Late Marxism: Adorno: Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic Book

Theodor Adorno's texts are difficult & confusing, knotted tight into an intimidating intertextual register. Reading him, really reading him, necessitates extensive focus & diverse erudition or his puzzling books will leave you in the dust. So, in 'Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic' Fredric Jameson does some of the heavy lifting for you. The bargain in any book like this is that its author is smart enough to read & reveal the subject, in this case Adorno, so that you don't have to be.

But how smart do you need to be to read Fredric Jameson? 'Late Marxism' still assumes a background in philosophy, sociology and history, calling on Freud, Weber, Kant, Hegel, the Frankfurters and every Marxist you've heard of (and a few you probably haven't) to read Adorno. Jameson's writing is clearer than Adorno's own, but I wouldn't exactly say it's accessible. The back-cover of this edition calls it a 'lively and lucid introduction to [Adorno]'. It's not.

This is not an introduction, in so far as it does not introduce Adorno's thinking from the ground up--for that, check out books by Simon Jarvis, Brian O'Connor and I hear that new thing from Zero Books is okay too. But Jameson's book assumes knowledge of Adorno's concepts and analyzes, elaborates and refortifies them through attendant and adjacent theoretical work, both by others and his own. If you're generally conversant in critical theory, but not Adorno in particular, this might be a good bridge to his books.

For me, the most useful & provocative sections were toward the beginning at the very end. They address two of the most interesting ambiguities in reading Adorno today--how Hegelian is he and how postmodern is he? If at all?

Jameson's recapitulating of Adorno through Hegel in the first section will to a lot to help you understand the vexed connection between the two. Adorno's anti-Hegelian position that 'the whole is untrue' puts into conflict the particular & the universal, the concept and the constellation, which rejigs Hegel's entire system--in Jameson's reading, along the lines of an abyssal Marxism, but one grounded in historico-cultural analysis rather than abstract speculative conceits. Jameson's more-or-less convincing thesis is that Adorno is not, as some have claimed, a Hegelian who substitutes the Freudian death drive for the historical world spirit, but a Marxist who disabuses some of the economic determinism in Marx, replacing it with an ashen dialectical anthropology. This move does not revert to Hegel so much as further develop Marxist recourse to social realities as conditioned by material forces. Adorno's Marxism is a social history of extinction, of damaged life, a salvage ship in poisoned waters contaminated by the chemical runoff from drowned industrial ruins.

The last, and maybe most interesting chapter pits Adorno against postmodernism. In Jameson's reading, the relationship between Hegel & Adorno is tense but substantive, properly dialectical; interlocking, ricocheting apart and restituting itself. Conversely postmodernism as philosophy is sort of a thicket for Adorno--but as a periodization it makes fertile soil for his ideas. The reconciliation is a nuanced historicity, it does not hybridize or composite postmodernity with Adorno (as it did with Hegel, developments in sociology, etc), rather suggesting Adorno's 'introspective & reflexive dialectic' as a substitutive 'model for the 1990s'. And does Adorno persist until today, almost 30 years after Jameson's book (which was written only 20 years after Adorno's death)? I mean, yeah, probably.