444 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
from the world as swindle and idea’.^182 It expressed, he said, the wish for
freedom and change.
Adorno’s theses on the question of ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial
Society?’ were intended as a concrete contribution to the diagnosis of
the current social situation. Right at the start, he made it clear that he
was not concerned with the clarification of terminology: ‘Experts might
be thought to be tormented by the vain anxiety that the present phase
was one thing or the other and hence deserved to be called by one
name rather than the other. In reality, however, there is a crucial matter
of substance at issue. What is at stake is whether the capitalist system
still predominates according to its model, however modified, or whether
the development of industry has rendered the concept of capitalism
obsolete.’^183 Adorno’s argument was based on the premise that rational
analysis of contemporary society by social theory was ruled out by the
irrationality of the totality. This irrationality was manifested, he thought,
in the mechanisms by means of which individuals were directly integ-
rated into society. He noted the atrophy of social spheres that enabled
individuals to familiarize themselves with the social values, the recogn-
ized norms and the traditions of society.
Since Adorno made use of Marx’s terminology to describe the basic
structures of modern society, it was logical to begin with the question
whether capitalism could still be used as a structural concept. In doing
so, he started from the premise that what was really social about a
society was its structure, which in this instance he defined as antagon-
istic. This meant that society as a whole consisted of institutions, norms,
dominant interests, etc., which have become autonomous as a real sphere
of antagonistic forces opposed to the intentions of individual actors.
Admittedly, this antagonism no longer takes the form of class distinc-
tions as we have known them historically, since class consciousness in
its traditional sense can no longer be established empirically. In the
same way the practical experience of exploitation has ceased to deter-
mine the actions of workers who themselves have been subject to a
process of social integration. ‘No longer does the employer confront
workers as the physical incarnation of the interests of capital.’^184 The
subjects of domination are without distinction and in equal measure the
agents of functions that the production apparatus dictates. Domination
thus assumes an impersonal character; it manifests itself as the coercion
exercised by the system.
The decisive modification of the classical model of capitalism that
justified the prefix ‘late’^185 was that the state control of the economy
had largely eliminated the dynamic of the marketplace. What, then,
justifies us in describing contemporary society as late capitalist rather
than industrial society? Adorno suggested three reasons. First, within
the system of social labour, people’s lives are dependent upon funda-
mental economic factors. Second, class antagonisms have been trans-
formed on the international plane into the opposition between rich and