Suffering Reified. On Adorno’s Thoughts on Reification and Suffering
Preface to the publication for the Critical Theory Working Group journal
This essay was motivated by what, at the time of its writing (in 2020) had become a very intense and ubiquitous activity in the use and abuse of the ad hominem fallacy for rhetorical-political purposes.The ad hominem fallacy, which may have been claimed by Marx in his introduction to *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,* 1844, takes the usual sinister aspect when it is used for means such as those as the ‘cultural war’ context of our days. Nevermind how poetically right the challenge sounded at Marx’s times. The ad-hominem fallacy has proven to be an excellent tactic to defeat and smear political enemies. This turn had thrown us into a new temporality filled with a revisitation of the signifiers of (the old) fascism and nazism, of racism and antisemitism. Even if initially a primary focus of the turn had been on the structural anti-black racism endemic to the USAThis problematic previous to the furor of the new anti-semitism, had been brought up by me in a previous module for the curatorial studies and decoloniality course at the Open University of Catalonia, UOC. (https://arts-practiques-curatorials.recursos.uoc.edu/la-revolucio-de-les-estatues/es/) 2018-19., the issue of antisemitism was—during those times— rarely the protagonist or cause for any cancelling or de-platforming. This dynamic lasted for a few years, till an updated bill (IHRA, Budapest, 2016) on what entailed antisemitism was presented, which then took centre stage (for some of us in the UK) during the scandal surrounding the (false ad hominem) accusations of anti-semitism against the leader of the English Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn; who was taken by (the perfect) storm as he was fully cancelled and de-platformed from his political party and his position as the most eminent leader of its history. The instance discussed in this article concerns specifically the use and abuse of the allegations of anti-semitism and the effects of the new update of the elements included as signifiers of antisemitism. However, it also looks at the social dynamics that made this update possible in its form and system. This inquisitorial, manipulative, and manipulable form of moral and legal censure has been instrumental in cancelling great voices and projects of the left, such as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour.The practice of naming and shaming in social media by all sort of subjects against any other subject had bore its fruits: “One source said the aim was to “shame” people out of being part of Facebook groups with unacceptable content but argued that it wasn’t really working. So, next they took aim at news websites they considered to be either alt-left or alt-right, including, perhaps not surprisingly, the Canary. As part of a “Stop funding fake news” campaign, they took screenshots of articles they felt **had either racist** or fake content, then posted messages on Twitter aimed at brands that were advertising on the websites’ pages.” Fragment from Anushka Asthana’s article at The Guardian, bold highlight mine, accessed 16-September-2024 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/14/corbyn-had-flown-too-close-to-the-sun-how-labour-insiders-battled-the-left-and-plotted-the-partys-path-back-to-power?utm\_source=dlvr.it\&utm\_medium=twitter A key point to be asked about this momentous reification of suffering and victimhood is that, as we know with the case of antisemitism, racism and fascism, its existence and its victims are real, so it becomes the susceptibility of those realities to be relativised as an aftereffect of such aggravated manipulations of its signifiers. Hence, this tension between the possibility of malversation of what is true is thus reversed and the objective context of the fact dissolves, becomes forgotten. The regime of intensifying the ad hominem fallacy prompts us to ask how it can be so easy for such inversions and instrumentalisations to occur amid our social and political context. This takes us directly to the issues of consciousness and language, the medium and the message, of questions asked within philosophy and critical theory. At the same time, during this turn, we have also witnessed fascist politicians in SpainWhat most people is not aware of, is that the conservative party of Spain, the PP or People’s Party, directly derives as an offspring of a Francoist, thus a Fascist and Nazi sympathiser government, which was basically renamed and its ministers repositioned during the very unorthodox to not say fraudulent “transition to democracy” of Spain in the late 70’s. accusing Catalan politicians of being fascist or nazis, while the Spanish new laws that protect “as victims of hate crimes” (Circular 7/2019 on its new guidelines for the interpretation of hate crimes under art. 510 PC “The prosecutor's office considers incitement to hatred of Nazis to be a crime. ‘An assault on a person of Nazi ideology, or incitement to hatred towards such a group, can be included in this type of offence,’ reads a Circular from the agency.” La Vanguardia 2019, accessed 30-May-2019, https://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20190522/462408935254/fiscalia-considera-delito-incitacion-odio-nazis.html) any Nazi sympathiser who is accused and named (as is now considered an insult and a hate crime too) as such. This would mean that in the context of what concerns us here, there is a real susceptibility to a manipulation of the signification of what constitutes antisemitism or similar other like racism, nazism or fascism, for repressive political means, not to say for personal acts of vengeance or just mere scapegoating. This semantic saturation crisis shows us how the initially well-meant use of accusations for exposing racism or fascism (witnessed in the university and the art world since the last decade) has produced a number of recuperable ethics as its offspring.Sami Khatib exposes the issue in clear terms: “...Against such a *desired reality* one has to insist on a *historical reality* in which victims can become perpetrators and vice versa; at times they are both victim and perpetrator within one and the same space of history. However, there is no symmetry, neither historical