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

advanced capitalist societies is neither necessary for survival nor conducive to happiness
but rather seems aimed at the reproduction of the capitalist structure for its sake alone,
and it is this turn of affairs that renders repression irrational and unbearable. It no longer
upholds the promise of a future compensation, for the concrete potentialities to begin
bringing about that compensation have already been actualized, and yet the idea of
consciously ordering society for the sake of this compensation—for the sake of happiness
and liberation from unnecessary repression—has not been pursued.
In his Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik, Adorno traces the pathology of the
creation of reality as a rigid and ‘totalitarian’ system to the failure of the promises of the
bourgeois revolutions. 237 It is difficult to place the moment at which frustration became
intolerable precisely, but it is clear that Adorno takes it to be tied to the unrealized
possibilities for liberation from coercive work that the scientific revolution afforded, and
the forsaken promises contained in the bourgeois liberal ideas of the seventeenth century:
promises of emancipation and new possibilities for happiness that were never fulfilled.
Instead, the social conditions of life continued to require ever greater renunciation from
the masses and, even for those in power, the small capitalist class that did not have to pay
through sacrificial labor and the inhibition of pleasure, their privileged position bore the
cost of maintaining and increasing humanity’s distance from nature. At this point, the
repression of nature not only became intolerable in that it made satisfaction of instinctual
desires impossible, but moreover it became independent of its initial raison d’etre as a
sacrifice to be compensated in a future that would manage to recover the lost promise of
237 Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik, in Nachgelassene Schriften, Vol. 16 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 170-3. English translation in Lectures on Negative Dialectics (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2008), 122-6.
247