40
Materialism
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this chapter is to outline the sig-
nificance of materialism for the formulation
of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of
society. Traditionally, materialism has been
taken to mean that the world is composed of
a single substance or matter, and that all
worldly phenomena – including ostensibly
intangible ones, such as thought – are modi-
fications or attributes thereof. Accordingly,
materialism has long been equated with the
view that our experience of the world is
rooted in (and conditioned by) tangible,
material circumstances. It signals an effort to
explain the world out of itself, on its own
terms, i.e. without appealing to any higher
principle, be it the primacy of the Idea or the
supreme reign of God. The wider implication
of this view – famously elaborated in the
nineteenth century by Karl Marx, Friedrich
Engels and their followers – is that these
material circumstances are historically pro-
duced, rather than naturally given or divinely
S e b a s t i a n Tr u s k o l a s k i
sanctioned, and that, as such, they can be
contested, challenged and, ultimately,
changed. However, as we will find, many of
the most prominent attempts to give concrete
shape to these views have wound up inad-
vertently reproducing the very metaphysical
assumptions that they set out to overturn. The
materialism of the Frankfurt School stems
squarely from within this contested space.
Accordingly, the positions advanced by fig-
ures from its so-called ‘first generation’ (par-
ticularly Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, as well as Ernst Bloch, Walter
Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse) mark a sig-
nificant, if not uncritical, contribution to the
history of this idea. Horkheimer, for instance,
discusses the question of materialism in his
early essays ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’
(2002a), ‘Materialism and Morality’ (1993)
and his seminal ‘Traditional and Critical
Theory’ (2002b). This theme is taken up
again in his discussions with Adorno (Adorno
and Horkheimer, 2011), who – in turn –
treats it in his lectures on Philosophical
662 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
Terminology (1974) and his magnum opus
Negative Dialectics (1973). Other notable
examples include Bloch, who explores the
issue in his book Das Materialismus-
Problem, seine Geschichte und Substanz
[The Problem of Materialism, its History and
Substance] (1972), Benjamin, who debates
the matter in the notes comprising his unfin-
ished Arcades Projects (1999), and Marcuse,
who examines the subject in his essay ‘New
Sources on the Foundation of Historical
Materialism’ (2005). What holds these texts
together is that, in one way or another, they
all interrogate the professed materialist dis-
position of Marxian social criticism, which,
they suggest, had hardened into a dogmatic
worldview by the 1930s – at least in its offi-
cial iterations. Following figureheads of
‘Western Marxism’ (Elbe, 2013), such as
Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch, the authors
from the Institute for Social Research thus
re-inscribe the diverse concerns collected
under the heading of materialism into the his-
tory of philosophy, especially that of German
Idealism – a tradition which, in their estima-
tion, had been prematurely left for dead. In
this regard, Horkheimer, Adorno et  al.
explore questions of experience and affectiv-
ity, cognition and morality, as well as the
relation between nature and culture in the age
of ‘positivism’ – a byword for the philo-
sophically un-reflected empiricism of much
scientific thought, including its Marxist vari-
ants. By re-engaging with the problems of
materialism in this expanded sense, and by
drawing on a range of disciplinary special-
isms – from sociology to philosophy and
economics – the authors from the orbit of the
Institute for Social Research thus sought to
recast the parameters of this concept with and
beyond Marx. In this regard they position
themselves against a tendency, prevalent
amongst Soviet Marxists such as Lenin, who
tended to neglect the wide-ranging philo-
sophical implications of Marx’s early writ-
ings, thus re-converting the emphasis on the
material transformation of society into a
metaphysical doctrine.
It is noteworthy, too, that many of the
most pointedly Marxian aspects of the early
Frankfurt School’s materialism were taken
up in the 1960s/1970s by students of Adorno
and Horkheimer in Germany, and Herbert
Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal in the United
States. Significant examples include works
by Alfred Schmidt (1971, 1973, 1974, 1975,
1977, 1981), Hans-Jürgen Krahl (1974), Hans-
Georg Backhaus (1997), Helmut Reichelt
(2001), Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt
(2014), as well as Angela Davis (1998). Their
positions markedly contrast with those of
prominent figures from the so-called ‘second-
generation’ of the Frankfurt School, includ-
ing Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth,
whose work has tended to foreground ques-
tions of normativity over explicitly Marxist-
materialist forms of social criticism.
