Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 391despair, and I would say that, as long as... people are not required
to assume complete responsibility and self-determination, their entire
well-being and happiness in this world is an illusion. A bubble that
at some point will burst. And when it bursts this will have terrible
consequences.’^107 Gehlen immediately accused Adorno of reverting to
an irresponsible idealism, while for his part Adorno insisted material-
istically on the horizon of possibilities that would open up once human
beings no longer had to suffer from ‘the overpowering organization of
the world’. For what would drive people to the relief from institutional
burdens postulated by Gehlen was ‘precisely the strains... imposed
on them by institutions’.^108 In this way Adorno was able to hold fast to
his belief in the subject’s capacity for autonomous action even at the
point where his critique of society was at its most stringent. It followed
from this that reification must have its limits. For only if Adorno
believed that there were limits to the process by which difference was
brought into line with eternal sameness, could non-identity, the cen-
tral concept of Negative Dialectics, have a proper foundation.^109 Thus
he did not doubt that the subject ‘resisted the societal spell with forces
mobilized from the stratum in which the principle of individuality which
enabled civilization to prevail, was able to assert itself against the pro-
cess of civilization that was liquidating it.’^110 The thesis that ‘societaliza-
tion finds its limits in the subject’^111 was one Adorno defended explicitly
at the end of a lively debate with Alexander Mitscherlich in early
November 1965 in an internal conference of the German Sociology
Society. Adorno took the opportunity to clarify his diagnosis of the
total impotence of the individual by placing the emphasis on the latter’s
potential for freedom. This meant that human subjects were by no means
condemned to utter impotence by the constraints of society. He put
it succinctly: ‘Critique of the individual does not mean the abolition of
the individual.’^112 A few years later, he would point to the example
of the student movement as proof that the forces of resistance can in
fact be mobilized within individuals.^113 And as far as the masses of the
population were concerned, he diagnosed ‘a double, self-contradictory
consciousness’.^114
At the end of May 1969, in one of the last lectures before his death,
Adorno stressed that, ‘apparently, the integration of consciousness and
free time has not yet wholly succeeded.’ He refers to ‘the real interests
of individuals’ as the disruptive factor. They are still ‘strong enough to
resist, up to a point, their total appropriation. This would accord with
the societal prognosis that a society whose fundamental contradictions
persist undiminished cannot be totally integrated into consciousness.’^115
For this reason, the complexity of the social system appears as no more
than a veil. ‘In many respects... society has become more transparent
than ever before. If insight depended on nothing but the functional
state of society, then it would be possible for the proverbial man on the
Clapham omnibus to understand how it works today.’^116