446 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
of nature continues as a systemic relationship that in the meantime has
become a ‘second nature’. It appears to be a natural, irrevocable given.
Adorno summed up the tendency for the whole of the social life process
to be enveloped in a comprehensive administrative organization with
the concept of ‘the administered world’. This tendency was expressed
in the different forms of intervention in a state-regulated capitalism, on
the one hand, and the control exercised by the welfare state, on the
other. The precautionary measures taken by the welfare state seemed
to be alien to the system, but actually served to sustain it. This was
Adorno’s interpretation of the fact that, while the social system was
becoming increasingly integrated and independent, that independence
had long since become marginal and was really a symptom of its grow-
ing disintegration.
The isolated possibilities for resistance that developed within the
social system were taken in hand by the culture industry, thanks to
which ‘even the ability to imagine in concrete terms that the world
might be different’ was largely paralysed.^192
At the end of his analysis of the present situation, Adorno admitted
pessimistically that ‘there was no vantage point outside the machine’.^193
This raises the question whether we are left with any scope at all for a
project of social enlightenment. Against this background, he pointed at
the end of his diagnosis to the ‘free-floating anxiety’ that arises from the
overwhelming power of the things that confront us. This anxietyliberates
impulses that might give rise to recognizable potentials for resistance.
Dahrendorf was the second principal speaker at the conference, and
he took the opportunity to formulate a fundamental criticism of the
Frankfurt School’s theoretical base as well as its relation to practice.
His main objection was directed at the degree of conceptual abstraction
and the generality of Adorno’s diagnosis of the age. According to
Dahrendorf, ‘an all too confident analysis of the totality of our social
development’ was itself part of ‘an ossified world; it duplicates this
ossified world’.^194 With its turn to the level of principle, it casts doubt on
the possibility of a practical politics that might achieve concrete social
reforms that could lead to improved living conditions. Furthermore,
the predictive value of theories of social totality was small; theories
of this type were limited to producing ‘a neo-pessimistic picture of his-
torical inevitabilities’. Finally, Dahrendorf proposed that the potential
for development in the advanced industrial nations made a future state
of affairs free from domination quite conceivable. He went on to ask,
not without a polemical side-swipe at Adorno: ‘Are there identifiable
conditions and identifiable groups where we can find this idea of doing
away with the domination of human beings by other human beings?
What sociological factors can we point to with which to explain the
return of this dream of anarchy?’^195
Adorno took his time to reply impromptu and at length in a speech
that was frequently interrupted by applause from the hall. Partly as a