Notes on Adorno "History and Freedom" - Lecture 4
Lecture 4 - The Concept of Mediation
In this lecture, Adorno discusses the universal as existing systems working through (mediating) particular events. He uses academics and the French Revolution to explain how the particular, a specific event, is often erroneously taken as a cause rather than a side effect of the workings of universal processes. He claims that once we acknowledge the workings of the universal in the particular we can see the "spirit," the real underlying cause of the event.Facts as Cloaks of Illusion
A fact (a particular) acts as a cloak when we mistake it for a cause rather than a secondary effect, creating the illusion that we know what really happened. The better we become at recognizing the universal's effect on the particular and the particular's inability to have a like effect on the universal, the better we will become at recognizing that a particular is not a cause of an event but a byproduct of the universal process or "context."And by facts here I mean the individual both in his understanding of himself and in his effect on another mind. (29-30)
Reality is not speculative
If the "immediacy" of an event only applies to the person experiencing the event first hand (see Lecture 3) --"immediate" means "now," "without intervening space or time"--then we can only arrive at the truth of an event if we investigate/analyze the context (the universal) in which it occurs--what is speculative is not the event itself nor the reality underlying it but the way in which we understand it; the investigative, analytical process we use to arrive at our understanding.The only way to capture reality and the true experience of it is to go beyond the immediate givens of experience. In this sense we can say that speculation remains an aspect of experience. (30)If we do not have an accurate picture of the context in which an event occurs, we don't have an accurate picture of reality. Adorno gives an example from the world of academia to illustrate how a particular event, the passing over of a promising graduate student for promotion, is often taken as a sign of something lacking in the student, rather than a sign of a process that promotes mediocrity.
If he [the student] is really able, if he has opinions of his own and is not simply a careerist, and if he retains his intellectual independence...he will decline to mince his words when criticism is warranted....This will instantly expose him to rebuke." (31)This tends to lead to promotion of the mediocre or "the worse" rather than the best; promotion goes to those who are in sync with existing opinion. [For a real world example of how the process works read What is real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, which covers the debate surrounding the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics and how it came to be the default standard model at the expense of not a few careers.]
The Connection between the Dominant Power Group and the Majority's Ideas
The dominant power group controls the ideas we are exposed to and, over the years, these ideas form the "authorized categories" we apply to historical and sociological studies--the categories themselves are structures built of controlled ideas: "sedimented content that conceals the dominant relations and the dominance of the universal that forms the subject of our reflections on the philosophy of history" (32).The Majority is the Prevailing Universal
The majority "echo...current opinion." They act as "social beings" who, together, represent a "concentrated intelligence" that is greater than any individual intelligence, "the consequence" being that anyone who desires change is "always in the wrong" by virtue of disagreeing with the majority (32).Intent
Individuals supporting the majority often have the "best of intentions," usually rationalized as "for the good" of whatever they represent. They may also raise "intrigues" in support of their stand but in reality they are "asserting the negative world spirit" in being against change and productive action. Group opinions act on the "micro-level" in the form of committee's, boards, international groups, etc. which non-conformists run into when attempting to act on new ideas. i.e. the people blocking change are not necessarily conspirators against change, the blocking is just a function of the way the process works. Although there is the possibility that individuals who recognize how the process works could intentionally use it to bring about their own aims. As an example he refers to a Cologne banker who supported German fascists in 1933 (33). [Today we might consider the oil company attempts to influence public opinion on climate change and ALEC's efforts to re-write laws to favor corporations rather than the public. Both groups work to turn their ideas into majority opinion.]Theory of History
Adorno's intent is to develop[A] theory of history that sets out to comprehend history and not simply to chronicle it, while at the same time resisting the temptation to impute to history a positive meaning. (34)He uses the French Revolution as an example of "the complex issues involved in mediating between the universal and the particular". In the Renaissance "the principal of liberalism" led to the development of city-states that began the "emancipation of the middle-class" in the form of "an uninhibited entrepreneurialism" that eventually developed into nation-states and led to capitalism, which placed the "crucial economic levers" of the state in the hands of the middle class. At the time of the revolution (1789) there was still in place a "feudal, absolutist order" that was "essentially an economy based on expenditure"; the French King, Louis XIV, thought he controlled the economy of France but the economy he thought he controlled was now based on industry, "acquisitiveness," which was controlled by the capitalists in the middle class. Louis' misunderstanding of the real economic conditions led to a financial policy which caused immense suffering in the "urban" population of Paris. This suffering is generally seen as the "proximate" cause of the French Revolution when it was actually the trigger that allowed the underlying reality, the economic power of the middle class, to come to the fore (34-37).
None of the three factors: the development of capitalism [the universal], Louis XIV's ruinous financial policy [the particular], the urban suffering [a universal acting as a trigger (??)], taken on their own would explain "the course of history."
[T]he overall process that asserts itself, the dependence of that global process on the specific situation, and then again the mediation of the specific situation by the overall process (37).The "urban suffering" was the result of a particular, the King's financial policy, which in turn was the result of a misreading of a universal, the actual workings of the French economy; he thought he controlled it, in reality, "the crucial economic levers were already in the hands of the middle class" (34). The revolution that resulted made plain the previously hidden reality; the King was not in control of the economic state.
A fact, Louis' personal experience, created the illusion that he controlled the French economy and when he acted on that illusion he brought down the French aristocracy. And the fact(s), the immediate experience of suffering by non-middle class Parisians, created the illusion that they could take over the state when the best they could do was take control away from the King and officially hand it to the middle-class who already controlled the levers of power. The middle-class were the mediating factor, the universal that made the French Revolution possible but which required the particulars of it's own creation: Louis' "ruinous financial policy" and suffering Parisians, to bring it off.