In this innovative book, Peter Gordon aims to provide a normative foundation for critical theory by drawing on the early Frankfurt school critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno. He thereby seeks to challenge what he calls “negativist interpretations” that suggest Adorno is “a philosopher of thoroughgoing negativity” who lacks any normative orientation. While negativist interpretations have some validity, argues Gordon, we find in Adorno’s works also a positive source of normativity.
Gordon locates in Adorno’s work a “normative demand for maximal fulfillment of human flourishing” (69–70). Against negativist interpretations, he argues that we find in Adorno human flourishing as a positive concept, which implies that the social world should be arranged in such a way as to make it possible for human beings to realize their capacities to the fullest possible extent. The promise of human flourishing is given to us in instances of human happiness. The particular experiences of happiness in the present, which are partial and precarious, are promises of happiness in the future, where happiness is universal and would extend to humanity.
Adorno sees the world not as a seamless whole or completely bad, as argued by some negativist interpretations, but as shot through with contradictions. Adorno’s practice of immanent critique allows us to seize upon these contradictions (to which the nonidentical alludes) and thereby to “expose moments that point beyond our current despair to a world in which happiness or human flourishing would at last be realized” (40). Instead of the absence of normativity, we find a form of immanent normativity in Adorno, which emerges from the internal contradictions of our social life.
Gordon’s book is well written, accessible and free of jargon, and an interesting read that brings to our attention an aspect of Adorno’s work that scholars have mostly overlooked: sources of normativity. It is crucial in that it provides a defense of Adorno vis-à-vis scholars, mainly of the contemporary Frankfurt school kind, preoccupied with providing normative foundations for critical theory and who have dismissed Adorno with the argument that he focuses exclusively on the negative and lacks any normative orientation. Gordon also offers insightful examples of how we can get “glimpses of happiness without domination” (170), including some from Adorno’s writings on music (Beethoven, Mahler, and the Second Viennese School).
However, while saving Adorno’s work from the charge of negativity, Gordon provides a “positivist interpretation,” which becomes somewhat uncritical of positivity itself. In his Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007, 33–34), Adorno points out that during his exile in the United States, the notion of Positivität (positivity) was constantly propagated by capitalist society, even though people had to adjust themselves to oppressive conditions, and that is why he started to question this term. It implies that positivity itself is something good, which exempts people from critiquing what is accepted as positive and leads to fetishizing positivity itself. The task of critical theory is to find the negative in what appears as positive and to point at the Fehlbarkeit (fallibility) and Schwäche (weakness) of positivity itself (ibid., 49).
Gordon’s positivist reading of Adorno does the exact opposite: it aims to find the positive in the negative, which no longer seems to question the fallibility and weakness of positivity itself. The fetish of positivity appears on several levels. To begin with, Gordon repeatedly invokes the notion of the positive on a textual level, such as in his claim that we find in Adorno a positive concept of human flourishing (although Adorno never once used such a concept) and that we find in his work a positive normativity. But Adorno was critical of normative claims that he saw imbued with the fetish of positivity as implicated in capitalist power relations.
Furthermore, Gordon turns Adorno’s hesitant formulations of the possibility of (damaged) happiness in a damaged world into happiness as “the expression of a maximalist demand,” which would entail a future condition that “satisfied all of our needs at once without contradiction” (99). To counter the negativist interpretation according to which Adorno analyzes the world as “all bad,” Gordon provides a positivist interpretation that suggests that Adorno leads us to a society that will be (one day) “all good.” Both give the picture of a whole world without contradictions, which Adorno would have contested.
Also, Gordon aims to reinterpret nonidentity as a positive concept. As he puts it, “the promise of happiness can only manifest itself as the non-identical” (103). However, for Adorno, the nonidentical is linked not to the positive (e.g., happiness) but to the negative. In his Negative Dialectics (Continuum, 1981, 203) he points out that the nonidentical refers to a bodily moment of pain and suffering, which “tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different.” It is not so much the promise of happiness that we glimpse in the negative, as Gordon claims, but the bodily moment of suffering linked to nonidentity that can instigate us, together with others, to create a better world where such suffering has ceased to exist (see Claudia Leeb, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism [Oxford University Press, 2017]).
Gordon’s focus on the positive can also distract us from the negative aspects of today’s precarity capitalism—growing exploitation, alienation, unemployment and underemployment, and job insecurity for people at all levels of the economic hierarchy. Instead of a critique of precarity capitalism, Gordon focuses on today’s “precarious happiness” that should lead to a future all-encompassing happiness that implies “the unfolding of all our manifold capacities, from the sheer fact of bodily pleasure to the most exalted kinds of aesthetic and intellectual experience” (71). Such a demand seems like a bourgeois fantasy from which the working classes are excluded, particularly in the United States (and elsewhere), where many people go hungry and suffer. Therefore, we need to find the negative in what appears to be positive, such as false forms of happiness that capitalist (via the culture industry) and fascist forces (via their propaganda tactics) offer to people to make them forget their suffering on a subjective level instead of uniting with others to challenge the objective, capitalist conditions that created their suffering and that remain intact (see Claudia Leeb, Contesting the Far Right [Columbia University Press, 2024]).
Finally, despite invoking some of Karl Marx’s more well-known texts throughout the book, Gordon aims to distance Adorno from Marx’s thought (106–9) and from psychoanalysis (122–23). However, his arguments are problematic. Adorno follows Marx and Freud closely, particularly (but not only) in his studies on the rise of fascism, which he saw as connected to the ills of capitalism. Here, Gordon contributes to weakening Adorno’s critical insights into the rise of fascism, which we need now more than ever. Despite some of the critical points I have raised here, Gordon’s book is important as it provides an avenue to find normative resources in Adorno’s works that allow us to see ‘his thought in a new light.
