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

The positivist method of studying social facts in isolation from their
determination by the whole social structure is clearly inadequate if we accept Adorno’s
ontological picture of social reality as a structure of irrevocable tension between essence
and appearance—that is, as having the structure of “the contradiction in the object.”
The latter structure can only be adequately analyzed by a form of thought that
does not stop with the study of appearance but that rather locates itself in the tension
between appearance and essence and shows this tension to be the expression of reified
social reality (i.e., an appearance) rather than a result of natural necessity. This form of
thinking still requires the sort of empirical studies with which positivist thought is
concerned, but it ought further to place the findings of such studies in confrontation with
a theoretical analysis of society as a totality and to interpret the opposition that results as
a symptom of reification. This confrontation sheds light on the contradictory structure of
social reality, for
Empirie und Theorie lassen sich nicht in ein Kontinuum eintragen. Gegenüber
dem Postulat der Einsicht ins Wesen der modernen Gesellschaft gleichen die
empirischen Beiträge Tropfen auf den heißen Stein; empirische Beweise aber für
zentrale Strukturgesetze bleiben, nach empirischen Spielregeln, allemal
anfechtbar. Nicht darauf kommt es an, derlei Divergenzen zu glätten und zu
harmonisieren: dazu läßt bloß eine harmonistische Ansicht von der Gesellschaft
sich verleiten. Sondern die Spannungen sind fruchtbar auszutragen. 185
“Sociology and Empirical Research,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (Brookfield, Hong
Kong, Singapore, Sydney: Avebury, 1994), 76:
Such sociology becomes ideology in the strict sense—a necessary illusion. It is illusion since the
diversity of methods does not encompass the unity of the object and conceals it behind so-called
factors into which the object is broken up for the sake of convenience; it is necessary since the
object, society, fears nothing more than to be called by name, and therefore it automatically
encourages and tolerates only such knowledge of itself that slides off its back without any impact.
185 Adorno, “Soziologie und empirische Forschung” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 8 (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), 198. English translation by Glyn Adey and David Frisby in Adorno,
196