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

The ‘natural history’ of a phenomenon is thus achieved in an interpretation that is
inseparable from socio-historical concepts and reflections. The interpretation is in fact
composed of socio-historical reflections, connected to each other in specific, associative
but non-arbitrary ways, with the goal of revealing the phenomenon’s meaningfulness
from the most objective standpoint, the standpoint of nature. The successful
interpretation is one able to order these reflections around the object of analysis in such a
way that the objective content of the phenomenon is elucidated not in isolation from, but
precisely in concrete mediations, oppositions, and determinate relations to, the various
socio-historical foci of reflection. If successful, the arrangement of these foci of
reflection around the phenomenon expresses something about the phenomenon that was
not already present in the conceptual content of the individual foci of reflection; it is this
content that gives concretion to the phenomenon as elucidated from the standpoint of
nature. But the content does not refer to new insights regarding the structure of the social
order and of the phenomenon’s place in that order—that is, the content does not add new
structural elements to the theories and reflections that were arranged in a specific way in
order to elucidate the phenomenon. Rather, the additional content adds a new
interpretation of the meaning of the structure of the social, and the meaning of the
particular phenomenon under interpretation as embedded in the social world. 291
So, for example, the natural history of the development from animistic
communities to advanced capitalist society that Adorno and Horkheimer offer in
Dialektik der Aufklärung, and the particular interpretation I have offered of it in chapter
291 In this sense, the overall interpretation is non-systematic, so long as one conceives of increased
systematicity as involving an extensive increase in the domain of the theory.
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