![]() 9 The adherence to correctives that become ends in themselves can lead to their becoming static images of a reality that has since moved on. 8 It is in this sense that Adorno’s materialism can be said to be “imageless” and to participate in something akin to a ban on graven images. No single “image” of right life can be a substitute for right life itself. This is one important way in which socialism failed in its historical incarnations, according to Adorno: it once set about establishing a practical corrective to the very real problem of structural social injustice but then effectively banned any serious renewal of theoretical reflection on the persistence of injustice, especially within the very institutions that were meant to set things right. ![]() ![]() If right life is possible at all, it does not follow from our adherence to any singular vision but only from a renewable critical examination of a life that persists in its wrongness. The point would be to avoid fetishizing specific theoretical correctives, while continuing to infer from reality the patterns that inform its historical development-a development that may invalidate such correctives along the way. 6 The meaning of this statement begins to come into focus when we consider that tenacious adherence to theoretical correctives can all too easily cause us to lose sight of the evolving processes that underlie the realities that call for such correctives. The second line of interpretation is the more promising, not least because Adorno explicitly criticizes the notion of correction as rectification, as though a simple adjustment to some available, normatively charged model of existence could set everything right: “False opinion cannot be transcended through intellectual rectification alone but only in relation to reality” (where “reality” refers to concretely given material existence). He would merely be saying that the alternative to wrong life is not to be found in “correct” life or consciousness, understood in terms of some norm of rectitude to which we must adjust. It should be noted, however, that there is an ambiguity in the impossibility of “right life” and “correct consciousness.” Does Adorno mean that there is simply no way to escape wrong life, no really possible right life that would belie the apparent necessity of various forms of suffering and injustice? Or does he mean that the problem of wrong life cannot be solved by a consciousness that takes itself to be correct? In the latter case, Adorno would not necessarily be ruling out the possibility of right life. 4 Indeed, Adorno elsewhere seems to imply that wrong life condemns us to remaining trapped in false consciousness: “If wrong life really cannot be lived rightly, then for that very reason there can be no correct consciousness in it either.” 5 The apparent pessimism of the often-quoted claim that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” 3 would seem to prevent us from gaining access to such a redeemed future. One might wonder first of all what precisely would be different? Adorno mentions indications such as the satisfaction of material needs, the elimination of senseless suffering, the redemption of the hopes of the past, the happiness of unborn generations, a humanity that has never yet existed, freedom, peace, and reconciliation.īut how are we to articulate such possibilities without lapsing into a vague and naïve utopianism? The answer is far from obvious. This possibility raises a number of questions. ![]() “What would be different has not as yet begun.” 2 This is how Adorno describes the possibility of a redeemed life in relation to the suffering that stems, in this life, from the perpetuation of ancestral social injustices. Without it, we would be unable to think at all and indeed, in the strictest sense, nothing at all could even be said. I don’t think I can give up on possibility, on the thought of possibility. Ab esse ad posse valet, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia.
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