Tetsuo Kogawa Adorno's "Strategy of Hibernation"

Despite its widespread reputation, Adorno's remark is unclear. What is 'garbage'? Is it a metaphor for ideology? He would not use such a cheap metaphor. As Adorno and Horkheimer had argued earlier: "The development toward total integration¹ produced a culture industry as a mechanism of totalitarian administration . In the era of fully developed capitalism, cultural institutions and mass media have become absorbed by multinational corporations and local or national governments that generously subsidize them. Today, cultural control and administration are much more important than economic operations. Indeed, economic operations cannot effectively function unless they are preceded by cultural efforts.

Today, work (not only the literary work of authors, but also labor in general) is totally mediated by the production-market mechanism, and the worker (not only the author as a creator of work but every laborer) is alienated from his work. The contemporary 'work' has nothing to do with the worker's specific character: the worker does not decide the value of the work. Thus, it is the user, arranger, and mediator of the work who decides its value². Consequently, to shift the subject of language to the reader constitutes resistance to the situation in which the whole value of work is decided by administrators just as the meaning of a literary work is determined by publishers, ad men and reviewers, not by each reader. 

Benjamin's use of the term 'Abfuelle', or scraps, reminds us of Adorno's 'Muell' (garbage). Apparently, Benjamin's scraps and Adorno's garbage indicate a reified situation in which language (the essence of culture) becomes an arbitrary sign. However, Adorno's garbage implies the impossibility of salvage, while Benjamin's scraps seems to suggest a strategy. For Benjamin, scraps that are obsolete as signs referring to old aesthetic values can still provide new value if they are related to some new code, i.e., if they fall into a newly organized social group's hands. Thus, he compares John Heartfield's 'photomontage' and Renger-Patsch's picture: the former transformed the advertising photography into a political instrument, while the latter "succeeded in turning into an object poverty itself, by handling it in a modish technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment³." Benjamin contends that the cultural situation can be radicalty changed only if an alternative social context, i.e., a new collectivity, appears. Only if the mass-oriented capitalist collectivity is switched to the collectivity of a class-conscious proletariat. Hence, he confronted 'the fascist attempt to aestheticize politics' with the Communist politicization of art, uniting artistic activity with the workers' movement⁴. 

Adorno nowhere shares Benjamin's optimism. The new technological means hardly provide the possibility of new and active collective reception of culture. Rather, the capitalist culture industry destroys not only the traditional community but also the basis of almost all authentic collectivity: collective memory or unconscious collectivity. Spontaneous collectivity is increasingly impossible, and is replaced by the artificial organization of the entertainment business and bureaucratic administration: even religious ritual and traditional feasts are no exception⁵. In an apparent reply to Benjamin's thesis, Adorno in his essay "On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression in Listening," in referring to the attitude of the music listening audience insisted that "the new phase of the musical consciousness of the masses is defined by displeasure in pleasure; it resembles the reaction to sport or advertising. Contemporary culture, despite its seeming diversity, has been fundamentally chained to the dominant code. When an audience receives a cultural work (which should be originally free from any code before the association with the recipient), it has little choice in deciding what code it should be related to in accordance with the interests of its own members⁶. In this sense, Adorno argues that "in spite of all the progress in reproduction techniques, in controls and the specialities, and in spite of all the restless industry, the bread that the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype⁷." That is why "all culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is garbage." At the same time, Adorno is fully aware that no matter how reified culture becomes, it is not totally reified. It always refers back to living subjects. Even in the context of extreme reification, the subject who is conscious of alienation survives, and this critical activity is the subject's final barricade. Thus Adorno's statement regarding culture as garbage is not an epistemological definition of culture but a strategic critical gesture within the context of the culture industry. His 'pessimistic' and totally negative tone reflects this strategy. He is not pessimistic but performs this pessimistic gesture. The philosophical basis of this performance is put forth in 'Negative Dialectics': "In epistemology the inevitable result is the false conclusion that the object is the subject. Traditional philosophy believes that it knows the unlike by likening it to itself, while in so doing it really knows itself only. The idea of a changed philosophy would be to become aware of likeness by defining it as that which is unlike itself⁸. But this does not suggest that he acts as if he is negative. He tries to be totally negative to the extent that the critical subject <is> essentially negative. If reification constitutes the basic trend of culture, the only possible response is neither a search for an alternative, given the present limited situation, nor an objective description of the 'status quo', but a strategic exaggeration of the negative element of the trend⁹.

Accordingly, Adorno finds in Kafka one of the most successful examples of this strategy. Adorno writes in 'Prisms': "As was done thousands of years ago, Kafka seeks salvation in the incorporation of the power of the adversary. The subject seeks to break the spell of reification by reifying itself. It appears to complete the fate which befell it.... Immersion in the inner space of individuation, which culminates in such self-contemplation, stumbles upon the principle of individuation, the postulation of the self by the self, officially sanctioned by philosophy, the mythic defiance. The subject seeks to make amends by abandoning this defiance. Kafka does not glorify the world through subordination; he resists it through non-violence. Faced by the latter, power must acknowledge itself as that which it is, and it is on this fact alone that he counts. Myth is to succumb to its own reflected image." 

