Adorno

A Theory Devoured by Thought 441

dialectics was concerned ‘with the dissolution of standpoint-thinking
itself’. This is to be achieved ‘by means of a procedure in which the
phenomena under investigation are not scrutinized from any outside
perspective, but are judged in accordance with their own concept.’^166
Nevertheless, the question of the impartiality of critical theory had now
been raised; it forced itself on Adorno’s attention and would preoccupy
him in the near future more than almost any other.

What kind of a society do we live in?

Adorno’s analysis of the present

‘All theory is grey,’ Goethe has Mephistopheles preach to the student he

is leading around by the nose; the sentence is already ideology from the

very beginning, fraud about the fact that the tree of life the practical

people planted and the devil in the same breath compares to gold is

hardly green at all; the greyness of theory is for its part a function of the

life that has been stripped bare of qualities.^167

As a philosopher who had passed his sixtieth year, what Adorno had
to show was chiefly the Negative Dialectics, but there was also the
Aesthetic Theory, although this book, which remained a fragment, was
not published until shortly after his death. In sociology he had pub-
lished a considerable number of essays on a great variety of subjects,
demonstrating that his unorthodox social theory was eager to overcome
the separation between pure philosophy and pure sociology that was
currently practised by both disciplines. But even more importantly, the
micrological form of sociological theory formation fitted his conception
of the subject. As he explains in Negative Dialectics, his first concern
was to make use of models in his work on sociology, in other words,
‘to interpret phenomena, not to ascertain, organize and classify facts,
let alone to make them available as information.’^168 In his epistemo-
logy, Adorno insists on ‘binding statements without a system’.^169 As a
sociologist, too, he had little interest in creating a consistent theory of
society. What he wanted above all was to clarify the way in which we
acquire knowledge of society. He wanted to show in practical terms
how social knowledge is to be understood as a specific form of reality,
to discover ‘how matters have developed thus far and where they are
going’.^170 Adorno approached sociology by a process of immersion in
the particular nature of specific social phenomena, such as quarrels
or situations of spontaneous laughter,^171 so as to decipher them as
expressions of the universal. He did not analyse the universal, that is
contemporary society, from the perspective of an observer contemplat-
ing it from outside, but from within. This internal perspective revealed
‘what secretly holds the machinery together’,^172 namely the way in which
modern society functions.