CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

is “contradictory” and “false” because it cannot fulfill its claim adequately to capture its
object.
Yet, as we should expect, there is a sense in which the concept of the empirical
subject is also “true.” As I have said before, the truth of a theoretical position subject to
negative dialectics arises through an investigation of the position’s ideological function.
And ideology in general fulfills two functions: the first is to mask the true nature of
social reality, and the second to provide a justification for the status quo. How does the
conception of the subject as merely the empirical, concrete subject fulfill an ideological
function? Adorno does not elaborate this point in the section of “Zu Subjekt und Objekt”
that we have been looking at, but he does in other places. 97 In the first place, the idea that
we can understand ourselves primarily or fully as individuals plays the ideological
function of giving the appearance that the self of modern capitalism is substantial in
itself, that it is free and that it has content that is its own—content that expresses the
individuality (uniqueness) of that self. In fact, as we have seen, Adorno thinks that the
modern self is given all (or almost all) of its content and the form of its ordinary
experience by structures that are beyond individual control. In social and political
discourse, the idea that the subject is to be conceived fully in terms of the individual
gives rise to the ideology of atomistic individualism: an ideology that conceals the lack
of self-determination and independence—in effect, the lack of individual self-hood—of
modern individuals.
97 See Minima Moralia, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1969), §97. Consider also, for example, Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s conception of the individual—which,
Adorno thinks, both reduces the individual to a mere appendage of the whole and retains a liberal view of
individuality that ideologically fulfills the individual’s delusion of self-determination for the sake of
preserving the status quo—in the dedication of Minima Moralia, 16-17.
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