– The concept is fused with untruth, with the oppressive principle, thus lessening even the dignity of its epistemological criticism. |
Adorno,Negative Dialectics, 48. |
This chapter offers a brief look into Adorno's critique of modernity, with an emphasis on his theory of identity thinking in post-Kantian philosophy. The concluding sections introduce the concept of deformation and establish a unifying thread for the subsequent discussion.
Their different evaluative commitments notwithstanding, Adorno's preoccupation with the crisis of contemporary culture is a shared focus of scholarly investigations into his work.43 As outlined in his collaborative essay with Horkheimer, Adorno's analysis of modernity pivots around the question of how Enlightenment rationality, which Condorcet hoped would lead to‘the perfection of the human species',44 nevertheless reverts to oppressive tendencies.45 Notably, he asks how this is enacted in seemingly unrelated behaviours and intellectual domains.
To begin with, Adorno observes that scientific modelling is increasingly taken to convey evidently valid information about reality, instead of being seen as a context-sensitive instrument meant to produce falsifiable knowledge claims.46 Since facts ‘speak for themselves', interpretation is relegated to an auxiliary role to data mining, and the researcher is regarded as an arbiter of truth as opposed to an inherently biased inquirer with uneven skills and idiosyncratic interests. Consequently, scientific discovery becomes more and more path-dependent, and compliance with the results is enforced as a matter of protocol.47 In the same spirit, feedback mechanisms like peer review are used to reaffirm rather than scrutinise existing hypotheses.48
Following Adorno, this is cemented by an educational system that promotes conformity and penalises critical thought.49 In his account, students are trained to suppress novel perspectives in favour of rote memorisation and disciplinary assignments. He also notes that standards-based testing often serves to exclude supposedly impractical speculative approaches, not to determine potenti