nor moral, between the two. The idea of pure victim and perpetrator identities and the grouping of people and their deeds into abstract collective identities, is among the most problematic legacies of the age of nation states. Sami Khatib, 'Against singularity: Palestine as symptom and cause', *Radical Philosophy* 216, Summer 2024, pp. 21–33. ([**pdf**]) Those are now used to suppress those same legitimate claims for justice (embodied by all who are criticising and protesting against Zionism and the genocide that Israel is committing against the Palestinian peoples) and have succeeded in promoting a series of self-reified discourses about victimhood, trauma and pain.The systemic hypocrisy of the West is made apparent in many articles, but this is a recent example which contains the kernel of the problem that we are facing: ”the victims of structural violence (class, race, gender) can be offered compassion and charity while maintaining structures of injustice, exploitation and submission. The ‘world community’ (that is, the West) casts its role of an ongoing beneficiary of past ‘evil’ (colonialism, imperialism, fascism, genocide) as the ‘rescuer’ of future victims of an imagined new genocide, while denying the existence of a real genocide as it currently unfolds in Gaza.” Sami Khatib, Ibid. Theodor W. Adorno had already warned us about this scenario and Gillian Rose did so in various of her works quoted briefly in this essay. Thus, from the standpoint of Adorno and Rose, we may see how the newest definitions of what constitutes antisemitism and the toxic consequences that these have achieved, show us what occurs when suffering becomes reified. And, even further, it shows us how the “freed” combination of the liberal and the neoliberal state is a full-blown model of a police state, a state or an empire (as it is the case with the USA) that has never ceased to exercise tactical racist and fascist policies even if now those are applied to quash “anti-semitism.” Following this development, we may see how its institutions have now applied an inverted mirroring stance about who has the legitimate right to suffer and thus defend itself; producing a newer version of the upside-down world, as Adorno had seen it. Thus, it accuses, punishes, and takes us to prison for protesting, wearing a piece of cloth or wording certain statements, including posting certain images or opinions on social media. It does so under the banner of anti-racism and anti-hate because now those have been conflated with anti-semitism and it does so under the banner of what legally constitutes a hate crime. Now one can see how those incipient gestures of the Spanish neo-fascist periphery have come to the centre of what constitutes this strategy. Cunningly, the current inverted discourse is that those who protest against Israel’s genocide and apartheid on Palestine and Palestinians are materially realising an act of hate, racism and antisemitism. Then we may see how in that case, that accusatory well-meaning rightful movement has come full circle, co-opted fully, and turned against itself. I thought that under the present circumstances and in the context of the Critical Theory Working Group, it might be relevant to publish this short essay, which reflects on the reification of suffering in the critique of Theodor, W. Adorno (and Gillian Rose). These reflections should help us to think frankly about the risks of walking the path of reification, and thus, of forgetting. Competing about who has suffered the most—who deserves recognition and who doesn’t as a victim—instead of looking for a common meeting ground, for those commonalities that each of our sufferings will entail.
Esther Planas Balduz, September 2024
First Reification
In a time where decolonial voices, such as Aïsha Azoulay’s unapologetic questioning of the amount of Jewish victims under the Nazi’s ‘final solution’—self-defined by jewish subjects as The Holocaust*“The identification of the term “Holocaust” with the extermination of the Jews overshadows the multiple groups targeted by the Nazi extermination plans…”* Ariella Aïsha, Azoulay, Interview by Sabrina Alli, Guernica Magazine, March 12, 2020\. My point is that the case of the Holocaust is a very complex and multifaceted issue and should not be as reductively depicted as it is by Azoulay. To denounce the Zionist misuse of a fact does not erase the fact. Indeed other groups were exterminated. As groups and identities they did not name themselves as Holocausted group, as they indeed were an ad-up to a major plan. It belongs to Jewish history, subjects, and language to define what happened to them in Germany as a ‘Holocaust’, and yes, because they were a majority, somehow and democratically so, their history overshadows that of those other minorities. However its aim for defining and claiming for recognition of victimhood was not to overshadow anyone, but claiming a crime committed and designated to ethnically, massively, and efficiently kill as many Jews as possible. If other bodies and identities under the Nazi Eugenicist and political regime were thrown to the furnace it was as an extra add on that opportunity,, not the core aim for the architecture of the ‘final solution’.—is consolidated by publishers and museum curators, the now-former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was successfully debunked by a byzantine deployment of accusations about his anti-Semitism by its ‘blue Labour’ inside enemies and the press. Not so far away, Spanish unrepented fascist politicians—linked to Francoist doctrines inherited after 40 years of his dictatorship as the fan and friend of Hitler, the Nazi—have publicly accused the pro-independence Catalan president of being a Nazi, while passing (without consequences in EU and the West at large) a law protecting Spain’s own Nazi sympathisers as prospective victims of hate crimes. These are but a few examples of the actual use and misuse of appellatives such as Nazi or anti-Semite, which today are suffering—as their signifiers suffer—a kind of semantic satiation, a neutralisation of its meaning. The challenges that our perception of truth faces, of how it can be thought about, mediated and subsequently expressed (or of the impossibility of it) as the subjective reified totality that will tend to become, was a constant preoccupation for Theodor W. Adorno.
