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

principle of exchange’s primacy over social reality is not self-justifying. The principle of
exchange, rather than a final ground for intelligibility, is a cipher for the social imaginary
of advanced capitalist society and the non-rational background that gives rise to it, which
we have traced to the specific conditions of pathology of the modern social imaginary. A
functionalist analysis of society structurally like a Hegelian or Marxian analysis
necessarily falls short of discovering the sense, the meaning of social phenomena because
it isolates the “essence” of society as the final ground of intelligibility, without instead
understanding it as the contingent result of a pathological relation between society and
nature.
Nor can the relation between society and nature be understood as the ground for a
functional explanation of social reality. On the one hand, a functional explanation that
would attempt to explain the social order in terms of the domination of nature fails
because of reasons that I have already discussed in section 6.2 in my refutation of the
negative teleological reading of Dialektik der Aufklärung; namely, because the social
order is at the same time itself dominated by repressed nature. Nor is it finally possible to
explain the various elements of social reality functionally in terms of the paranoid
diagnosis of advanced capitalist civilization; i.e., in terms of these elements’ contribution
to the pathology of modernity. The simple fact of saying that modern society is defined
by pathology entails that something has gone awry, and the functionalist view cannot say
anything about what is awry or how things have gone wrong. The explanation of what
has gone wrong with Western society must for Adorno be interpretative and not
functionalist. A functionalist form of explanation necessarily misses the pathological
quality of the capitalist order and therefore falls into ‘ideology.’
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