Reification, Materialism, and Praxis: Adornos Critique of Lukcs

Timothy Hall
I. The work of Georg Lukcs has languished in critical neglect since a period of intense interest in his work in the 1960s and early 1970s. Lately, however, there are signs of a revival of interest. The reasons for this are multiple. On the one hand, art theorists and literary critics are turning to Lukcss concept of realism in order to help understand the political and realist turn of contemporary art and literary works. In a separate development, social and political theorists are turning again to Lukcss concept of reification as a way of understanding the peculiar social pathologies of the present. Two recent studies, in particular, stand out in this regard: Timothy Bewess Reification: Or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism and, more recently, Axel Honneths Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with critical responses from Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear. While the approach of each study diverges, markedly, both advance the thesis that the category of reification is essential for understanding the present, albeit, for Honneth, in a heavily reconstructed form. It is against the backdrop of this renewed interest in Lukcs that I propose to look again at Adornos critique of Lukcs, particularly as this
. See Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall, eds., Georg Lukcs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence (London: Continuum Press, 2011). . Timothy Bewes, Reification or the Anxiety of late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002). . Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). 61

Telos 155 (Summer 2011): 6182. doi:10.3817/0611155061 www.telospress.com

62 Timothy Hall

is developed in Adornos principal theoretical work, Negative Dialectics. As is well known, Adorno was a trenchant critic of Lukcs, especially his later work. What is less frequently recognized is Adornos debt to Lukcs, in particular the life-long engagement with a number of Lukcss early works, including On the Nature and Form of the Essay, from Soul and Form (1911), Theory of the Novel (1916), and History and Class Consciousness (1923). What I propose to do here is review Adornos critique of Lukcss Hegelian Marxism, particularly as this is developed in Negative Dialectics, and consider what if any responses are possible to this from a Lukcsian perspective. I will focus specifically on the two-pronged and seemingly contradictory character of this critique, which, on the one hand, criticizes Lukcs for not getting beyond idealism and, on the other, takes him to task for regressing behind it. The charge of idealism derives from Adornos belief that Lukcss philosophy of praxis confounds the realization of autonomy with overcoming the dependency on the object, a position most emphatically articulated in Fichtes subjective idealism. What, in Adornos eyes, the philosophy of praxis shares with subjective idealism is the view that the demonstration of the actuality of the autonomous subjectthe absolute ego in Fichte and the identical subject-object in Lukcsturns on showing how the object is ultimately derived from the subject. This in turn leads to a purely productivist account of the subject that in some sense produces its own reality. To this conception of the praxical subjectas producer of its own historyAdorno opposes the priority of the object and the heteronomy of the materialist subject. At the same time, however, there is an alternate strand of criticism in which Lukcs is accused of regressing behind idealism to a form of romantic anti-capitalism. This is particularly evident in Adornos critique of Lukcss analysis of the principle of exchange. In this analysis Adorno appears to criticize Lukcs for romanticizing pre-modern societies, in
. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973). On Adornos critique of Lukcs, see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978); Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukcs to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971) and Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990). See also Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 63

particular the view that pre-modern economies were geared toward the production of incommensurable use-values and that people related to one another immediately and without the mediation of reified objects (i.e., social institutions). For Adorno, the problem with this was twofold: first, it was simply untrue, since pre-modern societies were not free of the principle of exchange or reification, as Lukcs contends; and second, in inveighing against comparability as such, Lukcss critique loses sight of the principal purpose of the critique of exchange, that is, the critique of unfair exchange and the establishment of fair exchange. These criticisms appear to pull in different directions. Whereas the productivist account of the subject calls for a reinterpretation of materialism on the basis of the priority of the object, the criticism of the romantic strains in Lukcss critique of identity/exchange calls for more idealism specifically, the notion that the universality of the idealist subject has emancipatory potential and is not simply complicit with more totalizing forms of social domination. The former appears to call for a clear demarcation of idealist and materialist conceptions of the subject, whereas the latter seems to call for the acknowledgment of the emancipatory potential of the modern autonomous (i.e., idealist) subject: the acknowledgment of the possibility of a fair exchange implicit in the principle of exchange. Such a tension, however, disappearsor at least is significantly reducedif we bear in mind that there were strong romantic elements in the immediate post-Kantian tradition, not least in the work of Schiller, Schelling, and the German Romantics. Indeed it should be remembered, when considering Adornos critique of Lukcs, that Romanticism as a form of critique is internal to Enlightenment modernity, of which the idealist conception of the subject is a significant part. That is to say, it is primarily concerned to address the dichotomies and fragmentation arising from the specifically modern and idealist project of attempting to understand the subject as autonomous. There is nothing, therefore, inconsistent in maintaining that Lukcss own attempt to overcome the antinomies and contradictions of modernity is both idealist and romantic as, I will argue, Adorno does. Indeed, I will suggest that the importance of Adornos critiqueespecially in the context of contemporary attempts to retrieve
. For a contrary view, see Isaiah Berlin, The Counter-Enlightenment, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1979); John Gray, Enlightenments Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern age (London: Routledge, 1997).

