The Melancholy Science by Gillian Rose

Author:Gillian Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

This position is incompatible with the idea of formulating and testing hypotheses.192 It illuminates esoteric assertions, such as, ‘concealed essence is non-essence’:193 ‘essence’ refers to the production of value in exchange; the production of value in exchange structures the appearance of society; exchange value appears to be a real attribute of commodities although it is not a real attribute; it is therefore not really an essence, but ‘non-essence’.

Adorno’s major criticism of scientistic sociology and of certain kinds of empirical research is that they reduplicate, instead of explaining what they observe. Any theory which stipulates what is to be tested will then pick out only what is thus more or less narrowly defined. Empirical research which simply ascertains people’s opinions reproduces the mistaken beliefs which people hold, instead of explaining how they come to hold such beliefs.194 However, such theories and such empirical work do have a cognitive status for Adorno: they provide the place where his analysis starts. He quotes Hegel’s aggressive assertion approvingly: ‘Public opinion deserves to be respected and despised’.195 For the scientistic approach describes the appearance of society more accurately than, for example, the verstehende approach, which cannot capture the apparently fixed, invariant, unintelligible appearance of society.196

Adorno’s own approach is more helpfully called Deutung than ‘theory’.197 Deutung is translated as ‘interpretation’ in the English translation of The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, but ‘elucidation’ would be better because Adorno distinguished his position so clearly from Verstehen which is often translated as (subjective) interpretation.198 Adorno’s procedure is best described as an ‘indirect method’,199 or as the physiognomy of appearance’,200 since it involves the elucidation of the relation between the underlying process of society and the forms in which the process appears – people’s perception of it, the methodologies of non-dialectical sociologies, and other cultural forms.

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