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

objectivity (essence) and ordinary consciousness (appearance), and shows it to be
grounded in the objective structure of reified social reality. Finally, the fact that the
analysis bottoms out in the interpretation of society’s structure as inherently reified and
so contradictory brings the tension between appearance and essence back to the status of
appearance.
By contrast, the positivistic mode of analysis stops short at the description of
ordinary consciousness. In the example above, the first step in the investigation of
people’s musical tastes, which consists in gathering information about people’s musical
tastes in accordance with existing categories, but which looks neither at the social pre-
formation of taste nor at the social determination of the choices given in the
questionnaire, illustrates the kind of inquiry favored by positivism. According to
Adorno, positivism studies finite social facts and quantitatively analyzes them, but it ends
with this kind of analysis. The results are usually “correct” in the sense that they
correspond to the way that facts appear. Yet the problem is that the “facts” are, as we
have seen, constitutive of a distorted appearance. Facts are facta; they are made, and
understanding them theoretically requires understanding the social, objective conditions
of their formation. The mere study of facts, because it does not look at the ideological
determination of those facts, fails to understand that the results of its analyses are only
adequate as a depiction of reified reality. Positivism takes the facts to depict all of
reality, and seeks to use the facts it encounters in order to arrive at the laws that order
Kong, Singapore, Sydney: Avebury, 1994), 83: “The difference which thereby emerges between social
objectivity and the consciousness of the subjectivity, no matter in what form this consciousness may be
generally distributed, marks a place at which empirical social research reaches knowledge of society—the
knowledge of ideologies, of their genesis and of their function.”
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