Adorno on Nature by Deborah Cook

Author:Deborah Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317548034
Publisher: Routledge

THERE’S NO MORE NATURE

Society’s increasing disregard for the lives of individuals marks the direction of history. Mere pawns in a world “whose law is universal individual profit”, we submit to forms of integration that are so complete and far-reaching that Adorno compared them to genocide, “the absolute integration”. “Even in his formal freedom”, Adorno remarked, “the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots” (ND 362). Bourgeois individualism, which celebrates the individual as the substance of society, now masks an entirely different reality: the predominance of the universal exchange principle and its homogenizing and levelling effects on needs, behaviour, thought and interpersonal relations. Individuals today act as a collective, albeit a damaged, and therefore ineffective one (ND 344). Their virtually complete integration helps to explain the emergence of totalitarian movements. So, in Minima Moralia, Adorno spoke about the “straight line” that leads from thraldom to reifying exchange relations to “Gestapo torturers and the bureaucrats of the gas-chambers” (MM 183).

Now the largely helpless pawns of economic and political forces that ruthlessly advance their particular interests in profit and power across the globe, individuals remain “too much in thrall to the biological life of which consciousness is itself a kind of derivative, a diverted energy” (MCP 132). Struggling all their lives to procure the necessities of life, individuals have little choice but to sell their labour power to those who are in a position to buy it; they must constantly learn new skills or upgrade old ones to keep pace with new technologies; they must search for employment with every change in the labour market, and in many cases move or emigrate to find work. And, to satisfy their needs, they must use their wages or salaries to purchase whatever commodified offers of satisfaction are affordable and available on the market. To stay alive, then, individuals are obliged to perpetuate the very conditions that make their existence precarious. Indeed, under monopoly conditions, self-preservation demands that individuals adapt to an economic system that has little interest in keeping them alive qua individual. “For capital”, as Jarvis remarks, “the individual’s self-preservation is not itself a matter of any importance” (1998: 83).

When he condemns capitalism’s damaging effects on the lives of individuals, Adorno also objects that late capitalist society is self-defeating. By compressing “the particular until it splinters, like a torture instrument”, society is working against itself because “its substance is the life of the particular” (ND 346). In fact, Adorno goes much further than simply underlining the indifference of capital to the preservation of the individuals whose activities of production and consumption sustain it. Ostensibly geared towards the preservation of its subjects, late capitalism destroys individuals in the more literal sense when it disregards the needs of its living human substratum in its relentless pursuit of profit. Stressing the gravity of our situation, Adorno warns that the primacy of volatile economic forces, which the owners of the means of production defend on the largely specious grounds that they

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