ADORNO

Adorno's philosophy is about the kind of world we are making out of uncritical notions about knowledge and human consciousness. To Adorno the present world of advanced societies is the one in which knowledge respond more to the instrumental needs of universal Capitalist exchange and the its overwhelming social administration and codification, than other human possibilities. For matter and nature in general, to become commodities they have to be abstracted from a whole constellation of meanings and functions. The exchanged value they acquire is a reified value: in other words, they lose their sensous,heterogenous and potential quality in order to become opaque products reduced to fulfill the abstract needs of the market. Man becomes just another commodity in this global market. Man, once reduced to a commodity, he has to sacrifice his many inherent potential qualities. They become the irrational side of his nature, descarded as worthless, but nonetheless those dimensions of his life remain as a shadow difficult if not impossible to subdue to the rational imperatives of social administration.

Now, Adorno focuses his criticism on how human consciousness suffers this reductionism in the name of the many rational and instrumental disciplines that today enjoy the legitimacy in this world of "universal administration and codification". To Adorno, the reduction of people, human beings, to instruments of a global market system can be seen in the philosophy of people like Kant, Heidegger, Comte, Hegel, and so on. Philosophy has always looked for the self-same identity. In other words: western philosophy has always been obsessed with the problem of identity. The problem has always been how to reduce, domesticate, and subdue the many multidimensional qualities of nature and the universe; to a self-same rational control. Thought had to be structured to the dictates of logic and causality, but at the same time the object, the external world; was becoming simplified and deprived of its many other sides. They were rejected as irrational, as a danger. But nonetheless they stay with us like a shadow: an omious shadow always eluding our control. The "other" is always there whether we like it or not. Today, once social sciences, economy and the many "scientific" disciplines applied to nature, social and human control, became independent of philosophy their fields of application are already overwhelming: the codification of the world, or: the reduction of the world to a self-identity measured by the standards of exchange-value is a scared possibility.

Adorno talks about how our subjectivity is socially produced in order to function as "free" individuals who "freely" obey and subject themselves to their authorities. But lurking behind the curtains there's an "unconscious" shadow which makes us feeling uncomfortable with ourselves, always already pushing us beyond the limit of proper and discrete bourgeoise civilized behaviour. The forces of repressed nature live with us always threatening to disrupt the self-same identity, the never achieved balance of a consciousness that gets desplaced and unstabled at the same time it looks more secure.

Adorno was always against the Socialist countries. To him they were just another version of "the advanced industrial-capitalist establishment". His definition of a true rational society and rational knowledge embraces the many multidimensional aspects an qualities of nature.