¹ Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1953), pp. 127, 121.Google Scholar

² James, Henry, The American Scene (Bloomington, 1969), p. 347Google Scholar. Subsequent references in parentheses in the text.

³ Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Cumming, J. (New York, 1972), p. 167.Google Scholar

⁴ Adorno, Theodor, Prisms, trans. Weber, S. (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 82.Google Scholar

⁵ Rowe, John Carlos, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison, 1984), p. 28Google Scholar. The image of James as an elitist snob who celebrates bourgeois values is a staple of left liberal criticism of the novelist, beginning in the twenties with Van Wyck Brooks, V. L. Parrington, and Charles Beard, revived by Maxwell Geismar's hysterical diatribe of the mid-sixties and receiving its latest expression in Jameson's, FredricThe Political Unconscious (Ithaca, 1981), pp. 221–22.Google Scholar

⁶ Among the many critics who emphasize James's allegedly reactionary response are Conn, Peter, The Divided Mind (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, “The American Scene: Versions of the City,” Massachusetts Review, 8 (Summer 1967)Google Scholar; Furth, David, The Visionary Betrqyed: Aesthetic Discontinuity in Henry James's The American Scene (Cambridge, Mass., 1978)Google Scholar. Here I should mention several valuable essays on The American Scene: Holland, Laurence B., “Representation and Renewal in James's The American Scene” appended to his The Expense of Vision (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 411–34Google Scholar; Johnson, Stuart, “American Marginalia: James's The American Scene,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 24 (Spring 1982), pp. 83–101Google Scholar; Kraft, James, “On Reading The American Scene,” Prose, 6 (1973), pp. 115–35.Google Scholar Closest to my own concerns is Daniel Silver's important discussion of The American Scene in chapter 3 of his “Margin and Mystery” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1981).

⁷ Adorno, Theodor, “Sociology and Psychology,” New Left Review, 47 (1968), p. 74.Google Scholar

⁸ Prisms, pp. 32, 31.

⁹ See Sartre, J. P., Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Sheridan-Smith, A. (London, 1976), pp. 771–72.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia, trans. Jephcott, E. (London, 1974), p. 95.Google Scholar

¹¹ Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 48.

¹² Prisms, p. 84.

¹³ James, Henry, Hawthorne (Ithaca, 1966), p. 67Google Scholar. My use of the word “centered” here and my later use of the word “decentered” substitute for “self-identical” and “non-identical” respectively, the less accessible terminology favored by most of Adorno's English translators and commentators.

¹⁴ James, Henry, Partial Portraits (Ann Arbor, 1970), pp. 5, 7.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Minima Moralia, p. 16.

¹⁶ Adorno, Theodor, Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. B. (New York, 1973), pp. xi, 216Google Scholar. In quotations from this text the translation has been occasionally altered.

¹⁷ Habermas, Jurgen, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Lawrence, F. (Cambridge, 1983), p. 100Google Scholar. My sketch of the dialectic of Enlightenment is a bare summary that of necessity leaves out the issue of nature's mastery by instrumental reason. Adorno rejects Lukacs's notion of reification as specific to the historical development of capitalism, and to be abolished with the revolt of the proletariat. As Habermas points out, Adorno and Horkheimer “generalize the category of reification,” making instrumental reason itself “the basis of the structures of reified consciousness.” This troubles Habermas because, in his view, it leads to an aporia: with reason having been contaminated, there is no way to conceptualize opposition to reification. See Habermas, , The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. McCarthy, T. (Boston, 1983), pp. 379–80Google Scholar. (See also note 39 below on mimesis.) In the voluminous literature on Adorno in English, Habermas' exposition, analysis and counter-theory is perhaps the richest engagement with the philosopher.

¹⁸ Negative Dialectics, pp. 278, 216, 183, 22, 221, 147, 191, 219.

¹⁹ James, Henry, The Tragic Muse (New York, 1909), 1, p. 173Google Scholar. I develop my reading of this passage in Henry James and the Problem of Robert Browning (Athens, 1985), pp. 126–27Google Scholar. Both James's and Adorno's views of the subject have a resemblance to Foucault's sense of the word “as a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.” He speaks of the “submission of subjectivity” in “The Subject and Power” reprinted as the “Afterword” to Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983), pp. 212–13Google Scholar. For more on Foucault, James, and Adorno see notes 31 and 43.