Yet, it is an unresolved question why suffering became his material of preference for accessing that truth: “The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression is objectively mediated.”Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond, 2001 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). Adorno’s insistence on “lending suffering” a voice and of the necessity of practice in a theory and philosophy which voices suffering, was based in his critical position against the domination of scientific positivism as it was the established in a domineering thought that reified rationalism and at the same time “disappeared” the voice of suffering from its own reified system: “For ordinary consciousness, the notion that no such individual truth can actually be assumed, that on the contrary there is truth only in the constellation which the quite specific individual instances of knowledge come to make up, is the hardest challenge posed by dialectical thought.”Adorno, Theodor W., L20, 208, *An introduction to Dialectics*, ed. Christof Zierman trans. It is in this forming of concepts in a constellation of a thought’s approach to truth, where Adorno inscribes his theory against an instrumentalising and rigid positivism that brings reification into the equation. With this purpose, Adorno works to expose how and why rationalisation, as a promise of emancipation, had failed, thus becoming false consciousness for supporting the positivist logic of a scientific thought invested in the expansion of capitalist relationalities, triggering the somehow polymorphous conflation of opposites:
… it is equally true that the process of the progressive rationalisation of the world has also represented a process of progressive reification –just as the reification of the world, the petrification of the world as an objectivity which is alien to human beings, on the one hand, and the growth of subjectivity, on the other, are not simply opposed to one another, are not simply contradictory, but are mutually correlated so that the more subjectivity there is in the world, the more reification there is as well, and its precisely to this that irrationalism responds.Ibid., L4, 41, *Introduction to Dialectics.*
Against these socio-historical outcomes Adorno presents philosophy with the property for “suspending something,” and this something to be halted would be that rationalised and reified frame of thinking, which “appears so self-evident, [that] has become almost second nature to thought [and] has now exerted its influence over an inconceivable long period of time.”Ibid., L20, 209\. But, what is out there exerting this “influence” and how is reification propitiated during that “inconceivable long period of time”? Out there, and veiled in anonymity, we argue, we will find what Adorno calls the self-preservation of an anonymous dominant minority in relation to our socio-historical context. This hidden fact is what becomes the forgotten aspect of that whole, which conforms to a capitalist Western totality, implying that there will be an ongoing predominant thought (liberal and bourgeois) always in progress; for critical theory or philosophy, will have to come to terms with the threat of neutralisation:
If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history.Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer., *Dialectic of Enlightenment*, trans. John Cumming, (London: Verso, 1997\) Preface XV.
The structural specificness of this socio-historical context, which produces us, means that all our questions and preoccupations are situated inside (and by default) capitalist contexts—even if those are in flux, unstable or mutant—and that to be able to survive undisturbed by the truth of such a fact, we have to become oblivious that in reality, all is included and that, so we are.
And that to oppose any official status, and to just contradict it, is not enough because “those tendencies too, however, are caught up in the general process of production.”Ibid., Preface XX. The obstacles to a thought (a critique and a philosophy) about suffering and its likely reification, keep recurring in the inside to which they belong as in the Chinese Book of Changes:
They have changed no less than the ideology they attacked. They suffer the fate which has always been reserved for triumphant thought. If it voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the service of an existing order, it involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it has espoused into something negative and destructive.Ibid., Preface XV.
Adorno’s insistence on the entrenchment of the bourgeois psyche (which does administer our thoughts) sees his concept of reification slippery but also sticky in its ways to become an element participant in the institutional processes in which thoughts as theories are inscribed:
No theory escapes the market anymore: each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions, all are made available, all snapped up. Thought need no more put blinders on itself, in the self-justifying conviction that one’s own theory is exempt from this fate, which degenerates into narcissistic self-promotion, than dialectics need fall silent before such a reproach and the one linked to it, concerning its superfluity and randomness as a slapdash method.*Negative Dialectics,* trans. Dennis Redmond, p.7
It is precisely the inescapable marketplace relation to each of our fields and the human relations implied in it that concerns Adorno. It was therefore no surprise that for him, the only thing left for a resistance was to engage in a negative dialectics of thinking and what he called self-reflexivity for tackling systems of thought and of belief that influenced relations: “Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of non-identity. It is not related in advance to a standpoint. Thought is driven, out of its unavoidable insufficiency, its guilt for what it thinks, towards it.”Ibid. Meanwhile, in the present Institutions—from which Adorno is gone—this liquified and superfluid entity, which is formed or triggered by a series of elements such as dissociation, the spell, the shudder, narcissist self-promotion, and cunning, finds in our neoliberal epoch, a point of unmatched comfort overlaid imperceptibly in the institutions which involve art and cultural programs, most especially, of those who feature specific peoples representing suffering.“Contemporary liberalism rests on, and also fosters, an extremely highly developed sensitivity vis-à-vis the phenomenon of suffering and seems recently to have contributed to a veritable cult of the suffering victim. One unedifying consequence of this is the highly visible contemporary spectacle of groups and individuals vying for the status of ‘most oppressed.” Geuss. R. *Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno*, Constellations Volume 12, Number 1, 2005 The institution will be thus dissociating in the sufferings it includes, and in those it forgets and disappears, being by default “caught up in the general process of production” and embedded in the marketplace.
