Adorno on The Goal of an Emancipated Society

Since I was young I have allied myself with the Left, believing that human beings ought to live free of economic or institutional compulsion and domination. When asked about the goal of such an emancipated society, I talk of such things as the “fulfilment of human posibilities,” the “richness of life,” and “the equal and unrestricted opportunity of all people to pursue their creativity”. According to Adorno, not only are these ideas not radical enough but they positively reproduce the worst imperatives of capitalist society:

Sur L’Eau. — He who asks what is the goal of an emancipated society is given answers such as the fulfilment of human possibilities or the richness of life. Just as the inevitable question is illegitimate, so the repellent assurance of the answer is inevitable […] There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more. Every other seeks to apply to a condition that ought to be determined by human needs, a mode of human conduct adapted to production as an end in itself. Into the wishful image of an uninhibited, vital, creative man has seeped the very fetishism of commodities which in bourgeois society brings with it inhibition, impotence, the sterility of the never-changing.

— Reflection 100 from Minima Moralia

Can I withstand this criticism? Do I want to? Is Adorno calling me repellent? Whichever way I go, I appreciate the challenge. Adorno always thinks deeper and with more originality, and with closer attention, than anyone else. It’s good to be shown where one has failed to think things through.

First, what is he actually saying? In a nutshell, it is that every concrete demand beyond the basic one, that nobody shall go hungry, is meaningful only in the society in which it is formed — its validity is inseparable from its genesis.

It follows that “the fulfilment of human possibilities” and “the richness of life” are bourgeois concepts which can only express the conditions of capitalist production, with the associated concepts of variable exchange value, success and failure in business, and utility with respect to the unquestioned ends of profit and growth. Adorno might ask, why must the human being fulfil or realize its possibilities, like a company realizing the value of a raw material by processing it? Why must life be rich, like a consumer’s life is rich with a diverse choice of new and exciting products?

And we should stop to notice his point that not only these answers but the question itself is illegitimate: asking for the goal of an emancipated society is to presume, illegitimately, that it’s in need of further justification. It is to ask for its utility, expressing the means-ends reasoning characteristic of modernity. It is like asking the slave what the use of escaping is, forgetting that freedom is an end in itself, not a means to some other productive activity.

So we have two incommensurable attitudes confronting each other: on one side, the ends in themselves are production, profit, growth, and economic development; on the other, we have emancipation and an end to suffering and domination. But they are not quite equal: in conditions where the former attitude is dominant, the question will be asked as to how the latter ends serve as means to the former ends.

Adorno draws a line of regression or contamination going from the uninhibited, vital, and creative through capitalism to inhibition, impotence, and sterility, and it is on this latter pole, according to him, that we find my utopian ideals of fulfilment, richness, and so on. This seems to imply that the uninhibited, vital, and creative are pure, transcendent, truly human ideals, sullied by the economic system. But couldn’t I turn the tables and accuse him of also importing the imperatives of production? Are my fulfilment and richness any more contaminated by capitalism than his own favoured concepts? After all, capitalism, like no other economic system before it, is uninhibited and vital, and advances by creative destruction. Can we really separate out creativity from its meaning in capitalist society? Can we be sure that its aura, its positive normative valency, does not derive from the capitalist ethos of perpetual innovation?

In any case, the idea that the uninhibited, vital, and creative are pure and transcendent is questionable, and very un-Adornian. Can he really be saying that his concepts are about pure human need, but my concepts of fulfilment and richness are corrupted?

Well, not exactly. The point is not that the uninhibited, the vital, and the creative transcend society and history, but rather that bourgeois society has produced these ideals while at the same time deforming them, failing to see them through. Liberal capitalism’s own ideals are curtailed by its imperatives of money and power.

Even so, this does still seem to imply that his concepts are closer to true human need than mine. And that is a debatable point, at the very least.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter, and we can agree with Adorno in spirit if not in his details. Adorno’s ultimate position is that we should assert human need, whatever that need is or might become. We can say that everyone should have enough food, water, and shelter, but — even though we know human life can be much more than this — if we say much more, we shackle our hopes to mere possibility, where possibility, as something that can grow from what already exists, always contaminates our hopes with the status quo.

That said, I do want to say more. There is more to life than having enough to eat, and Adorno would agree. One can imagine those basic needs being satisfied while we continue living lives of alienation, mental suffering, drudgery, and coercion. Of course, the point here must be that such a society would not be emancipated after all, therefore we can indeed legitimately demand more than an end to hunger.

But let’s not get carried away. This is not a knock-down argument against Adorno. He knew what he was doing: using rhetorical exaggeration to provoke us, making us think through the question and to understand the problem inherent in the attempt to answer it, namely that this is an attempt to describe utopia. It should not be easy to say what utopia would be like. This is why Adorno finds the assurance of the answer repellent: it is too neat — it rolls off the tongue too easily — and it is too positive. It desecrates the hope for a world that we should only describe in negative terms, as a world without suffering and domination.