64 Timothy Hall

Lukcss concept of reificationlies in the way that it demonstrates how the praxical subject remains very much within the horizon of the attempts to overcome the diremption and fragmentation of modernity in the immediate post-Kantian tradition, despite Lukcss claims to the contrary. Any attempt to retrieve Lukcss critical concept of reification and the praxical conception of the subject to which it gives rise must, I will argue, be alive to its romantic and subjective idealist impulses. Adornos engagement and critique of Lukcs occurs throughout Negative Dialectics. There are three passages in particular where this engagement is specific: the sections entitled On the Dialectics of Identity and Objectivity and Reification, both from part two; and the section Happiness and Idle Waiting, from part three. On the Dialectics of Identity anticipates the transcendence of the principle of identity in its social formthat is, the domination of value-in-exchange over use value in capitalist society. Objectivity and Reification criticizes the attempt to resolve reified objectivities into processes as a hostility toward things as such. And lastly, Happiness and Idle Waiting criticizes the false choice between fetishism and immediacy, and proposes a concept of materialism that is neither the acceptance of reified objectivities nor the recovery of an integrated world in which people relate to one another directly. Taken together, I will argue, they constitute a cogent and compelling critique of Lukcss theory of praxis and Hegelian Marxism generally, and present the case for a different object-centered conception of praxis. I begin with the critique of the principle of exchange and by contextualizing Lukcss distinctive approach to the problem. II. A fundamental characteristic of capitalist society is the production of goods for exchange rather than use. Whereas in pre-capitalist societies only the surplus was exchanged, capitalist societies are characterized by the universality of the principle of exchange. This is not to say, of course, that goods in capitalist societies no longer render a use. It is just that their use value comes to be a function of their value-in-exchange. This domination of exchange value over use value, revealed in the analysis of the commodity form, is the starting point of Marxs analysis, in Capital, of capitalist
. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 14648. . Ibid., pp.18992. . Ibid., pp. 37375.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 65

relations of production and the social domination inherent in them. What Marx is particularly interested in is the illusory character of the commodity form: the process whereby relations between people (the relation between private individuals producing independently of one another) come to appear as the objective characteristics of a thing (its value-in-exchange or price). It appears, therefore, that commodities have a life of their own as evidenced by the fluctuations of their exchange value on the market. Classical political economy and, later, economic science buy into this illusion by treating the economy as an objective realm of law whose laws and regularities can be systematically investigated without being fundamentally transformed. This leads to a fatalistic relation to the economy not unlike the fatalistic relation to nature found in natural religions. Marx himself refers to the fetish character of the commodity. With the help of political economy and economics, we can anticipate the likely outcome of economic events (although not completely) and position ourselves in respect of these. However, we remain powerless to fundamentally alter these events and mitigate the force of the laws that determine human action. As science was implicated in capitalism and the form of illusion specific to it, Marx called his critique of capitalist relations of production a critique of classical political economy. The critique of capitalism was indissociable from the way these relations appeared to people living in capitalist societies and to the way these societies have come to be theorized. The vulgar Marxist concept of ideology is a fundamentally inadequate way of expressing this relationship between the relations of production, prevalent views about the social world, and social science because it implied that the way the social world appears is the consequence of beliefs and worldviews that have been, in some sense, impressed upon it. This overlooks the origination of social illusion in the economic process itself. For Marx, capitalist society contains its own non-optional appearance-form, that is to say, the way economic relations necessarily appear to its members. Marxs analysis of the commodity form was central for both Lukcss Hegelian Marxism and for the Frankfurt School. Lukcs saw the commodity form not simply as the central problem of economics but as a model for analyzing bourgeois society in its entirety, that is, in all its objective
. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans Ben Fowkes (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp.16465.

66 Timothy Hall

and subjective forms.10 It is a moot point the extent to which Marx thought that the fetish character of the commodity provided a basis for thinking social illusion generallywhat Lukcs calls societal reification. What is clear, however, is that Marx nowhere elaborates these forms in the detail that Lukcs does in History and Class Consciousness. The split between the objective realm of law and the subjective impotent standpoint characteristic of our economic life is also to be found in the administrative and legal spheres. Indeed, Lukcs argues, the passive, subjective position of the worker vis--vis the production process, the individual vis--vis the legal and administrative process, can be traced back to the basic categories of the subjects immediate relation to world.11 It is therefore not simply the economic subject but the bourgeois subject in general that is confronted with a reified social reality that it can only contemplate and not fundamentally alter.12 It is this analysis of bourgeois societysocietal reification/subjective contemplationthat leads Lukcs to search for a practical principle capable of altering social reality.13 It is a search that takes him back to Kantian and post-Kantian idealismto a metacritique of idealist concepts of reason. For Lukcs, the importance of idealism lay in the fact that it took up and attempted to go beyond the fundamental antinomies of bourgeois societyprincipally the dichotomy of subject and object.14 This made it an invaluable resource for a non-dogmatic materialism that sought to uncover the practical standpoint from which social reality could be altered. The fundamental limitation of idealism for Lukcs was that it sought to introduce a concept of the subject into history. Whereas materialism viewed
10. Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 83. 11. Ibid., p. 89. 12. The implications of Lukcss account of social illusion for the classical basesuperstructure model is also unclear. In my viewwhich I dont have time to elaborate properly hereLukcss account of the economic structure of modern societies in no way commits him to the view that the primary determination in modern societies is economic. While Lukcs views the becoming autonomous of economic life as the principle driver in social fragmentation, there is little evidence to suggest that he thinks that reification in the legal and administrative sphere or the cultural sphere is determined by reification in the economic. It is at least problematic to maintain, as Honneth does, that Lukcss theory of reification is restricted by his prior commitment to the base-superstructure model. See Honneth, Reification, p. 77. 13. Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 126. 14. Ibid., p. 121.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 67