However, would the study of Adorno’s work shed light on his thoughts on suffering—even if it was delivered as an affirmation, as a categorical imperative, lacking in dialectic elaboration—and aid us in understanding how susceptible thought processes are to the likely instrumentalization of ideas, the words, and the grammar connected to a history of traumatic events? And how those could then lose meaning or become fading truths? “It is historically perfectly understandable that in the 1950s and early 60s of the last century Adorno made the abolition of suffering in a rather unqualified sense one of the central motifs of his philosophy. However, even then that was an undialectical thought, and one way or another, a mistake.” Geuss. R. *Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno*, Constellations Volume 12, Number 1, 2005
Second Reification
The power or tendency towards reification in thinking processes and of the critique of reification is exemplified in Adorno’s critical outlook towards Lukacs: “The truly meaningful times, whose return the young Lukacs longed for, were just as much the product of reification, of inhuman institutions, as he only attested to those of the bourgeois ones.”Negative Dialectics, p. 113, trans, Dennis Redmond. But be that a naïve objectivization of the root of all Western early twenty-century evils, Lukacs was not so mistaken in pointing out the bourgeois Institutions. Adorno’s flowing dialectic indicates how he too, is specifically preoccupied and focused with the self-preserved bourgeois thought and its institutions in his studies on reification and suffering, as he does not propose another source or cause for it, but the same one. Yet, there is another issue to be overcome, as talking about suffering as with the primary materials of philosophy, does not equate to knowing better about it, as in the case of theory involved with suffering while lacking self-critique, becoming fetishist of their own material, generating inevitably a recurrent paradox:
Whoever recites profundities, is no more profound than a novel is metaphysical, just because it reports on the metaphysical views of its characters. To demand of philosophy that it direct itself to the question of existence or other keynote themes of Western metaphysics is a crude fetishism of the materials.Negative Dialectics, Ibid., 14\.
The avoidance of a “fetishism of a material,” as Adorno advises, facilitates an understanding of the rhetorical outcome of a thought concerning the material as a trend, or even as a mere rhetorical tool for defeating a competitor, or political enemy.
This fetishism as a willing move to reification, has increased in the last decade, in relation to certain ideas and narratives which present themselves as unquestionable, truthful, and just; just because they signify suffering. Yet, questioning suffering as the material that it is, is not rendering it irrelevant either: “Thought it is not to be separated from the objective dignity of those themes, there is however no guarantee that its treatment would correspond to the great objects in question.”Ibid. The thinking process proposed in Negative Dialectics is invested in accompanying—as ever-moving question marks—what appears as natural in a thought for a non-forgetting. Still, Adorno is talking of a philosophy yet to be established and practised:
The aporetic concepts of philosophy are marks of what is objectively unresolved, not merely in thinking. To accuse contradictions of incorrigible speculative obstinacy merely shifts the blame; shame bids philosophy not to suppress the insight of Georg Simmel, that it is astonishing, how little one notices the sufferings of humanity in their history. The dialectical contradiction “is” not purely and simply, but has its intention—its subjective moment—in that it cannot be talked out of this; in its dialectics goes towards what is divergent. The dialectical movement remains philosophical as the self-critique of philosophy.Ibid., 92\.
Suffering as the once forgotten material of thought, is not such anymore, as newer theories constituted after classical philosophy, from feminism to the post-colonial and de-colonial (some feminism as a specific thread initially recognising their indebtedness to Adorno) hold the wounded subject at its core. However, if there was to be a space for self-critique, as Adorno shows us as a must, this would be scarce or not effectively exercised. On the contrary, most positions and theories present themselves as a petrified self-righteous thought thus mirroring the same identifications and categorical abstractions, which establish a social othering that reproduces inside our reified conscience and ways of relating.
Once more it is about the market power and its spell, about the self-preserving moves that will consolidate it. This would be what Adorno meant about a “total integration,” as our consciousness which has turned false via its process of reification, sustains by necessity a false promise which holds its lie: “the straighter a society’s course for the totality that is reproduced in the spellbound subjects, the deeper its tendency to dissociation.”Adorno, Theodor W., p. 346, *Negative Dialectics*, trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1990\. Thus, the “forgetting” will work by producing a general oblivion even in the most sensible minds.
