Adorno

A Theory Devoured by Thought 429

was able to fall back on the explanations he had offered in 1966 in
Negative Dialectics. There, it was possible to discover in detail what he
had meant when he described sociology as an interpretative procedure
that he called ‘micrological’. His method envisaged the individual analy-
ses of different types of data which could be concentrated in different
explanatory models that could then be synthesized in a constellation.
‘Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tanta-
mount to deciphering the constellation which.. .it bears within it.’^88
What Adorno formulated as a constellation was supposed to culminate
in theoretical knowledge that would not be confined to classification or
schematization: ‘As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the con-
cept it would like to unseal, hoping that it might fly open like the lock of
a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a
single number, but to a combination of numbers.’^89
By way of illustrating such combinations of numbers, Adornoreferred
in Negative Dialectics to Max Weber’s ‘ideal types’ as aids to under-
standing. Weber thought of ideal types as heuristically useful constructs
that are utopian in character because as ‘composed’ entities they have
no reality. However, ideal types have nothing in common with an ideal
state to be striven for. It is rather the case that ‘the idea of what ought
to be, the paradigmatic, should be kept at a distance from what are in a
logical sense “ideal images of thought”.’^90 As a music theorist, Adorno
regarded this method of creating ideal types as a form of composition at
the level of abstract theory. Since Weber himself spoke of ‘composing’
in connection with ideal types, it was all the easier for Adorno to take
up this idea. In analogous fashion to these ideal types, whose purpose is
to make the process-like nature of social developments comprehensible,
objects have to be encircled by the constellation of intellectual models,
instead of being subsumed under concepts. Thinking in constellations is
itself neither associative nor non-conceptual, since ‘Concepts alone can
achieve what the concept prevents.’^91
Alongside this way of thinking in terms of sociological models, Adorno
tried to clarify the concept of social totality. He defined totality as the
assemblage of the relations formed by individuals which have their own
weight over and against him. The ‘totality’ is society as a ‘thing in itself’,
as a system. Without the previous experience of society as a totality, it is
scarcely possible to comprehend the individual facts elicited in the course
of research. To elucidate this idea of the need to use the objectivity of
society as a whole as a starting-point, Adorno produced an instructive
illustration: ‘In order to know what a worker is one must know what
capitalist society is; conversely, the latter is surely no more “basic” than
are the workers.’^92
At the conclusion of his introduction, and on a number of occasions
in his lecture course, Adorno commented on Max Weber’s postulate of
value freedom, a concept to which Popper’s critical rationalism adhered
strictly.^93 Adorno maintained in contrast that sociology was a normative