²⁰ Negative Dialectics, pp. 189, 191.

²¹ James, Henry, Autobiography, ed. Dupee, F. W. (New York, 1956), p. 101.Google Scholar

²² Prisms, p. 91.

²³ Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 232.

²⁴ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Women and Economics (New York, 1966), pp. 116–18, 220.Google Scholar

²⁵ Aspects of Sociology, Frankfurt Institute (Boston, 1982), p. 45.Google Scholar

²⁶ Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 154–55.

²⁷ Quoted in Dallmayr, F., The Twilight of Subjectivity (Amherst, 1981), p. 133.Google Scholar

²⁸ Two thinkers who have discussed this dualistic weakness in liberal thought are Unger, Roberto M., Knowledge and Politics (New York, 1975) pp. 46–47, 121–23Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 1985), p. 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ Foucault, Michel, Knowledge/Power, trans. Gordon, C. (New York, 1980), p. 119Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, trans. Hurley, R. (New York, 1980), p. 92.Google Scholar

³⁰ Jean-Christophe Agnew also notes the “army of puppets” passage, and calls it an “extraordinarily prophetic image of the managed freedom of consumer societies.” In touching briefly on The American Scene in the course of discussing James's relation to consumer culture Agnew goes on to remark that James's book “foreshadows the modern critique of the consumer culture industry as ‘mass deception.’ And like that critique, the book seems to look backward as well to the romantic tradition within which Marx first ventured his views on the human impoverishment of possessive individualism.” While Agnew's allusion to James's affinity to the Frankfurt School anticipates the direction of the present essay, his description of their critique as romantic is true only on the broadest level, and inadequate when that critique is examined in any detail. Although I question Agnew's emphasis on James's “elitism” and “aloofness” and his neglect of James's sympathetic identification with much of what he encountered, Agnew's essay is one of the most successful recent efforts to “break the seal of historical solipsism and idiosyncrasy surrounding James.” See “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” The Culture of Consumption, ed. Lears, and Fox, (New York, 1983), pp. 67–100.Google Scholar

³¹ Negative Dialectics, p. 27. My emphasis on the hotel world as closed system agrees with Mark Seltzer's description of it as a “closed order of life” (p. 111), “an achieved closure,” an “exemplary site of power and control” (pp. 143, 112). Where we differ is that, in my argument, James (like Adorno) finds closed systems “finite and static,” whereas in Seltzer's argument James (like Foucault) sees the hotel world as embodying “the panoptic and normalizing techniques that constitute the American scene” (p. 115). To Seltzer, the hotel world's “ultimate realization of the panoptic ideal” re-enacts the novelist's “own policies of aesthetic form” “Incorporating the normative and the organic, the hotel is a triumph of form, of the Jamesian imperative of organic regulation” (p. 113). Seltzer's reading of James through Foucault reduces James's work to a closed system of “circular efficiency” that is “always self-confirming, every deviation from the norm reaffirms the norm by providing an occasion for correction and normalization” (p. 87). The sterile circularity of James's art that Seltzer unfortunately insists on depends on a simplistic notion of organic form. In fact, the organic metaphor in James is always problematized by James himself, who possesses an undeniable urge for unity, but an urge that (his Prefaces show) is inevitably compromised, often sacrificed, in the pressures and “cruel crisis” of artistic creation. Compromised and sacrificed too is the disciplinary rule of the hotel world, which is limited by its static perfection of control. For James, as for Adorno, the bourgeois norm is not discipline but rather antinomy; or to borrow the words of Foucault in “The Subject and Power”: James perceives the American scene as a space of “agonism…a permanent provocation” (p. 222). This Foucault might have usefully complicated Seltzer's argument. See Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca, 1984).Google Scholar

³² Negative Dialectics, pp. 26, 346.

³³ Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 167.

³⁴ Adorno softened his hostility to mass culture late in life; see his “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique, 6 (Fall, 1975).Google Scholar

³⁵ Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 154–55.

³⁶ Veblen, Thorstein, Essays In Our Changing Order (New York, 1934), pp. 226–27Google Scholar. John Patrick Diggins in his excellent book on Veblen, , The Bard of Savagery (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, calls this essay “the closest thing to a self-portrait that Veblen ever committed to print” (p. 40).

