Critical Insight of the Week
The cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. He speaks as if he represented either unadulterated nature or a higher historical stage… The notion of the free expression of opinion, indeed, that of intellectual freedom itself in bourgeois society, upon which cultural criticism is founded, has its own dialectic… The bestial fury of the Brownshirt (He could have as easily been talking about Tea Partiers) against the ‘carping critics’ arises not merely from his envy of a culture which excludes him and against which he blindly rebels; nor is it merely his resentment of the person who can speak out the negative moment which he himself must repress. Decisive is that the critic’s sovereign gesture suggests to his readers an autonomy which he does not have, and arrogates for itself a position of leadership which is incompatible with his own principle of intellectual freedom… Except that the fascists (read Republicans) succumbed to the same naiveté as the critics, the faith in culture as such, which reduced it to pomp and approved spiritual giants. They regarded themselves as physicians of culture and removed the thorn of criticism from it. They thus not only degraded culture to the Official, but in addition, failed to recognize the extent to which culture and criticism, for better or for worse, are intertwined… If cultural criticism, even at its best with Valery, sides with conservatism, it is because of its unconscious adherence to a notion of culture which, during the era of late capitalism, aims at a form of property which is stable and independent of stock-market fluctuations. This idea of culture asserts its distance from the system in order, as it were, to offer universal security in the middle of a universal dynamic… Yet his very sovereignty, the claim to a more profound knowledge of the object, the separation of the idea from its object through the independence of the critical judgment threatens to succumb to the thinglike form of the object when cultural criticism appeals to a collection of ideas on display, as it were, and fetishizes isolated categories such as mind, life and the individual… Once the mind is no longer directed at reality, its meaning is changed despite the strictest preservation of meaning. Through its resignation before the facts of life and, even more, through its isolation as one ‘field’ among others, the mind aids the existing order and takes its place within it… That the fatal fragmentation of society might some day end is, for the cultural critic, a fatal destiny… Totalitarian regimes of both kinds, seeking to protect the status quo from even the last traces of insubordination which they ascribe to culture even at its most servile, can conclusively convict culture and its introspection of servility… The modern notion of a pure, autonomous culture indicates that the antagonism has become irreconcilable. This is the result both of an uncompromising opposition to being-for-something else, and of an ideology which in its hybris enthrones itself as being-in-itself… Rather the fact that every form of repression, depending on the level of technology, has been necessary for the survival of society, and that society as it is, despite all absurdity, does indeed reproduce its life under the existing conditions, objectively produces the semblance of society’s legitimation. As the epitome of the self-consciousness of an antagonistic society, culture can no more divest itself of this semblance than can cultural criticism, which measure culture against culture’s own ideal.
-Adorno, Prisms, "Cultural Criticism and Society", pp. 19-27
Adorno’s insight is profound. Cultural criticism as a practice requires a self-consciousness of culture, and a purported divorce from culture. Both conjuncts in the previous sentence involve contradictions. Culture is lost in the self-consciousness of culture. Divorce from culture in the form of cultural criticisms is vain since that criticism is inextricably linked to culture. Cultural critics are not truly eminent. Cultural criticism is truly immanent. Furthermore, reductionism is a self-defeating enterprise with respect to cultural criticism, since once cultural values or norms are reduced to such talk as this they are now elements in the larger culture.
Conservatives appeal to isolated entities like the mind or the individual. Conservatives value purity. So they do this not just out of calculation but out of inclination. The “standaloneness” of self-contained systems, which if successful at achieving the status quo are self-perpetuating, is appealing and can seem to legitimize those systems. Criticism from within those systems is self-criticism. Such criticism, like all constituents of such systems, is repressive. In accordance with Marx, Adorno asserts that these systems, in this instance culture, are features of society and to that extent are caused by the material conditions of life within society (though Adorno would probably say such talk of causality is primitive). The essay goes on to criticize both reductionism and explanatory social science in favor of a holistic hermeneutics known as dialectics.