A Theory Devoured by Thought 445poor countries. And third, social cohesion is indirectly created now as it
always was by relations of exchange. The universal reach of the laws of
exchange is the cause of the abstract nature of social relations. Follow-
ing this clarification of the structural elements in society, Adorno ar-
gued in favour of a definition that would avoid the need to choose
between late capitalism or industrial society. Present-day society is an
industrial society as judged by the state of its productive forces, for the
pattern of industrial labour has stamped itself on every aspect of soci-
ety. In contrast to this, ‘society is capitalist in its relations of produc-
tion.’^186 For on the one hand, people living in contemporary society are
forced to adjust completely to the apparatus of production; on the other
hand, production takes place for the maximization of profit. This has
the consequence that commodities are produced merely as exchange
values; they are the expression of needs created in the first instance by
the profit motive. The predominance of the interest in exploiting capital
is maintained at the expense of the objective needs of consumers. ‘Even
where there are goods aplenty, this abundance seems cursed. Since need
tends towards illusion, it infects the commodities with its own illusory
character.’^187 The irrationality of social relations is accepted as a neces-
sary price for preserving this state of affairs, even though the short-term
benefits that the system seems to guarantee the individual are of dubi-
ous value. The expression of social irrationality is the fact that poverty
persists even in the affluent society. The fact that extremes of wealth
and poverty can exist side by side is manifest proof of the absurdity of
society as a whole.
Adorno refused to accept a technocratic justification according to
which social domination is merely the product of material circumstances.
Domination is rather a means by which to ensure that certain definite
social interests prevail: ‘It is not technology that is at fault, but its
entanglement with the social relations which hold it in their grip.’^188
The control of technology by economic interests so that those interests
remain invisible is referred to by Adorno as ‘the technological veil’
behind which real relations of power and domination lie concealed. ‘It
is not for nothing that the invention of weapons of destruction should
have been the prototype of the new technology.’^189 The dynamics of
technical rationality do not lead to the dissolution of outdated relations
of domination, as Marx had predicted in his philosophy of history. ‘The
signature of the age is the dominance established by the relations
of production over the forces of production which have long since
made a mockery of those relations. The fact that the extended arm of
mankind can reach out to remote, empty planets, but is unable to estab-
lish eternal peace on its own planet, is a striking proof of the absurd
direction in which the social dialectic is moving.’^190 This is the high point
of Adorno’s diagnosis of his age. He understood society as a coherent
system whose stability arises from rising productivity which itself stems
from society’s increasing success in subduing nature.^191 The domination