Without presuming to account for the full
breadth of the Frankfurt School’s materialism –
there are, of course, considerable differences
between its individual players – the follow-
ing pages will attempt to highlight some of
its salient features, such as the prominent
emphasis on the suffering body, on material-
ist epistemology, and on the negative image
of utopia that the examination of these themes
is supposed to throw into relief. To this end
the chapter is organised into three parts:
(1) An overview of the history of materialism,
and an indication of the Frankfurt School’s
place therein; (2) An account of Adorno’s
‘imageless materialism’ as a paradigmatic
instance of the Frankfurt School’s position;
(3) An attempt to highlight the cotemporary
resonance of the Frankfurt School’s ideas in
contrast with a recent form of philosophical
materialism known as Speculative Realism.
All the while the overarching conceit is the
following: the Frankfurt School’s re-formula-
tion of materialism – the malleability of man’s
historical, material situation – intends to safe-
guard Critical Theory from the perceived pit-
falls of both Soviet-style Marxism and liberal
scientism by creating an interdisciplinary
toolkit with which to change the world that
philosophy has hitherto only interpreted.
 MATERIALISM
OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF
MATERIALISM
Although it is arguable that the concern with
matter and the way that it relates to conscious-
ness is coeval with the emergence of (European)
philosophy itself, materialism – in the sense of
a distinctive intellectual formation – means an
eminently modern phenomenon; one that rose
to prominence in eighteenth-century France
during the era of the so-called ‘High
Enlightenment’ and is associated with the writ-
ings of the Baron d’Holbach, Julien Offray de
la Mettrie, Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien
Helvétius and others (Israel, 2001). In turn, the
French materialists – whose fiercely atheistic
views are frequently named in connection with
the revolutionary ferment of the late 1780s –
forged their positions in response to a wide
range of older philosophies, which fore-
grounded the material stuff of life over the lofty
realm of ideas: from the Pre-Socratic Atomism
of Democritus and his follower Epicurus, to the
pantheistic monism of Spinoza, and the scien-
tific thought of Galileo, Bacon and Descartes.
With a view to these sources, amongst others,
the French materialists developed their charac-
teristically polemical, politically explosive
view that human beings are quasi machine-
like, that they are independent of divine design,
and that – as such – they are not answerable to
clerical and (by extension) royal authority. A
famous formulation of these views appears in
d’Holbach’s The System of Nature (1770),
which denies the existence of any final causes,
arguing that there is no soul apart from the
living body, and suggesting that faith in God is
the result of an irrational fear before the ulti-
mately mechanistic processes of nature.
Despite the widespread political reception
of the French materialists’ ideas amongst
German-speaking intellectuals, which was
due – above all – to their association with
revolutionary Republicanism, their philoso-
phy as such tended to be met with some sus-
picion. Immanuel Kant, for instance, whose
declared, if not unambiguous, sympathies for
663
the French revolution are well documented
(Kant, 1996), rejected materialism – along-
side Idealism – as insufficient for grounding
a critically self-reflexive form of philosophy.
As he writes:
Through criticism alone can we sever the very root
of materialism, fatalism, atheism, of freethinking
unbelief, of enthusiasm and superstition, which
can become generally injurious, and finally also of
idealism and skepticism, which are more danger-
ous to the schools and can hardly be transmitted
to the public. (Kant, 1998: 119)
The German aversion to materialism, which
was foreshadowed in the famous controversy
between Leibniz and Newton (Bertoloni-
Meli, 1993), remained in force throughout the
first three decades of the nineteenth century
– a period that was dominated by the Idealist
systems of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling. The
Idealist’s relation to materialism can be
gleaned in Hegel’s lectures on the history of
philosophy (1995), which praise the French
materialists’ attempt to overcome the dualism
of body and mind, whilst rejecting their view
that it is possible to grasp totality in terms of
mere matter. What is important here is that
following Hegel’s death in 1831, Idealism –
the philosophy of Spirit – increasingly came
under fire. As a consequence, numerous
attempts were made to circumnavigate its
perceived failings. They are characterised by
an extraordinary conceptual breadth, ranging
from Søren Kierkegaard’s Existentialism to
Hermann von Helmholtz’s Neo-Kantianism.
Amongst these varied programmes there are
four specifically materialist approaches that
bear mentioning, insofar as they form the
backdrop to the Frankfurt School’s subse-
quent work. They are, first, the physiological
materialism of Jacob Moleschott, Carl Vogt
and Ludwig Büchner; second, the anthropo-
logical materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach;
third, the early dialectical/historical material-
ism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; and
fourth, the late reformulation of dialectical/
historical materialism by Engels, as well as
its reception by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
664 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
(It exceeds the limitations of the present
chapter to outline a fifth important forebear of
the Frankfurt School’s position, namely: the
messianic materialism of the Jena Romantics
[Frank, 2004].)