Third Reification
The calamity that generates angst and suffering, is a coldness towards which most subjects are to be drawn in order to dissociate properly and thus, survive. This “coldness” either in concrete relations or as a quality of the superstructure, is in place so that it omits that a cunning is what actually occurs, as it has to take place for reification to fulfil its purpose. Coldness in this case, is engaged by cunning, covering up a variety of passions and emotions, or affects—with envy in most need to be hidden—which are activated in relation to a ferociously passionate competitivity, and what is known as a life in constant friction, from which no one is spared: “Angst is the necessary form of the curse laid in the universal coldness upon those who suffer it.”Ibid., p.346. But Angst too, found itself reified as what had been once the existential trend, when it became just a “system character,” a reified “shibboleth of academic philosophy” to later, find itself “strenuously denied from the initiates of that philosophy [and] they may with impunity pose as spokesmen for free for original indeed unacademic thinking.”Ibid., p.24. This is what truly occurs under the intensified frictions of the competitive bourgeoise/neoliberal relationality at the workplace within its constant social irritations. For it appears that all causes have to fight for attention and recognition with a Westerner status quo (never mind how it is despised and accused) which by default, will exercise its anthropophagic subsumption, by keeping pace with a change of theme. Those are the paths taken by capital embodied in the broader sense, which is perceived as a naturalised --this is how things work– resulting in a natural neutralisation and relativization, promoting replacements of cycles of memory versus oblivion, all integrated into what Adorno considered a “totality in its untruth.”Adorno, T., p.362, *Why Still Philosophy, Critical Models*, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 2014\. The outcome of the market as an idol and its spell is the facility by which the causes of those who suffer or have suffered, are subject to instrumentalization, either to being weaponised or further neutralised, forgotten.
“Genocide is absolute integration,” is a sharp and hurting declaration. Adorno is never too far from the concept of the sadist which informs his dialectics of suffering: “What the sadist in the camps foretold its victims …,” pairing the concepts of those sadists as operatives of a technique of replacement and obsolescence, and the universality of individual profit confronted with the nothingness of becoming indifferent, as one more piece instrumental to the capitalism of organised death and extermination.*Negative Dialectics*, trans. Ashton.Ibid., p.362. Adorno’s indications about how our predicaments come to be are that the spell is perpetuated due to “the coldness between men, without which, the calamity could not recur,” while those who are not cold, who do not “chill as the murderer chills its victims, must feel condemned,” thus placing himself as induced to a condemnation by the sadist, as he negates its coldness.Ibid., p.347.Ibid. The depiction of an eternalised repetition of the “old familiar tendency” takes us into an unheimlich dimension of reality from which there is no way out as if we all had become surrounded by an ever-expanding barbed wired camp: “The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering ….”Ibid., p.203. However, now, under our neoliberal regime, the subject which represents a prolongation (even if unapparent) of the bourgeois “I” of yore, self-turns irremediably into a fluid thing: The self-objectified subject’s subjectivity and its discourse expressing suffering, will converge (owing to the necessary production processes) in producing a self-reifying shift, failing in its principal aim, which was to share a truth. Adorno had an understanding of how a sadist “dictatorial minority,” operated and how its reasoning was activated across an unaware subject under a bourgeois mentality.p.31, *Dialectic of Enlightenment*, trans. John Cumming. That disposition is now separated from what once had launched it, expanding and influencing the social dynamics embedded in those relations to the institution, where a thematic cultural focus on suffering becomes just mere fetishized material.
The “forgetting” to which Adorno (and Horkheimer) had referred to, takes effect in the way theories end up forming a totalising narrative, reflected in the position it occupies, when talking about privilege from a site of privilege, so that privilege as site, never ceases to exist. Those are the ways of tackling suffering (which would cause empathy beyond its own limits and centrality) towards specific peoples, as charities have always worked for a reason, that can be considered an exclusive of a Western bourgeois self-perpetuating mode. In the context in which discourses about suffering are placed, the appointed representative of a suffering will lose (along the way) its meaning and its motive to express the cause of it, while endeavouring to voice it, for it too, will be hosted under the spell.
“Dialectics means intransigence towards all reification,” Adorno stated, and still today reification’s unavoidability looms over us in how the status quo preserves itself in the institutional domain, concerning the critics of the West that simultaneously ‘disappear’ the thought (thus the Marxist critique) of capitalismTheodor Adorno., *Prisms*, p.16, MIT Press paperback edition, Ninth printing, 1997\.
… however critical we might be in relation to bourgeoise society, this critique, as far as cultural and intellectual matters are concerned, only really has a relevant object insofar as it explores the internal dynamic of this bourgeois spirit within which the development of society as a whole in certain sense is also refracted and revealed*Introduction to Dialectics*, L10, p.100.