the overcoming of the dichotomy of subject and object as the consequence of the collective self-interpretation of a historical subject (the proletariat), idealism saw it as the consequence of the successful self-grounding of a philosophical subject.15 What made the proletariat the bearer of social transformation, in Lukcss view, was its position in the social process as pure object/commodity. As self-conscious commodity it was the negation of the bourgeois conception of subjectivity, incapable of making sense of its life in accordance with bourgeois categories of thought and action, and therefore compelledin a boot-strapping exerciseto forge its own concepts in line with its own experience.16 III. Adorno draws a great deal on Lukcss elaboration and development of Marxs concept of commodity fetishism, particularly the idea of a general concept of social illusion and the critique of immediacy that this entails. Indeed in many respects Dialectic of Enlightenment could be read as an anthropological extension of the concept of fetishism and a deepening of the philosophical analysis of the relationship between identity and exchange.17 Adorno also shares Lukcss view that modern science and philosophy are not free of this illusion insofar as they are contemplatively positioned toward social reality. As with Lukcs, the elaboration of a materialist theory depends heavily on a metacritique of idealismabove all Kants practical philosophy and Hegels philosophy of history. However, in Lukcss critique of the principle of exchange he detects regressive tendencies toward pre-modern social forms. He refers indirectly to Lukcss critique of the commodity form as an abstract negation.18 Adorno writes:

15. Ibid., pp. 14549. 16. Ibid., pp. 16768. 17. To suggest that Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) could be read as a continuation of Marxs analysis of commodity fetishism as well as Lukcss concept of reification is not, of course, to suggest that the former could be accommodated to the latter projects. In at least one important sense it cannot. This is Adorno and Horkheimers view that substitution and exchange can be traced back to Greek mythology. If this is the case, then commodity fetishism and reification cannot be distinguishing characteristics of capitalist societies, as both Marx and Lukcs claim. 18. Even though Lukcs is not named in this passage, there is little doubt that Adorno has him in mind. See similar criticisms of Lukcss tendency to romanticize pre-capitalist societies in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp.191, 396.

68 Timothy Hall

If we denied the principle abstractlyif we proclaimed, to the greater glory of the irreducibly qualitative, that parity should no longer be the ideal rulewe would be creating excuses for recidivism into ancient injustice. From olden times, the main characteristic of the exchange of equivalents has been that unequal things would be exchanged in its name, that the surplus value of labor would be appropriated. If comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the exchange principleas ideology, of course, but also as promisewould give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privileges of monopolies and cliques.19

Adornos argument is that if we critique identity by siding with the non-identicaluse value as the irreducibly qualitative or the radically incommensurablewe end up throwing out the baby with the bath water. That is to say, we delete the promise of fair exchange implicit in the principle of exchange. Thus, while the principle functions as an ideological pretext for concealing the expropriation of surplus labor, it also points beyond itself to fair exchangeto a rational identity in which no man had part of his labor withheld from him anymore.20 The problem, therefore, is not with exchange relations as such but with the specifically exploitative form they assume in capitalist societies.21 Following on from this, Adorno sees two problems for criticisms of the principle of exchange that assume this form, the first theoretical and the second political. By deleting the promise of fair exchange implicit in the principle of exchange, the critique of identity (and by extension, the principle of exchange) loses its immanent basis. Identitarian thinking cannot be criticized from a standpoint outside identity.22 For example, the conceptual grasp of reality in identity thinking cannot be criticized from a standpoint that claims an intuitive grasp of reality unmediated by concepts. Nor could a critique of production for exchange in capitalist societies be mounted from the (imagined) standpoint of a society that met its needs through the production of use values. For Adorno such a critique
19. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp.14647 (translation modified). 20. Ibid., p. 147. 21. For this reason I disagree with Hammers claim that use-value/the non-identical becomes a cipher for everything that can possibly contain a utopian promise. See Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 3031. The utopian promise is actually lodged in the rational claim to identity for Adorno, in this case the possibility of fair exchange implicit in the principle of exchange. 22. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 69

