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

context of the object’s origin is essential for understanding the object’s meaning and in
fact constitutes the core of objectivity in the object. 299
The idea that the object’s core of objectivity is constituted by a “sedimented
history” of the object’s relations and ties to its original social context may at first seem
idealistic: the center of ‘objectivity’ seems to be reduced to a context of social
experience, which seems necessarily to be an experience had by individuals (subjects),
not material objects, so that objectivity seems to be reduced once again to the subject.
But to understand Adorno’s point we need to think in a wholly different way: Social
reality and its experiential, non-conceptual ground—just as much as its conceptual,
reflexive moment—is not a subjective category but is rather the framework of objectivity
in the world. While it is experienceable only by a subject of experience, it, as a pre-
conceptual ground of experience, predates the distinction between subject and object; it is
the non-conceptual context from which both emerge.
The non-conceptual is the ground of objectivity and permeates the object’s
particular identity. An object is always an object in a world, and, as such, it acquires
both conceptual elements that are subjectively projected onto the object, and a non-
conceptual core that denotes the pre-conceptual relation of significance in which the
object stands to its world. This relation of significance is multifarious and cannot be
299 Roger Foster’s excellent study of Adorno’s method of interpretation for ‘expressing’ the nonconceptual
rightly emphasizes that the non-conceptual should be understood in terms of the socialhistorical
experience sedimented in the object. See Foster, Roger, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), esp. pp. 1-30. Though I think Foster’s interpretation
of Adorno’s method of natural-history is basically right on point, I disagree with the primacy that he gives
to this form of interpretation in negative dialectics as a whole. After developing my own reading of the
relation between the natural-historical interpretation of the non-conceptual and the dialectical-conceptual
interpretation of the object, I discuss my agreements and disagreements with Foster at the end of this
chapter in footnote 340.
335