Our relation to an expanded bourgeois society and spirit as critical beings is, a “living relationship to the object to which it would know,” and not a “clinging to what is supposedly simply given without grasping its relation to the whole,” and we have to remember that we are embedded in a reification process too. The reifying/reified minds which align forming a context, ‘avoids and forgets’ what is at work in the specific form that their critiques are given, as they too become transacted as commodities and as part of self-serving social relations.“The commodity‐form was no longer just an interpretative “figure” dissolving a particular riddle (the antinomies of bourgeois thought), as an example of a general interpretative procedure; it was the basic form of the social as such…. Gone were the Romantic vagaries of a broken being and in their place was a Marxist sociology of total commodification in which all social relations are exchange relations.” Peter Osborne., Adorno and Marx, *Blackwell companion to Adorno* (Cambridge: Blackwell 2020\) p. 309\. The sadist here reappears in the figure of the indifferent structures of the institution as the self-perpetuating site of privilege, but which now must ‘only seem’ to be fair and justified in the Machiavellian sense of a bourgeois princely politics of fairness, goodness, and rightness.
Fourth Reification
Adorno’s introduction to the notion of the anti-spiritual dimension or that “side of spirit” and of how the spiritual impressions lose force (or data as he points out) becoming enfeebled by the physical fact, as in the case of physical suffering, introduces the somatic (the physical) as a dimension invested with the mind. Is survival after suffering in culture as we know it, and surviving after Auschwitz, the cultural capital of victimhood transformed into a reified survival mode for the self-preservation of the administered society? As Adorno argues, “the subject’s desperate self-exaltation is its reaction to the experience of its impotence, which prevents self-reflection.”*Negative Dialectics*, p.180, trans, Ashton. The mind (and its reification of the relations to use/value) processes under capitalism, produces a somatic specific, a bodily-felt trajectory of the intense heartbeats of an anxiety that accompany alienation. This is one specific kind of anxiety (anxiety existed before capitalism) and the alienation that produces it, has taken many shapes since it was originally described as the side-effects of a division of labour in the proletariat.
For Adorno, the relation of production between anxiety and alienation is generated by a reified bourgeois context: “Alienation is reproduced by anxiety; consciousness— reified in the already constituted society—- is not the constituents of anxiety.”Ibid., p. 191\. The position of the bourgeois “I,” as the space of coldness after the survival of the aberration that Auschwitz represented, is one place from which some generations are induced to navigate indifferently the saturation of information and images of death and war around the globe every day on the news and social media. A place, which constellates dissociation, coldness, and sadism: “His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of the spared.”*Negative Dialectics*, p.363, trans, Dennis Redmond. The bearing of the survivor’s guilt diffused in the neoliberal distribution of blame.
As Adorno points out, a repression of the object by the subject is activated by those subjects when they reach a site of power which compels self-preservation by default, dominating the object once more by the premise. That “the cause of human suffering would be rather glossed over than denounced in the lament about reification,” is indicative of the problematics of thinking processes that have to deal soon or later with the ‘status quo’.*Negative Dialectics*, p.190, trans, Ashton. Those are the reasons why Adorno’s focus will turn on the conditions (social-political, historical and exclusively Western) “that condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and would yet be changeable with human action.”Ibid., p.190. The connection made by Adorno between his critique of the critique of reification or the reified consciousness, is patent in how ‘the fetish’ works: “The fetish character of goods is not laid to a subjectively errant consciousness, but objectively deduced from the social a priori, the exchange process.”Ibid. Discourse, theories, monuments to the fallen victims, oblivions, are all based on the same exchange process, of bartering signifiers, of opportunity and means to an end. That a discourse, narrative style, etc. can be true and simultaneously become a cliché once it enters the marketplace, should be extremely relevant for thinking critically about how the material is cared for.
Adorno argues that “Marx already expresses the difference between the object’s preponderance as a product of criticism and its extant caricature, its distortion by the merchandise character.”Ibid. He points at the figure of a self-deluded thinker who will hope and imagine a dissolution of reification, of the merchandise character, possessing the philosopher’s stone: “Centering theory around reification, a form of consciousness, makes the critical theory idealistically acceptable to the reigning consciousness and to the collective unconscious.”Ibid. Western thought can be understood as configurated by its characterised idealism, false consciousness, and barter processes taking on the form of a lie, or even it can be assessed by the actual questioning of post-truth, further:
Among today’s adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.[^45]
The possibility that we are constantly constructing lies was quite an intense and confrontative idea by the time this was written, but not for us, who are more used to a consciousness of the practice, as we have witnessed its tactical workings more naturally and in daily politics as to have come up with the concept of post-truth. This includes the ubiquitous claims of the more recent relativizations and denials of the Holocaust, which is described as a lie or an exaggeration and in the rewording and re-framing of what constitutes anti-Semitism (there is not yet a clausulae for new racism, while there it is for a new anti-Semitism) versus false accusations of it and its simultaneous denials.