³⁷ Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 184, 168, 183.

³⁸ Adorno and Horkheimer find a relation between hatred of women and Jews; Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 112.

³⁹ Minima Moralia, p. 154. Mimesis is a pivotal concept for Adorno because it alone can escape instrumental reason as its opposite – “pure impulse.” Mimesis would be an aspect of the “reconciled condition” of freedom – as a state of uncoerced intersubjectivity. But, as Habermas emphasizes, mimesis must remain a possibility resisting full articulation precisely because it is a “primordial” reason ”that is before reason.” “At most we can circle around this idea” for it is blocked in an aporia that Habermas tries to untangle by changing paradigms from Adorno's “philosophy of consciousness” to a “paradigm of linguistic philosophy” – namely communication. See Habermas, , The Theory of Communicative Action, pp. 382–83, 390.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Autobiograpy, p. 17; Letters of Henry James, 4, ed. Leon, Edel (Cambridge, 1984), p. 562.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Autobiography, pp. 149–50.

⁴² Ibid., pp. 8 412. Rather than seeing humiliation and self-contempt as one moment in James's self-representation, most critics reduce his complexity. Instead of taking him on his own dialectical terms, they tend to portray James as consumed by feelings of inferiority and envy, of repressed hostility manifested in a lifelong passivity. Too often ignored is what James implicitly reveals – that he converts these emotions, discovering the creative power in their negative energy. See, for instance, Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Untried Years (New York, 1978), p. 59Google Scholar; Schneider, Daniel, The Crystal Case (Lawrence, Kansas, 1978), pp. 18–23Google Scholar; Habegger, Alfred, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism (New York, 1982), pp. 259–60.Google Scholar

⁴³ Negative Dialectics, pp. 276–77, 299. In his delineation of decentered subjectivity, Adorno resembles the Foucault of “The Subject and Power” who states that “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are … We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality [subjection] which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (p. 216). Adorno puts it this way: “The question of freedom does not call for a Yes or No; it calls for a theory to rise above the individuality that exists as well as above the society that exists” (Negative Dialectics, p. 283). The relation of Adorno and Foucault is in need of extended analysis that, to my knowledge, has yet to be done. Such a discussion might begin with Foucault's statement that in the 1950s “Critical theory was hardly known in France and the Frankfurt School was practically unheard of. …It is a strange case of non-penetration between two very similar types of thinking which is explained, perhaps, by that very similarity. Nothing hides the fact of a problem in common better than two similar ways of approaching it.” See “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview With Michel Foucault,” Telos 55 (Spring, 1983), p. 200.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Here I can only mention a point that deserves extended discussion: the striking connection between non-identity and Jamesian narrative. For instance, Strether's concern to establish a viable “non-identity” is formally enacted in James's narrative procedures which make identity problematic. His well-known predilection for “free indirect style” or narrated monologue (in Dorrit Cohn's phrase), a technique that is suspended between first person and third person, blurs the narrator's and character's perspectives, creating an indeterminacy that dramatizes identity as decentered.

⁴⁵ Autobiography, pp. 17, 455.

⁴⁶ Negative Dialectics, pp. 277, 299.

⁴⁷ Adorno, Theodor, “Subject and Object,” reprinted in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Arato, and Gebhardt, (New York, 1978), p. 509.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Adorno, Theodor, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Critique, 26 (spring–summer 1982) p. 129.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Geismar, Maxwell, Henry James and the Jacobites (New York, 1965), p. 350.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Ambivalence toward the Jew, if not the particular mix of identification and disgust in James's response, is characteristic of American attitudes in this period. John Higham, the leading authority on American ethnicity, writes: “Most of the anti-semitism in native American circles in the late nineteenth century was entangled with a persistent sympathy.” See Send These To Me (Baltimore, 1984), p. 103.Google Scholar

⁵¹ My sketch of early twentieth-century attitudes derives from Higham, John, Strangers In The Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York, 1973), pp. 110, 118.Google Scholar

⁵² Sartre, J.-P., Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. Becker, G. (New York, 1948), pp. 57, 55, 18, 58.Google Scholar

⁵³ Adorno, , “Subject and Object,” p. 506.Google Scholar