138 Part II: A Change of Scene
In this early text, which was not published at the time, Adorno tried
to clarify his ideas about how critique might be thought of as a mode of
knowledge that could be defined as a dialectical process. This process
appeared to him to be one of rational construction. Such constructs
consisted of a series of mental models that could be brought together in
a set of changing constellations. And these constellations in turn pour
the historical materiality of society – what he called, following Freud,
‘the dregs of the phenomenal world’ – into new forms.
Adorno drew a distinction between this specifically philosophical goal
of knowledge and the independent logic of research. This too was a
theme in the inaugural lecture. Research, in his view, was the concern
of the individual disciplines, including the discipline of sociology. The
interaction between philosophy and sociological research that he vocifer-
ously called for was to be achieved through ‘dialectical communication’.
What he understood by this was that the aim of a large-scale philosophical
diagnosis of the age was ‘to construct keys with which to unlock real-
ity’.^23 To put this strategy into practice calls for an ‘exact imagination’
which can be protected against pure speculation only if ‘it adheres strictly
to the material provided by the individual disciplines’.^24 This is where
sociology has its place, alongside the other social sciences. With the
assistance of its research methods, it makes factual data accessible.
The great thematic framework of Adorno’s inaugural lecture was
comparable in its programmatic scope to Horkheimer’s directorial ad-
dress. Apart from this external similarity, the two lectures did not have
much in common, particularly as far as interdisciplinarity and the place
of the individual disciplines and their relation to philosophy were con-
cerned, topics treated by both men.
For Horkheimer, social philosophy – another word for social theory –
was the Queen of the Sciences because it involved the ‘general’,
the ‘essential’, and ‘is capable of giving particular studies animating
impulses’.^25 At the same time, he advocated a strategy of interdiscip-
linarity, explaining its productivity by the fact that only through the
collaboration of the individual disciplines could the great goal of ‘a
theory of the historical course of the present age’, a ‘theory of the
whole’, be arrived at.^26
In contrast, Adorno proclaimed his scepticism towards interdisciplin-
arity from the start of his lecture. He thought it pointless, since he deemed
it futile to strive for the ‘totality of the real’, given that the social world
has collapsed in ruins. In the same way, he tried to derail the model of
an interaction between philosophy and science by arguing that the logic
of the individual sciences was absolutely incompatible with the concept
of truth applicable to philosophy. In his view, there was an unbridge-
able gulf between research and interpretation. Thus, in contrast to
Horkheimer’s interdisciplinarity on a philosophical foundation, Adorno
took up a position of his own which he was able to define metaphor-
ically only with the aforementioned image of the exact imagination.