One important example of a comparative outlook to the tone the critique of the West departs from versus the actual proliferation of victims who suffer is that Adorno —as an exile (a migrant) and a survivor— does not dwell on the Holocaust to become self-centred on his pain or identifies with an abstraction as that of ‘his people’ to represent the wounded and errant Jew to an excess of identification with the cause of his exile, and of his mourning. Adorno works on the wound and from the wound, to be able to approach all who are wounded. In his case, he is going through the processes of that, which produces “the unrest that makes knowledge move, the unassuaged unrest that reproduces itself in the advance of knowledge.”Adorno, T., p.9, *Minima Moralia Reflections from Damaged Life* London, Verso, 2020\. The thought of the possibility of the uselessness of Western knowledge confronted with an outpouring from the hideouts of the terrifying experiences of its subjects, predates the gestures of the actual attempts for its abolishment.
The fact that for Adorno, there is a possibility for a total rejection or negation of anything produced so far from the heart of Enlightened Europe should suffice to understand that he does not interfere with any other civilisations or nations, but just those that conform to the West, and especially, of those damaged by it without exercising an abstraction of the matter:
All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is garbage. By restoring itself after what transpired in its landscape without resistance, it has turned entirely into that ideology which it potentially was, ever since it took it upon itself, in opposition to material existence, to breathe life into this latter with the light, which the separation of the Spirit from manual labor withheld from such… Whoever pleads for the preservation of a radically culpable and shabby culture turns into its accomplice, while those who renounce culture altogether immediately promote the barbarism, which culture reveals itself to be. Not even silence can break out of the circle; it merely rationalizes one’s own subjective incapacity with the state of objective truth and debases this once more into a lie.*Negative Dialectics*, trans. Redmond, 359\.
We can think that what forms a lie is a constellation and is dialectical too, if we look at how the Holocaust signified is failing to represent the aberration that it was in the midst of many sufferings that are legitimately or confusedly competing for whose cases were worse off and are in need to diminish the event of Auschwitz as an exaggeration, a lie.
Fifth Reification
Feminist theorist Renee Heberle exposes a “difficulty” perceived by Adorno when thinking or expressing theories about how the Holocaust was made possible. She states: “Creating a living, present memory of suffering as a means by which to prevent its repetition is, thus, treacherous.” It is in relation to her work, that she learns from Adorno to look at this problem:
Adorno shares with feminism a desire to theorize from the concrete rather than deduce facts from general principles. Like many feminists, he is sensitive to the issues of difference, of embeddedness in one’s historical context, and of the gradual erosion of the significance of the particular as abstract identitarian principles come to govern the most private, interior, subjective experiences.Renée Heberle., *Living with Negative Dialectics, Feminism and the Politics of Suffering,* (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press) p.219.
Those are a series of complications about expressing suffering when talking from the particular or the subjective as the problematics around meaning and language cannot be avoided. Adorno’s dictum here, “the need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth”*Negative Dialectics,* trans. Redmond, p.14. seems to have fallen into the “total integration” of which genocide and genocides are a part of, and into a context, which exercises its totalising integration via cultural and institutional forms, ‘suffering’ a similar fate, either demised, relativized, or recuperated literally to erase effectively, the “disappearing thought.”Ibid., p.387.
Adorno grounded the complexity of opposed and fluid dialectical scenarios for critical subjects: “Even the most critical person would in a state of freedom be totally different, just like those they wish to change” or “probably every citizen of the wrong world would find the right one intolerable, they would be too damaged for it. This ought to impart a measure of tolerance to the consciousness of intellectuals who do not sympathize with the world-spirit, amidst their resistance.”Ibid. To put in practice a way of thinking critically about suffering, the core premises in the theories of both Marx and Adorno for continuing to think, are a must for resisting a defeatist thought.“From Marx’s standpoint, however, without the actualization of philosophy (as communism), philosophy (in its historically inherited, inherently idealist form) must “live on” despite and within the terms of the critique of its alienated universality – rather than as an interpretation of “the riddle figures” of the existent. Hence the relentless negativity or negative‐dialectical approach required toward all philosophical categories, through which the world must nonetheless continue to be thought, which Adorno subsequently adopted.” Peter Osborne., *Adorno and Marx,* *Blackwell companion to Adorno* (Cambridge: Blackwell 2020\) p.309. It is a powerful prospect even if at most points, the feeling that all is impossible is too great. The technique of ‘negative dialectics’, which is equated to a “ruthless criticism” as proposed in Adorno, can open up a self-critical space to see through our thoughts and through what (how) is there to produce them. The attractions to a “mechanism of personalisation” and why this is the case, are elaborated below with the example of the Nazi turn and the exercise here would be to find out how this resonates within our own thoughts and resentments, especially when capitalism is left out of the constellation which forms our critique of the West or our assertions of difference against it,“Yet, instead of targeting the root causes of alienation, Rensmann writes, antisemitism functions as a ‘fetishized’ and ‘distorted’ critique-turned-conspiracy-theory that ‘shuts down the critique of capitalism instead of advancing it.” Jonathon Catlin., *The Frankfurt School on antisemitism, authoritarianism, and right-wing radicalism,* European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, Vol 7, NO 2, 198-214, (London: Routledge, 2020\) p.248.
