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

false or delusory. So, the idea that the final structure is appearance, in the sense that it is
a ‘sham’ or ‘delusion,’ does not entail that there exists another dimension of reality that
appearance misrepresents, but rather just the understanding that reified social reality is a
historical, changeable contingency, that its claim to be necessary is a sham.
One last point that needs to be made about the delusory character of reified reality
is that critical thought understands it not merely in terms of an abstract possibility that
another social order could exist, but rather in contrast to a determinate negation of reified
reality.
Die Gesellschaft, auf deren Erkenntnis Soziologie schließlich abzielt, wenn sie
mehr sein will als eine bloße Technik, kristallisiert sich überhaupt nur um eine
Konzeption von richtiger Gesellschaft. Diese ist aber nicht der bestehenden
abstrakt, eben als vorgeblicher Wert, zu kontrastieren, sondern entspringt aus der
Kritik, also dem Bewußtsein der Gesellschaft von ihren Widersprüchen und ihrer
Notwendigkeit. 167
The concept of a possible order that would be radically different from the existing
order is not a fully undetermined concept, but is rather a concept built step by step
through determinate negation of the conditions that determine our current social order.
Each of these steps constitutes a determinate, concrete negation of specific conditions in
reified reality (e.g., a negation of alienated conditions of labor grounded in the possibility
of different conditions, a negation of the primacy of financial capital’s interests over the
167 Adorno, “Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 8 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), 561-2. English translation by Glyn Adey and David Frisby in Adorno,
“On the Logic of the Social Sciences,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (Brookfield, Hong
Kong, Singapore, Sydney: Avebury, 1994), 118:
Society, the knowledge of which is ultimately the aim of sociology, if it is to be more than a mere
technique, can only crystallize at all around a conception of the just society. The latter, however,
is not to be contrasted with existing society in an abstract manner, simply as an ostensible value,
but rather it arises from criticism, that is, from society’s awareness of its contradictions and its
necessity.
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