Adorno adds to this analysis by his reading of Hegel. He helps us to understand how culture is not just dialectical in relation to the economy, but is in itself a manifold dialectical process: Cultural production is based on dialectics of subject/object, individual/social group, agency/structure, individual knowledge/social knowledge. Adorno is a negative dialectician. The structure of knowledge as negative dialectic can be described by the fact that the subject, the individual, agency and individual knowledge are never a pure identity, but non-identical with themselves: they are related to an object, a social group, structures and social knowledge.
Adorno’s analysis does not remain abstract, but is a critique of the class structures of knowledge that try to make knowledge identical. Ideologies try to reduce the dialectic of knowledge so that the possibility that society could be diferent is hidden. Ideology tries to present class-based society as identical with society itself. It proclaims a false identity of subject and object and thereby denies the dialectical character of all social reality and all knowledge. Ideologies are for Adorno anti-dialectical forms of knowledge. His critique of the culture industry is a specific application of his dialectical critical theory of knowledge. The political task is then to deconstruct ideologies and to find ways in society that can strengthen the production of dialectical, critical knowledge.
7.4. Herbert Marcuse: The Meta-Dialectic and the Dialectical Logic of Essence
Marcuse engaged systematically with Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and applied it to various phenomena of twentieth-century capitalism. Whereas Williams’ Cultural Materialism deals with the dialectic of culture and the economy, Marcuse was in his general works such as Reason and Revolution concerned with how the dialectic works in society in general and in capitalism in particular. The very concept of this approach is certainly related to Lukács’ dialectical ontology and Adorno’s dialectic of the subject and the object. The aim is a dialectical critical theory of society. Marcuse’s main philosophical concern was to ground a dialectic that is non-deterministic and non-mechanistic and thereby opposes and avoids the pitfalls of Soviet dialectics that turned into a totalitarian ideology.
Marcuse was interested in a humanistic dialectic, a truly dialectical dialectic. He worked out a meta-dialectic of the subjective dialectic and the objective dialectic that stresses that capitalism and class-based society’s contradictions condition, but do not determine the future. It is human praxis that shapes the future, especially in situations of rupture and crisis in society. So Marcuse’s point is, paraphrasing Marx (1852,103), that humans make the dialectic, but they do not do so just as they please, but under objective, structural dialectic circumstances set in the past.
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