Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic

by Fredric Jameson

Theodor Adorno is widely recognized as one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, as a foremost cultural critic and philosopher, and one of the most important figures in the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism more generally. And yet, Adorno’s reputation has suffered from accusations about his alleged pessimism and, even worse, from attempts but postmodernists to recruit him to their war against all ‘grand narratives’, including, most importantly, Marxism itself.

In this work Frederic Jameson rescues Adorno from the claws of his critics and the clutches of his false friends. Jameson sees Adorno as not only a thinker whose contribution to Marxism was unique and indispensable, but also as the theorist of late capitalism.

Late Marxism introduces Adorno’s thought to a new generation of dissidents and demonstrates the freshness and relevance of dialectical thinking to criticism and resistance today.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Politics, Academic, Literary Criticism

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I left more tabs in this book than any other. I would guess I spent something in the neighborhood of 30-45 hours reading it. On walks the last few nights, my thoughts have been worming through a couple of concepts which describe the difficulty of a text better than the vulgar “this book is difficult.” Jameson is rather more than a “difficult” writer— he is an *obfuscating* author, one who produces the obfuscation of his concepts through writing. Jameson is not an obfuscated writer (like a microbiologist, who must refer to phenomena outside of the domains of normative experience using the exact names of microbes who are only perceptible using an instrument of research), nor is Jameson a differencial writer (like Deleuze or Derrida, for whom signifiers are always active engines of the amorphous, novel, and positive; such that their literal or syntactical error in writing is a means of production, where production is more important than sense or where “nonsense is the sense event”).

Interestingly, or diabolically, Jameson is an obfuscating writer writing on one of history’s greatest obfuscating writers. Adorno meant for his texts to resist consumption, and Jameson has echoed this point just as well as he has echoed Adorno’s style. Both authors have made the four-clause sentence a default, and it is trivial to locate an 8-line paragraph from either writer which can be easily distilled into 2.

I will add some notes direct from the text some time soon- it has a very obscure progression and an interesting relationship with its subject matter. In a certain sense, the subject matter is most meaningfully the dialectical confounding of concepts, readings, interpretations, periods, and practices that might have some vulgar sense into richer, truer conceptions.

The concept of heteronymy guides this writing to great places, heteronymy leads the text to be deeply unerring in its treatment of nature and history, the creative event of aesthetic experience and the non-aesthetic elements which ground the experience, and most eminently the object and subject. The accompanying concept of part-whole relationship, of mediation, is a source of soreness. So far as there is a conclusion, it might be the soreness which mediation brings to collective consciousness; so far as the aesthetic is the soreness of the relation between subjective reason and the other, so far as class conflict is the soreness of the relations between production. The identity of identity and non-identity is my very tenderness.

[Spoust1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not "a lively and lucid introduction" to Adorno, as the back of the book suggests. That is probably for the better: Adorno's thought engages with such an array of different "fields" - philosophy, literature, popular culture, classical music, sociology. What I so casually called "Adorno's thought" cannot be spoken of as existing outside the texts in which it is manifest without doing damage to it; for it is not a system in which any object can be dissolved nor a method that one might apply. Moreover, Adorno's style - his frequent calling on a voluminous knowledge that can unsettle even his best read reader, and his expansive vocabulary, most notably - is an essential moment of his thought. That the what and how of writing form a dialectic (content-form) Adorno was well aware of. For those reasons any attempt at "introducing" Adorno in the traditional sense must do Adorno a disservice, not unlike how Sparknotes miss what is essential in literatary texts - namely, the fabric of the text itself.

Jameson is a major thinker in his own right, though - perhaps better thought of as a follower of Adorno than as a mere commentator - and he understands all this. His approach to Adorno is systematic, on one hand; but his main goal is not to present, to "totalize," Adorno's thought, which would inevitably result in it's reduction. Instead, this book is consciously a re-presentation of Adorno's thought, emphasizing that only now, in this third stage of capitalism, what Jameson calls the "late capitalism," can we appreciate Adorno's thought. As Nietzsche said, some men are born posthumously; Jameson's argument is based on the idea that Adorno is one of these men, and that his time has come.