could only take the form of a self-critiquethat is, a self-critique of the concept and a self-critique of the exchange principle. Second, by taking comparability or equivalence as such to be the problem, Adorno argues, it creates a pretext for a regression to pre-modern (i.e., direct) forms of expropriation and their latter-day equivalents in the Soviet Union.23 Adornos suggestion here is that romantic elements in Lukcss critique of reification make it all too appropriable by authoritarian currents in the communist movementabove all, Stalinism. IV. A second line of criticism is outlined later in the second part of Negative Dialectics, in the section entitled Objectivity and Reification. Unlike the first critique, this is carried out explicitly and Lukcss History and Class Consciousness is mentioned by name. Here he criticizes Lukcs for conflating reification (Verdinglichung) and objectification (Objektivitt)that is to say, of failing to distinguish between the illusory objectivity that is really alienated subjectivity and a genuine objectivity beyond the subject. In the realm of things, he writes, there is an intermingling of both the objects non-identical side and the submission of men to prevailing conditions of production.24 The task for a critical materialism is, therefore, to carefully delineate these two sides of the thing/object: between the false objectivity of congealed social activity, on the one hand, and of the alien or unfamiliar thing that exceeds the subject and mediates subjective action, on the other. The consequence of conflating these two sides of the object, Adorno argues, is a backslide into idealism. Idealism is understood, in this context, as a search for a first; the search, that is, for an originary principle that would arrest the dialectical process, once and for all, in a final reconciliation of subject and object. Versions of this can be found in Fichtes concept of the self-positing subject and in Hegels concept of absolute knowing. It is also understood as the tendency to see in objectivity only an inessential limitation of subjective freedom. For idealism, autonomy is characteristically achieved at the expense of the object, through overcoming ones dependence on itnot, as Adorno will argue, through the acknowledgement of its fundamental independence from thought.25
23. Ibid., p. 147. 24. Ibid., p. 192. 25. Ibid., p. 191.

70 Timothy Hall

It is precisely these aspects of the idealist project, Adorno argues, that are preserved in Lukcss social theory. In holding that reification is the problem of modernity, he overlooks the fact that reification is merely the reflexive form of false objectivity.26 Lurking beneath this diagnosis, however, is an absolute subject (the proletariat as the identical subjectobject of history), whose self-realization or freedom is seen to lie in the wholesale setting-into-process of reified objectivities. What is idealistic about History and Class Consciousness is notas the later, self-critical Lukcs, author of the 1968 preface, would writethat it located the first in the subject and not the object (nature),27 but rather in its identification of a first at all. On the basis of this identification, it comes to define freedom, like its idealist forebears, as the absence of any objective or natural determination. This means that social institutions figure in his account of social praxis only as shorthand designations for social processes and not, in what Adorno will take to be the eminently materialist sense, as the ineluctable objective mediation of subjective actions. It is Lukcss exclusive focus on the subject and the subjective mediation of the object that leads Adorno to state:
The trouble is with the conditions that condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and would yet be changeable by human action; it is not primarily with people and with the way conditions appear to people.28

Exclusive focus on the subject leads to an overestimation of the capacity of the subject both to see through and to alter these conditions. More importantly, it leads to the uncoupling of subjective action from objective context of action and its concrete possibilities. Greater emphasis on the objectspecifically, the aspect of the object that is not reducible to the subjectleads, in Adornos view, to a more precise sense of the concrete possibilities of action. In this sense, Lukcss concept of the proletariat retains Promethean characteristics found in bourgeois conceptions of the
26. Ibid., p. 190. 27. Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, pp. xviixxiv. Specifically: [o]bject ification is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in society. If we bear in mind that every externalization of an object in practice (and hence, too, in work) is an objectification, that every human expression including speech objectifies human thoughts and feelings, then it is clear that we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between men (ibid., p. xxiv). 28. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 190.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 71

subject, which are given their philosophical articulation in idealismmost notably in Fichtes conception of the absolute subject.29 However, it is not simply the actuality of human action that is sacrificed in attributing priority to the subject, but also the very conception of freedom. Adorno writes:
We cannot eliminate from the dialectics of the extant what is experienced in consciousness as an alien thing: negatively, coercion and heteronomy, but also the marred figure of what we should love, and what the spell, the endogamy of consciousness, does not permit us to love. The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien (das Fremde). Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different, beyond the heteronomous and beyond that which is ones own.30

The idealist understanding of autonomy as freedom from dependence on the object is replaced by an acknowledgement of this dependencewhat Adorno refers to as the priority of the object.31 Moreover, reconciliation, fulfilment, happiness, rather than being precluded by this acknowledgement, is actually held open and maintained in the possibility of a different, non-appropriative relation to objects/nature. The fact that objects are not ultimately reducible to our concepts is what, for Adorno, keeps alive the possibility of a changed world and a changed relation to world. If Adornos critique of Lukcss attempt to transcend the exchange relation suggests a regression behind idealism to a form of romantic anticapitalism, the critique of reification as hostility toward things as such implies, in a much more direct sense, a failure to escape idealism and the impasses that characterize it. The autonomy and independence of the subject that is the desideratum of idealism, which survives in Lukcss thought, is bought at the heavy cost of the subsumption, without remainder, of the object. For Adorno this indicates two things: first, that the idealist subject (which includes the praxical subject) fails to bring about the kind of reconciliation between subject and object that it purports to orwhat amounts to the same thingfails to imbue the social world with meaning.
29. Indeed Adornos claim that absolute dynamics would be the absolute action (Tathandlung) whose violent satisfaction lies in itself, with the non-identical being reduced to a mere occasion for this action, renders the Fichtean character of Lukcss concept of praxis explicit. Ibid., p. 191. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 183.

