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

The first thing we need to understand in order to answer this question is what kind
of being characterizes the non-conceptual and how it is related as origin to its object and
to thought.
Adorno holds the initially puzzling view that the non-conceptual exists in the
object as a “sedimented history” of the object, 297 which history makes the object the
particular object that it is. The “sedimented history” is in fact the unconscious trace of
the object’s origin 298 in a net of meaning and significance. This ‘origin’ is to be
understood in the sense of Herkunft and Entstehung, and not in the sense of Ursprung
(see chapter 6); it refers to an accumulation of the archaic and the new in a network of
significance that makes the object be what it is. And, for Adorno, this network of
significance is always irreducibly social: The object—any object at all—arises in a
specific social life-world, in the context of which it has a particular significance. We can
think here of Heidegger’s idea of the thing and its embeddedness in a specific network of
significance and practices in which alone the object has the meaning that makes it the
object it is. For Adorno, the network of significance is most importantly constituted by
connections and associations of social meanings, available exclusively in the pre-
conceptual experience of the social world in which they belong. The experiential social
297 See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1970), 347-353.
298 As I discuss later, the category of ‘origin’ here does not refer to an event in the past which gave
emergence to the object. It rather refers to a context of significance that defined the object’s belonging to
its world of emergence in the form that this context has taken in relation to both the object and the present
social life-world.
334