[Tom L · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Jameon's best. Right up there with Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious. This classic example of Jamesonian metacommentary makes the difficult dialectical apparatus of Adorno's writing at once more wieldy and intuitive, by foregrounding not just the content of Adorno's writing, but the various forms it takes, or even makes necessary, for its expression. Superb.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I read this, so I should forebear to review. I remember feeling like I expected more, or something else, even though the book is inarguably erudite. Franky, no one unfamiliar with Jameson or Adorno will ever read this anyway, so if you've come this far, read it!

[A L]

This was a journey.

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant, in the original sense of the term.

consists of a number of reasonably short chapters in which Jameson weighs Adorno according to a particular thinker or theme, e.g. here's Adorno as a Kantian, here's Hegelian Marx Adorno, Raymond Williams Adorno, Adorno via Benjamin etc. I get the sense that the real object here is Jameson's capacity to tease out and inflect or inflate the sentences that he's looking at, but whatever, I still read him and wish I could think as meticulously and comparatively as he does (or gives the impression of doing).

Confirms a basic antipathy I have to Adorno's critical project, notwithstanding how much I enjoy Minima Moralia and how influential the Culture Industry was on how I default to thinking about cultural production. This has possibly got to do with how poorly I regard Adorno as having been served by his would-be successors. I would argue that a watered-down, more dilletantish and less philosophically literate affect derived from MM is the regnant form of literary criticism taking place outside of academia, and this persists in a series of unearned deflationary gestures - problematising totalising thinking, which in practice amounts to blessing ourselves before a representation of the particular or the impossibility, difficulties attendant on the doing of anything, which is really a bit of self-aggrandising position given what's actually at stake in the situation, which is conveying a perspective on works of art. It reminds me of i) a review of a middlebrow debut novel I once read that began with a repudiation of the idea of progress ii) a neurotic social media calculus which apportions out praise on the basis of how many other people rate it and in what ways.

I like Jameson, Cleary, Deane, Williams because they seem to me to enable particular types of reading or aesthetic encounters, Adorno seems to be getting in the way, or using then to interrogate a set of ethics which he refuses to address as such, bringing us at times to the position that the only correct way of being is to float around in a perpetual present without having any categories or concepts to work from or towards. So I'd recommend this it's a Good Read

[Pierre · Rating 4 out of 5]

The way I rate books:
5 stars: I would absolutely recommend this book to all my closest friends; it's a gem
4 stars: great work, a book that will stick with me and that I would enjoy reading again.
3 stars: good book but I wouldn't spend time reading it again.
2 stars: not worth reading, I lost my time... I didn't learn or feel anything apart from how to deal with boredom
1 star: this is shit. How can you have respect for your readers and write something like this?

[Kerr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to understand.

[Matt Eisen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helpful analysis of Adorno’s concepts and contributions to the Marxist tradition.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid option among books which introduce Adorno, and it has the benefit of being in print (unlike, say Martin Jay's 'Adorno'). The best thing here is that Jameson recognizes the importance of Marx for Adorno, which many of other books (especially Berstein's 'Adorno') don't. On the other hand, Jameson's Marx is a shifty figure based on Mandel and Harvey, and thus actually does a disservice to Adorno. It's like someone offering you chocolate with the promise that it's got just the right amount of cocoa in it... and then finding out that the perfectly proportioned cocoa was scooped up off the floor of a sawdust factory (Marx here = cocoa, not sure how clear that is).
Other downsides are a general vagueness which is probably inevitable given Jameson's Jamesian prose style; a too-swift examination of Negative Dialectics with a lot of chat about the aesthetics; and a fatuously 'hip' recourse to Althusser and the concept of hegemony as a corrective to Adorno's theory of ideology. This last is only necessary because Jameson doesn't understand Hegel at all, and fails to see how important the German Idealists were for Adorno's work.
That said, it's really not bad, and gets the general point right: Adorno's obsession with totality and so forth must be separated from an affirmation of totality and almost every other concept he uses, and we would do well to remember that.