72 Timothy Hall

Second, in wholly reducing the object to the subject, it loses the objective mediation of action. For Lukcs, revolutionary action remains a more or less permanent possibility inhering in the reified world. Provided it can recover its own alienated subjectivity lying dormant in things, revolution remains imminent. The capacity to dissolve things into processes resides firmly in the subject.32 But this renders the revolutionary subject mythical. For Adorno, subjective action always requires objective mediation, and this in turn requires the prior delineation of the subjective and objective parts of the objectof the object as alien subjectivity, on the one hand, and the object as that which transcends the subject, on the other. But are these criticisms consistent with one another? Can Lukcss theory of reification be both romantic and idealist, as Adorno seems to suggest? Before turning to this, I will briefly consider a further elaboration of the idealism charge, which occurs in the final section of Negative Dialectics. V. This criticism of Lukcss subjectivism is restated in the final section, Meditations on Metaphysics. In the context of a discussion on the possibility of a metaphysical experience, Adorno again denies that objectivity is reducible to congealed society alone and insists on the priority of the object as a distinguishing feature of materialism. The total reduction of things to social processes involves a regression to the subjectivism of the pure act. He goes on to elaborate the sense in which he understands reification to be an epiphenomenon: the reflexive form of false objectivity. Pure immediacy and fetishism, he writes are equally untrue:
In our insistence on immediacy against reification we are relinquishing the element of otherness in dialectics....Yet the surplus over the subject, which a metaphysical experience will not be talked out of, and the element of truth in reitythese two extremes touch in the idea of truth. For there could no more be truth without a subject freeing itself from

32. tienne Balibar has developed a similar criticism of the early Marxs concept of praxis. Balibar links Marxs failure to depart from the idealist concept of the subject in the mid-1840s with the loss of objective mediation in the revolutionary activity of the proletariat. As a consequence, the situation of the proletariat is one of permanent insurrection. See tienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), pp.2527.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 73

delusions than there could be truth without that which is not the subject, that in which truth has its archetype.33

According to Adorno, the problem with Lukcss materialism is that it offers a false choice between pure immediacy, on the one hand, and fetishism, on the other: between an integrated meaningful society in which individuals relate to one another immediately, and a fragmented, anomic society in which relations between individuals are mediated by impersonal institutions. However, for Adorno, each is equally untrue: the latter is the abstract negation of the former and, as such, is anticipated by it. Just as the objective instrumental standpoint of the positive sciences anticipates its subjective moralizing critique, so the notion of a society dominated by the fetish form anticipates the standpointthe integrated, meaningful societyfrom which it will be abstractly negated. The idea of a society in which people would relate to one another directly without the mediation of institutions is simply the negative image of reified society in which individuals are seamlessly integrated into mechanically functioning social systems. In Adornos view, Lukcss approach ends up reproducing existing social reality, along with its constitutive oppositions, rather than interrupting it. To summarize: Adorno thinks that Lukcss materialism ends up backsliding into idealism, despite its criticism of the idealist philosophy of history because, ultimately, it tolerates nothing alien to the subject. That is to say, in its concern to negate the given in its immediacy, it inadvertently deletes that part of the object that transcends the subject. In this way, Adorno argues, he repeats the idealist fallacy of identifying autonomy with overcoming dependence on the object. For Adorno, it is immaterial whether this identification is carried out in thought or spirit and is imposed on the world, as in Fichte and Hegel, or discovered in reality itself as Lukcs argues in respect of the proletariat. With regard to the object, there is no difference between the so-called intellectual synthesis and the material synthesis. What is characteristic of both approaches is a refusal to accept a notion of otherness or the alien that is not reducible, finally, to the subject. In contrast to Lukcs, Adorno maintains that acknowledgement of our inescapable dependence on the object is the condition of knowing anything above and beyond what we contribute to the object andmore
33. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 37475.

74 Timothy Hall

significantly for the concept of praxisis the necessary objective mediation of any action.34 The practical significance of the charge of idealism for the theory of praxis is that it loses the very objective mediation that it claimed distinguished it from bourgeois practice in the first place. As a theory of political subjectivity, it is flawed because the capacity to see through the illusory appearance-form of the social world and re-institute it lies in subjectivity itself and is not tied to objective possibilities existing in the world. And here objective possibility cannot simply be understood in the one-sided Hegelian Marxist sense, as the release of alienated subjectivity in the reified social object but also in the emergence of the object in its unfamiliarity as the objective mediation of praxis. Materialism begins for Adorno, by contrast, with the acceptance of the irreducible otherness in things, with the acknowledgement of an irreducible distance between subject and object. On this acknowledgment of the objects aura hangs the very possibility of a changed relation to world. VI. What responses to this critique are possible from a Lukcsian perspective? To begin with, there is no small irony in the fact that Adorno criticizes Lukcs for lapsing into the kind of romantic anti-capitalism with which he is all too familiar.35 In the critique of the dominance of the principle of exchange considered above, Adorno effectively criticizes Lukcs for siding with the non-identical against the identical (the qualitatively unique and radically incommensurable use derived from a good against its value-in-exchange) and attempting, on this basis, an abstract negation of capitalist society. The problem with such approaches for Adorno is that they romanticize the past and attempt a critique of the present in the absence of an immanent standpoint. Ironically this criticism is similar in form to that leveled by Lukcs against Thomas Carlyles Past and Present.36 Lukcs thinks, like Engels, that Carlyles work is suggestive of the dehumanizing character of bourgeois society in all sorts of ways. The shortcomings of the work, however, lie in its lack of immanence: man as he
34. Adornos appeals to Hegels institutionalism and to the mature Marx are significant for his critique latent Fichteanism of Lukcss theory of praxis. See ibid., p.192. 35. I am grateful to Andrew Feenberg for drawing my attention to this ironyand for his criticisms generallyin a version of the paper presented at the Marxism and Philosophy Society Annual Conference in London, May 2008. 36. Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 190.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 75

