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

With this in mind, we can now develop a final account of Adorno’s conception of
critical thought and its relation to positivism as well as to the Hegelian/Marxian
conception of dialectics. I propose to draw the crucial distinctions along the lines of
thought’s penetration into the workings of reified society, whose structure contains three
distinct layers: the layer of appearance, the layer of essence and its opposition to
appearance; and, thirdly, the layer of interpretation that yields the pathological meaning
of the structure of opposition between essence and appearance.
The first form of thought merely reproduces the layer of appearance. It looks at
“the facts” and the ways in which finite elements and phenomena of the social system are
structured in their ordinary appearance, but it does not seek to understand the meaning of
its objects of study in terms of the systematic totality to which they belong. It therefore
does not achieve an understanding of the relation between appearance and essence—the
principle of exchange. This form of thought is what Adorno calls “positivism,” which he
decries as ideological because it merely reproduces the most superficial layer of reified
society.
The second form of thought goes one level deeper: it seeks to understand finite
elements and phenomena of social life in terms of the “essence” of society—that is, in
terms of the objective structure of the social system as a totality. This form of thinking
proceeds dialectically: it shows that the finite element under study is not fully intelligible
on its own, and that understanding it rather requires that its semantic connections with the
totality of which it is part be elucidated. This form of thought is able not only to
reproduce the surface level of society’s self-understanding, but moreover the relation that
this surface level of appearance has to the structure of the social system as a whole. The
322