… the greater the power of objective relations become, and above all the more anonymous the relations of power and pressure in which we are caught up become, the more this alien and anonymous character itself becomes unbearable. As a result, if we fail to reflect closely upon these things, we experience an ever stronger tendency to project what in reality is due to such objective circumstances precisely upon personal factors, upon the characteristics of particular groups of human beings. And here I would voice the thought that the racist delusions of National Socialism was able to exercise the extraordinary influence that it actually did only because it responded to precisely this need—that is, because it burdened specific vulnerable human beings and vulnerable human groups with responsibility for sufferings and misfortunes which in reality were anonymous in character and utterly unbearable for that reason.Theodor W.Adorno, *Introduction to Dialectics,* L12, p.123.
It is very likely that reification’s meaning and its figuring out, are in need of yet more ruthless criticism, and that we will want to still recover what keeps being forgotten along with the disappeared thought. Because it is what forms this capitalistic thinking in the expanded and emancipated bourgeois “I,” that keeps itself inside our minds, even if obliquely; its current potency is greater as it cannot be identified anymore in such a straightforward way as in the times of Marx or even Adorno’s. The actual bourgeois “I,” is redeemed by its many hideouts in language, especially when meaning in words disappears at viral speed.
The cases presented in the introduction to this paper show how suffering and its relation to words such as Holocaust or anti-Semitism end up being displaced and relativized as part of a process where competition is at work between various cases and facts of suffering and each possible keyword to define those, and of how often there is a using of the nouns Holocaust or Auschwitz, to signify other tragedies.See for example Rose’s *The Broken Middle* on Adorno and ‘poetry after Auschwitz’: “Modality of prophecy conjoins the necessity and the Sollen, the "is' and the 'ought', evident in this proclamation which concludes Levinas' short piece, "To Love the Torah More Than God', apparently unaware, in its declamatory pathos, of all the other 'rejoinings' implicated, if this commandment is not to reinforce the diremption it presupposes but refuses to recognize. *“After Auschwitz 'the metaphysical capacity is paralysed’.”\#* As confession and as witness, this minatory teaching of Adorno has been widely broadcast. Yet it has been received with brutal sincerity as refusal of and discredit to the development of thinking; while its use as dramatic irony in the major, sustained, philosophical reflection of an authorship devoted to defending comprehension against fundamental ontology in the wake of ‘Auschwitz’ has been utterly overlooked. (In 1966 the term ‘Holocaust’ had not yet acquired its emblematic status.) Yet main works of Liberation Theology and Holocaust Theology isolate the paralysis apparently proffered by Adorno, and confer on it the nimbus of angelology (…), Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle, Blackwell, 1992 p. 288 That Hollywood films and other reifying modes of ever-imposing universals would have had a hand in counteracting what it exceedingly had capitalised, is very possible too, as Gillian Rose explains in one of her essays in her book Mourning Becomes the Law, where she exposes “the fascism of the representation of fascism” in films such as Schindler’s List.Gillian Rose, p. 41 to 46, *Beginnings of the day: Fascism and representation,* Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996 The echoes of Marx and Engels about the repetition of history, first as tragedy and then as farce, seem relevant when thinking about the contexts and the representatives via which the reification of suffering is manifesting today. Such farces come as sinister caricatures, as they are talking to an oblivious, confused public, entering reality as mere dissociations.
If suffering produces a wound from which we will acquire knowledge—as Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) proto-bourgeois man Odysseus once had it—he but decided to instrumentalise it by the given property of ‘cunning’. This triangular move between wound, knowledge and cunning was presented as a singular outcome: that of cunning’s inseparability from knowledge, thus, becoming exemplary of the ethos of the bourgeois era.The collapsing of the qualities ‘cunning’ into ‘knowledge’ correlated to ‘wound’ was needed for the elliptical jump in placing Odysseus as the first bourgeois man. Here informed by the knowledge in psychology and psychoanalysis that Adorno (and Horkheimer considered) producing the idea that cunning is an aspect of knowledge for the narcissist and how narcissism can be embedded in the bourgeois pathos. These paragraphs from *Dialectic of Enlightenment* propose cunning as the outcome of the wound. *Dialectic of Enlightenment*, p.32, trans, John Cumming However, what would it be like a wounded voice of a subject today that could represent and express suffering and the wound as Adorno had meant to? This we can only guess. In any case, what we know is that following his critique, such would not be an expression of suffering (and a wound) whose outcome will be a replica of Odysseus’ cunning, thus becoming instrumentalised. Instead, we will hear a voice that if presented with the possibility of expressing, will not incur into a narcissist attempt to dedicate itself to (the cunning) move to displace, dismiss, and eradicate other people’s tragedies and their personal and historical sufferings to tell its truth, nor to persecute and punish unrelentingly anyone that appeared merely as a signifier of its causes.
Esther Planas Balduz, April 2020 New introduction and article revised, Sept 2024
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