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something apart from the life of a culture or society and its possibilities. Adorno
too seeks to affirm life but, given the present society, to affirm life is to affirm
that society and thus a life which does not live. Adorno instead affirms hope fo a
life (that is, a society) which lives. (33)
The Lament over Reification
[Adorno gives a lecture in 1932 titled Die Idee der Naturgeschichte] In that
lecture, Adorno attempted to redefine nature and history. Nature did not
have any connotations of physical nature but meant myth or what human
history bears as fatefully structured, pregiven, while history refers to the
sphere of human behaviour in which change occurs. (50)
Prima facie, Adorno seems inconsistent and eclectic in his appeal to the concept
of reification. [] However, Adornos concept of reification is consistent and
original. Many of the apparent confusions arise from his quest to avoid grounding
thought in the traditional ways and from the stylistic procedures which he
adopted to achieve this. Adornos theory of reification was based on commodity
fetishism in a way which dependent not on Marxs theory of work or the labourprocess (alienation) but on Marxs theory of value, especially on the distinction
between use-value and exchange-value. (55)