20] MECW is Althusser’s acronym for Marx and Engels Collected Works. This quote is from Engels’s letter to Conrad Schmidt on 12 March 1895. Althusser, “Part Four: The Object of Capital,” 226.

[21] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007.

[22] Engels’s and Editior’s citation: [K. Marx, Das Kapital, p. 793.] [Capital, volume I, Chapter 33, page 384 in the MIA pdf file.] Frederick Engels, “Part I: Philosophy. XIII. Dialectics. Negation of the Negation,” in Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, trans. Emile Burns (Progress Publishers, 1947), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch11.htm#:~:text=Marx%20says%3A%20%E2%80%9CIt%20is%20the,of%20production%20produced%20by%20labour.

[23] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 158-159.

[24] Here I refer to Habermas and Wallerstein’s ideas and those influenced by them; essentially, neo-feudalism is the prescription that capitalism has progressed into a feudalism with extra steps—large stratification and low social mobility for the poor.

[25] Althusser’s theorizing was in painting, drama, and visual arts, and Adorno in music, film, art, and many more as a large portion of his contribution to theory was in aesthetics (notably, his famous book Aesthetic Theory).

[26] Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson, First Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29-73.

[27] Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” 1993, 73-74. Gilroy’s citation: T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 196).

[28] Underlined to refer to original block quote.

[29] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1st edition (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6, 18.

[30] This is the general Adornian notion that subjectivity is the perception of objects and objectivity is the certainty of subjectivity. Jay Lampert, “Adorno on Freedom: Negative Dialectics Pages 221-265 Lecture and Lecture Notes” (Lecture, Adorno Seminar, Duquesne University, October 23, 2023).

[31] Mimetic impulse is elaborated best here: “Part I, Chapter 7: Sentences and Mimesis,” in Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, by Fredric Jameson, 1st Edition (London ; New York: Verso, 1990), 63–73. The phrase appears first on page 65.

[32] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202-204. Aphorism title: “Suffering Physical.”

[33] Louis Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 230, http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70ii.html#s8.

[34] Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract,” 230-231.

[35] Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract,” 241-242.

[36] Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 1st edition (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 23.