is is abstractly confronted with man as he was/should be.37 As we have seen, for Lukcs, the only possible critique of capitalism is an immanent critique. For this reason he describes materialism as the self-knowledge of capitalist society: through the conscious activity of the proletariat, capitalist society is brought to an awareness of itself.38 Lukcs would, doubtless, further object to Adornos characterization of his critique of capitalism as a lament over reification.39 While it is clear that Lukcs draws on pre-capitalist societies for examples of non-reified social relations, it is not at all clear that he sees a post-capitalist society as a return to pre-modern social forms.40 In fact, for Lukcs, it is not at all clear what pre-modern societies were like, as made clear by his 1919 lecture The Changing Function of Historical Materialism, which marked the inauguration of the Institute for Research into Historical Materialism in post-revolutionary Hungary. If materialism is the self-knowledge of the present, then, as Lukcs contends, it has little or nothing to say about pre-capitalist societies. For the newly appointed Peoples Commissar of Culture of the Hungarian Republic, coming to an adequate understanding of pre-modern societies was all very much work to be undertaken. The idea that the critique of the present itself rests upon an extended narrative of decline would surely have been vigorously rejected by him. On the contrary for Lukcs, as for Adorno, it is the unfulfilled promise of modernity that provides the immanent basis for criticism. With the advent of capitalism and the universalism inherent in it, it becomes possible, for the first time, to understand all human relations in purely social, rather than natural, terms. It is the manner in which this socialization of the world miscarries in the emergence of a second natureevery bit as inexorable as first naturethat provides the platform for critique.41 In other words, Lukcs recognized that capitalism was both humanizing and dehumanizing, bringing with it new forms of freedom as well as new forms of unfreedom. The idea that Lukcs romanticized pre-modern societies has to
37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., pp. 149, 229. 39. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 190. 40. See, for example, in his analysis of the rationalization of the labor process and, following on from this, the legal and administrative process. Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 92103. 41. Ibid., p. 176. For an exemplary reading of this passage, and of Lukcs generally, see J.M. Bernstein, Lukcs Wake: Praxis Presence and Metaphysics, in Tom Rockmore, ed., Lukcs Today: Essays in Marxist Philosophy (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1988).

76 Timothy Hall

be set against his avowed modernism, evidenced throughout History and Class Consciousness. It might further be objected, as indicated, that Adornos critique of Lukcs pulls in contrary directions: on the one hand, he appears to be criticizing Lukcs for regressing behind idealism and providing ideological cover for pre-modern forms of subjectivity, corresponding to pre-modern (i.e., direct) forms of expropriation; on the other hand, he appears to suggest that the praxical subject is no different from the idealist subject in its desire to overcome the object as such. Lukcs could quite reasonably object that Adornos criticisms cancel each other out. For while the perceived romantic strains in his thought require the critique of abstract negations, which is the stock-in-trade of idealism since Hegel, the critique of the praxical subjects appropriative relation to objects appears to call for the recognition of some limitation on the negating power of the subject. Adorno appears to want it both ways, calling for more or less idealism as the circumstance dictates.42 A further example of Adornos apparent ambivalence toward idealism can be seen in his rejection of the false choice between immediacy and fetishism in which Hegelian Marxism results. While the content of this argument would have been surprising to Lukcs, the form of the argument would surely have been very familiar. Essentially Adorno is arguing that the reified social world incorporates its own critique: the social world of reified objectivities becomes process much in the same way that Lukcs argued that the objective social world incorporated its subjective moralizing critique. Indeed, revolutionary praxis, to the extent that it lacks an objective mediation, shares some of the characteristics of moral criticism: for example, it represents a permanent possibility inherent in the revolutionary subject, and, ultimately, it is down to the subject, whether it realizes it or not. Adornos argument is not therefore particularly novel. What is novel is its application to the philosophy of praxis. VII. While these rejoinders are suggestive, none in my view is decisive in rebutting the charges that Adorno levels at Lukcss social theory. Adornos seeming ambivalence toward idealismcriticizing the reversion to it while employing quintessentially idealist argumentsis really nothing
42. I am grateful to Meade McCloughan for formulating this criticism precisely for me in a presentation of an earlier version of this paper.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 77