A common line on Adorno is that Adorno's "critical theory does not address any social group, nor can it provide a socialization model translatable into practice¹⁰. But as we have already shown, his "strategy of hibernation was engendered by a socio-cultural situation in a transitional period marked by the overthrow of traditional concepts: "theory," "practice," "individuality," "collectivity," "language," and even "concept," all of which need radically new interpretations and the method of interpretation itself must be fundamentally revised. Given that advanced mass communication and bureaucracy cripple bourgeois individuality and organic collectivity, Adorno's emancipatory strategy cannot count on any kind of conventional practice¹¹. Although Habermas criticizes Adorno when he writes, "Adorno's thesis can be proven with examples from literature and music, only as long as they remain dependent on reproduction techniques that prescribe isolated reading and contemplative listening, i.e., a mode of reception that leads down the royal road to bourgeois individuation¹²". Adorno does not depend on bourgeois individualism but only utilizes it in order to overcome both conventional individualism and collectivism. In this sense, he upholds the appearance of both a new individuality and collectivity, which are in turn never separated. His preference for highbrow literature and music is not accidental, and is in fact preferable to the extent that readership here is both too individualistic for bourgeois individuation and too spontaneous for the existing collectivity. Indeed, an extremely conscious, 'ndividualistic'readership may open up a new collectivity, while the individuals of the administered world are themselves so deeply integrated in the mass collectivity networks that their desultory reading patterns steadily affirm the established mass collectivity. In this sense, Habermas was too optimistic when he argued that "a noticeable development of arts with a collective mode of reception ... such as architecture, theater and painting, as well as utilitarian popular literature and music with their dependence on the electronic media, points beyond mere culture industry and does not afortiori refute Benjamin's hope for a universalized secular illumination¹³". Unfortunately, since 1972, when Habermas made this claim, such 'a noticeable development of arts' has turned out not to point beyond culture industry, at least in the North American context, and the socio-cultural context of West Germany is not much different. Despite Habermas' prediction, Benjamin's hope cannot be realized unless it is preceded by Adorno's strategy. 

TEL0S, Nr.46, Winter 1980-81 

1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Preface to the New Edition. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York, 1972, p.10. 

2 This situation does not invalidate Mar'x s analysis of the commodity but does demand the 'extraterritorialization' of Marxist economics. Among the attempts to develop the implication of Marx's analysis toward the cultural approach, see Jean Baudrillard, Le Systeme des Objets: La Consommation des Signes, Paris, 1968; and Pour und Critique de l'economie Politique du Signe, Paris, 1972. Also, see Dean MacCannell, The Tourist - A New Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, 1976. 

3 Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, In: Understanding Brecht, p. 95. 

4 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. New York, 1969, p. 244. 

5 David Gross, Culture and Negativity: Notes Toward a Theory of the Carnival. In Telos, no. 36 (Summer l978). p. 127-132. 

6 As for the semiological approach to this point, compare the works of Jean Baudrillard mentioned in note 7. 

7 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 148. 

8 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, ed. New York,: Seabury Press, 1979, p. 150. 

9 This strategic gesture, exaggeration may be closely related to Brecht's 'alienation effect' (Verfremdungseffekt), provided that this theater technique is not received dogmatically. 

10 Axcl Honncth, Communication and Reconciliation. In Telos, no,39 (Spring 1979), p. 56. 

11 However, can some existing practices implicitly anticipate Adorno's negative dialectics? Alan Wolfe proposes a strategy 'to fulfill democratic dreams' - hoarding, which he borrows from James O'Connor. Neither Wolfe nor O'Connor intends to trace their theoretical roots directly to Adorno, but their strategy seems to have an affinity to Adorno's 'strategy of hibernation'. "Hoarding constitutes a first step in the direction-of a non-alienated politics, a negative refusal to have alienated power exercised over oneself." "There are degrees of political hoarding. Simple apathy toward the organized political process is one." "Those who engage in cooperative enterprises - such as neighborhood grocery cooperatives, daycare centers, and other social activities Narc in a sense hoarding a certain amount of their power from the state, even if their expressed motive is a non-political one. The same is true of those who withdraw into rural areas to produce their own means of subsistence as much as they can. Even though such activities of the 'counter-culture' by themselves do not pose any direct threat against the existing order, they are a form of hoarding insofar as they withdraw from the existing political system's definition of what constitutes the productive 'obligations of citizenship'. When workers go on strike, they hoard their labor power for themselves; an important strategy for political change would involve a 'citizens' strike,' in which people would refuse to participate in the organized rituals that go under the name of politics in late capitalist society." - In: The Limits of Legitimacy, New York, 1977, p. 343-344. 

12 Juegen Habemmas, Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism/The Contemporary of Walter Benjamin, in 'New German Critique, no. 17 (Spring 1979), p. 4S-44. 

13 Ibid., p. 44.