Jameson, F. (1990).

Late Marxism: Adorno or the persistence of

the dialectic. London: Verso
[intro is on another file]
Part 1
1
[on identity and non-identity] At that point, there slowly emerges the
counter-image or mirage of the neurotic self locked utterly into its own
identity namely, the unrepresentable vision of the ceaseless flow of the
absolutely new, the unrepetitive, the great stream which never comes
twice and which Deleuze calls the flux of perpetual change, in which
neither subject nor object can yet be imagined, but only the terror and
exhaustion of radical difference without markers or signposts, without
moments of rest [].
To shed our defences and give ourselves over absolutely to this terrifying
rush of the non-identical is of course one of the great ethical fantasyimages of the postmodern and the very delineation of the schizophrenic
here []
These two absolutizing and frightening glimpses of a closed self and a
primal flux are, however, useful in grasping the function of the
compromise formations that variously come into being throughout human
history with their more familiar everyday shapes [] (16)
Thought need not rest content in its logical regularity; it is capable of
thinking against itself, without abolishing itself altogether; indeed, were
definitions of the dialectic possible, that one might be worth proposing
(ND 144/141) (17)
In the history of modern philosophy, the word identity has had several
meanings. It designated, for example, the unity of personal
consciousness: that an I remains the same throughout all its
experiences. []. Then again identity meant what was supposed to be
regularly or nomothetically present in all rational beings, or in other words
thought as logical universality; including the equivalence with itself of
every object of thought, the simple A=A. Finally, the epistemological
meaning: that subject and object, however mediated, coincide. The first
two levels of meaning are by no means strictly differentiated, even in
Kant. Nor is this the result of a careless use of language. Identity rather
shows up as the zone of indifference between psychology and logic within
idealism itself. (ND 145n/142n) (19)

In the philosophy framework, therefore, the concept is the strong form of

identity, subsuming a great variety of different, really existing objects
under the same term or thought (the objects being different by definition,
since they all exist separately). The primacy of the concept therefore
implies a historical moment in which universals come into being, in which
abstractions are wrested from the primal flux of sheer names that would
seem to characterize preconceptual thinking. [] it would begin to seem
that functionally the primacy of the concept (in Western philosophy) is not
so different after all from the elaboration of magical names, since both are
forms of enlightenment in the sense in which they secure domination
over nature, and organize the blooming, buzzing confusion of the natural
state into so many abstract grids.
Meanwhile, the concept any concept asserts and enforces the
conviction that it corresponds to the thing, to its object how that
relationship is conceived surely plays across a broad variety of
epistemological fantasies, from notions that it represents some inner truth
of the thing all the way to the feeling that it is somehow like the thing.
It is true that Althusser, whose epistemology is in this sense radically nonidentitarian, liked tirelessly to remind us that the concept of sugar does
not taste sweet; but the therapeutic shock of this reminder cannot last
long, and my hunch is that anyone trying to conceptualize the property of
sweetness will ultimately end up persuading himself that the mind
triumphantly manages to incorporate sweetness within itself as part of its
thought (20)
The failure is not simply the result of the minds weakness, or its
attachment to an outmoded philosophical ideology or epistemology; it is,
on the contrary, inscribed in the concept itself, whose whole dynamic
seeks to secure and perpetuate the feeling that it reunites subject and
object, and re-enacts their unity. Adorno, who still uses the language of
ideology and false consciousness, will sometimes go as far as to suggest
that this primal illusion of the identity of the concept with the thing is the
strong form of ideology itself and provides its very definition:
Ideology by no means always takes the form of explicitly idealistic
philosophy. It does its secret work within the very foundational
construction of something affirmed as first or primary (no matter what the
latters content), within the implicit identity of concept and thing, which
justifies the world as it is, even when a doctrine summarily teaches the
dependence of consciousness on being (ND 50/40) (21)
A passing remark, early in ND, makes it clear, however, that all of these
themes are first and foremost to be grasped within another tradition,

namely the Marxist one. The crucial phrase identifies what cannot be
subsumed under identity that is to say, everything that has been
evoked above variously under the notions of difference and heterogeneity,
otherness, the qualitative, the radically new, the corporeal as what is
called in Marxian terminology use value (ND 22/11)
Exchange value, then, the emergence of some third, abstract term
between two incomparable objects (an abstraction which, by way of the
historical dialectical narrated by Marx in this chapter, ultimately takes the
form of money), constitutes the primordial form by which identity emerges
in human history. (23)
The exchange relationship is the other great leit-motiv that sounds
throughout Adornos work, and it is strictly identical with the more
philosophical leitmotiv named identity which we have been tracing. Now
the philosophical and anthropological evocation of the will to domination
inherent in the identical concept gives way to a more vivid sense of the
constraints of the economic system (commodity production, money, laborpower) secretly inherent in all manifestations of identity itself; meanwhile,
this infrastructure of the concept then also makes it clear why its effects
(sometimes also called ideology as we have seen above) cannot simply
be thought away by the thinking of a better thought, by new forms of
philosophizing and more adequate (or even more Utopian) concepts.
History already thinks the thinking subject and is inscribed in the forms
through which it must necessarily think.
Society precedes the subject (ND 132/126); thoughts categories are
collective and social identity is not an option but a doom; reason and its
categories are at one with the rise of civilization or capitalism, and can
scarcely be transformed until the latter is transformed. (24)