other than the ambivalence and instability at the heart of idealism itself. It should be remembered that Romanticism, as well as the romantic critique of capital, is internal to the Enlightenment. That is to say, it is not a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment concepts of progress but an internal critique of some of its unanticipated outcomes, such as the fragmentation of the subject, the loss of community, and the instrumentalization of nature. There is, therefore, no intrinsic contradiction in Adornos charge that Lukcss social theory is idealist with romantic anti-capitalist strains. It is quite possible to be both. Indeed, it is the attentiveness to the inherent instability and volatility of the modernism at the heart of idealismconstantly at risk of regressing to pre-modernist forms43that characterizes the metacritical approach that Adorno inherits from Lukcs. Here the final criticism considered abovethat Lukcss social theory offers a false choice between fetishism and immediacytakes on a particular importance inasmuch as it combines the subjectivism and romanticism charge. If reity is nothing other than alienated society, then the resulting subject cannot but emerge as an abstract negation of society structured by exchange relations. Furthermore, the fact that the arguments used against Lukcs would have been familiar to him (that the critique of society as reified implies a longing for pre-modern social forms; that the fetish form of society incorporates its own critique) does not, in my view, vitiate them. On the contrary, the very familiarity of these arguments would suggest the proper grounding of Adornos critique in the concepts and categories of Lukcss social thought. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing the extent to which the standards by which it is judged and found wanting are themselves drawn from Lukcss own thought. Lukcss insistence that theory reverts to mythology at the point where the dialectic is arrested, could just as well have served as the motto of Adornos critique.44 Lukcss philosophy of praxis is one of the most rigorously historical theories in its insistence that the adequacy of a theory be judged by its ability to apprehend the meaning of the present. If correct theory is nothing other than the present raised to self-consciousness, then the traditional divide between reason and history would appear to be overcome. For Lukcs, the problem with the most advanced forms of rationalismeven Hegels idealismis that they cannot countenance the possibility of the novel or the radically new.
43. Schelling is the case in point here, particularly in his call for a modern mythology. 44. Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 194.

78 Timothy Hall

This is not to identify history as the site of contingency and thereby assign definite limits to rationalism; rather, it is to insist that the contingency of the historical penetrate the rational forms themselves.45 This is exactly what Lukcs intends by grounding theory in the self-interpretation of the proletariat.46 It is through this act of self-interpretation that the categories through which the present is comprehended are forged. In no sense are they introduced from without in an endeavor to make sense of history. However, if we hold fast to Lukcss insistence on the essential openness of theory (i.e., that it is able to countenance the radically new), how does his own concept of theory as praxis stand toward this? His insistence on the identity of subject and object would seem to imply that the contingency of history is absorbed, wholly, in the coming to self-consciousness of the proletariat. The question is: how is the image of history as the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man sustained in the face of the emergence of a subject whose self-understanding coincides with understanding society as a whole?47 Put simply, does not Lukcss concept of the subjectwhich acts through history rather than having history acting through itsignal the limits of the rigorous historicality of his theory? Is this not precisely the point at which his own dialectic is arrested and his theory turns into conceptual mythology? Unsurprisingly for a work as great as History and Class Consciousness, this was not a question that Lukcs ducked in any way. Indeed, he poses it explicitly in the The Changing Function of Historical Materialism:
The substantive truths of historical materialism are of the same type as were the truths of classical economics in Marxs view. They are truths within a particular social order and system of production. As such, but only as such, their claim to validity is absolute. But this does not preclude the emergence of new societies in which by virtue of their different social structures other categories and systems of truth prevail.48

Contrary to the conclusion arrived at above, Lukcs appears in this passage to insist that the emergence of the proletariat as the identical subject-object
45. Ibid., p. 118. 46. Ibid., p. 229. 47. Ibid., p. 186. 48. Ibid., p. 228.

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 79

of history does not preclude the emergence of new social forms. This is a striking claim, and one in which Lukcs appears to take his thought to its absolute limits. However, to my mind at least, Adornos criticism problematizes this conclusion in at least two important respects. First, the form of Lukcss thought (its reliance on the identity principle) seems to negate its expressed content. If the proletariat, as identical subject-object, understands itself and its social world exhaustively, how can this not preclude the emergence of new social forms? If truth is defined in idealist terms as the adequation of concept and object how can different social structures with different categories and systems of truth emerge? Two possibilities would appear to present themselves here: either the self-understanding of the proletariat and its understanding of the social world is acknowledged to be not exhaustive, thereby leaving room for the emergence of novel social forms and forms of truth; or the position is rejected as unsustainable. But neither option is promising. In the former case, the reconciliation of subject and world is downgraded and the concept of totality is reduced to the status of regulative idea. In the latter case, the principle of identity prevails, negating Lukcss insistence on the radical historicality of his theory. It is at this juncture, I would suggest, that we run up against the limits of Lukcss theory. Instead of suspending idealist antinomies, as it claimed, it reveals itself to be thoroughly enmeshed in them. Moreover, and again drawing on Lukcss own insights into bourgeois society, it is not clear that Lukcss theory of praxis did comprehend the present. The present of 1923, as Lukcs was all too aware, involved the increasing penetration of reification into the interior of the modern subject and into the spheres of culture. But this led to tendencies that were not anticipated by Lukcs: for example, the disintegration of socializing functions intrinsic to bourgeois civil society and the bourgeois family left the individual of late-capitalist society more vulnerable to regressive (i.e., pre-individuated) forms of collective action, as evidenced by the fate of the proletarian revolutions and rise of fascism in Europe. The reification of the cultural sphere, specifically the spheres of art and philosophy, signaled a qualitative change in society: the emergence of the increasingly totalized and integral society. In the face of such a change, the task is not to distinguish between an old, regressive culture in its terminal stages and a progressive new onea task that is ever present in Lukcss aesthetics from this time onwardbut to raise the question of the very possibility of art and philosophy as forms of critique, under these new conditions. What

80 Timothy Hall

is apparent from looking at Lukcss prescriptions for bourgeois society is that he clearly did not comprehend his own present. He saw in the disintegration of bourgeois society only the portents of the emergence of a new progressive society and culture. While his critique of societal reification registered the extent to which the individual was being integrated into mechanically functioning social systems, he was incapable of seeing in this anything other than the nullity at the heart of the old bourgeois culture teetering on the edge of collapse. He was, in short, unable to understand the subtle ways in which the institutions of bourgeois society mediated the Marxian concepts of class consciousness and class politics to which he turned. For Adorno, by contrast, the qualitative change undergone by societythe transition from bourgeois society to late capitalismwere, necessarily, the occasion of a rethinking of the basic categories of critical thought. VIII. Lukcss theory of praxis remains, for Adorno, very much within the horizon of idealist aporias of the subject, notwithstanding Lukcss claim to have transcended these. The principal reason for this is the priority it accords to the subject and the related claim that knowledge of the social world and radical transformative action requires an identity of subject and object. However, one needs to be clear about what Adornos charge of idealism against Lukcs amounts to. Ive suggested that it is not to identify his theory of praxis with any specific forms of idealism (e.g., subjective idealism, objective idealism, or absolute idealism), for, as we have seen, strains of each form can be found in it. Rather, it is to suggest that the theory repeats idealist aporias instead of making a definitive break from them, as it claims to do. The theory, therefore, falls short when judged according to its own criteria. At the same time it falls short as an account of the meaning of the present. For Adorno what defines the present of late capitalism is the existence of strong tendencies toward totality and integration. Lukcss idealist theory of praxis falls down on account of the fact that it does not examine its affinity with the present of late capitalism. The problem, then, is not that Lukcss account of transformative social action was founded on a fallacious idealist logic that is in some sense internally inconsistent. As Lukcs was well aware, the whole point of materialism was to deny any independent foundational existence to logic. The problem for Adorno was

Reification, Materialism, and Praxis 81

that Lukcswhile aware of the totalizing tendencies in the presentdid not see this as necessitating a thoroughgoing critique of identitarian (i.e., idealist) categories. Rather he was content to appropriate these, unaltered, from idealist philosophy. But given their lack of independence, why should these categories be exempted from a critical accounting on the basis of the present? This, in my view, is the central question that Adornos critique of Lukcs poses. All this might be conceded and yet Adornos conclusions still rejected. For the critique appears to leave behind a conception of critical theory as permanent metacritique, stripped of its transformative social power. In my view, however, this assessment is summary and premature. As is apparent from Adornos criticisms of Lukcs, his principal concern is that if we neglect to distinguish between the subjective and objective sides of the social object, the objective constraint on social praxis is lost. As a consequence of this, the modern subjects capacity to overcome social domination runs the risk of being consistently overestimated by social theorists. Counterposed to Lukcss idealism, Adornos account of social praxis emphasizes the institutional constraints of subjective action. Adorno rejects the notion of pure productivity at the base of the modern subject as intrinsically idealist and opts instead for a more realistically inflected account of social action: an account that involves both the experience of the social thing becoming process and the experience of institutional constraint in terms of what is concretely possible. This much, at least, is clear from his claim that the rational identity in the principle of exchange had to be realized and not simply abstractly negated. Novel, transformative social action cannot divest itself of the experience of institutional constraint. Just as actions take on new meanings at points of radical change, so also do hitherto misrecognized social institutions open up new and unanticipated possibilities of action. In my view insufficient attention is given to the distinctive character of the position Adorno stakes out here. Adornos emphasis on the necessary institutional constraints of subjective action is generally viewed either as a blanket hostility toward all forms of collective action, which are seen as apriori compromised, or it is annexed to subsequent theories of social action, such as Habermass, that start from quite different theoretical premises. While it is certainly the case that fractures in the ethical substance of modern society appear to render all forms of collective action potentially regressive for Adornofor the simply reason that late-capitalist society

82 Timothy Hall

and culture corrodes the self-enlightenment processes that animates such collective forms of actionnowhere does he appear to insist on the individual as the necessary locus of any account of human action. The Weberian pessimism often attributed to Adorno is, in my view, for this reason misplaced. Concomitantly there is little evidence to suggest that Adorno would have subscribed to Habermass view that ineliminable reification in modern society necessitates the use of steering mechanisms for complex social systems. Recognizing the institutional constraints of subjective action, for Adorno, is more about discovering in the de-reified social object new and novel forms of institutional possibility than it is about establishing a restricted domain for instrumental rationality, as it is for Habermas.