First, then, Moleschott, Vogt and Büchner
are notable principally because their posi-
tions demonstrate the extent to which
German-speaking philosophers had aban-
doned the precepts of Idealism by the mid
nineteeth century (Gregory, 1977). Over the
course of the 1850s, Vogt, for instance, pub-
lished a series of popular texts that echoed
the fierce atheism of the French materialists
by rejecting the biblical view of creation on
biological grounds, arguing that the world,
and our experience of it, is to be explained
in purely physiological terms; a view that, in
turn, led him to identify psychological pro-
cesses with physical ones (e.g. thinking with
brain activity). Vogt’s ideas were vigorously
contested by an array of Christian thinkers,
most prominently Rudolf Wagner, culminat-
ing in a public disagreement at Göttingen in
1854 – the so-called Materialismus-Streit
(Bayertz et  al., 2012). Without touching on
the finer points of these debates – in essence
they amount to a series of broadly ideological
declarations of the superiority of materialism
over spiritualism and vice versa – the public
interest in such issues, spurred on by major
advancements in the life sciences, created a
fertile climate for the proliferation of other
materialist philosophies.
Second, Ludwig Feuerbach – a contem-
porary of the physiological materialists, who
corresponded for a time with Moleschott and
Vogt (Feuerbach, 1993) – is significant for
introducing an anthropological dimension
into the newly fangled German debates about
the primacy of matter. Along with Bruno
Bauer, Max Stirner and others, Feuerbach
had been associated with the left-leaning
Young Hegelians, who – in the period before
1848 – foregrounded aspects of Hegel’s phi-
losophy that had seemed to them to call for a
ruthless criticism of the present (chiefly reli-
gion, but also the state) in the name of a fully
actualised form of reason, and an associated
state of freedom, which, they claimed, fol-
lowed from Hegel’s thinking, but exceeded in
its radicality his stated intentions. Although
Feuerbach is best remembered for the criti-
cisms levelled at him by Marx (2000) and
Engels, his central work – The Essence of
Christianity (1957) – is an important fore-
runner of dialectical/historical materialism,
not least because it emphasises the impor-
tance of human sensuality. As Feuerbach
writes, ‘I negate God. For me this means that
I negate the negation of the human. I put the
sensual, real, and, consequently, necessarily
political and social position of the human
in place of its illusory, fantastic, heavenly
position’ (Feuerbach, 1990: 189). On this
basis, Schmidt has done much to rehabilitate
Feuerbach’s philosophy by pointing out the
importance of his atheistic humanism for the
development of subsequent materialisms. As
he argues:
If, in its most advanced form, Marx’s theory dis-
cusses societal reality on two levels (which are
related precisely by dint of their mediation); if it
insists that, despite their objectivity, economic
categories, such as the commodity, value, money,
and capital are ‘subjective’, i.e. that they are con-
crete existential determinations of embodied
human beings, then this insight points back to
Feuerbachian impulses. (Schmidt, 1973: 19)
Third, then, Marx and Engels are crucial for
carrying out a practical re-orientation of
Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism, by
foregrounding the agency inherent in human
sensibility, which is central for the wider
project of re-shaping the material world.
Although Marx acknowledges the impor-
tance of Feuerbach for the development of
these ideas, one of the best-known docu-
ments of his consequential efforts to recast
the concept of materialism is a set of critical
notes known as the ‘Theses On Feuerbach’
(2000): ‘Feuerbach’, we are told, ‘wants
sensible objects – really distinguished from
thought-objects: but he does not conceive
human activity itself as objective activity …
Hence he does not grasp the significance of
 MATERIALISM
revolutionary, practical-critical activity’
(Marx, 2000: 171). As such, Marx chides,
Feuerbach merely presents another variant
of traditional materialism. By contrast,
he suggests, the true task of materialism
would be to outline an approach that is
intellectually adequate to the actualisation
of philosophical ideas, to ‘revolutionary,
practical-critical activity’ – in short, to
changing the world. This is why, as Schmidt
points out, Marx’s concept of materialism
aims at a critique of social objectivity. But
there is another instructive point that can be
gleaned from this short passage, namely:
Marx’s redefinition of the then prevalent
philosophical conception of subjectivity.
That is to say, Marx sought to recast the
(Kantian) concept of the subject – the ‘I’ –
as, in the first place, passively apprehending
the material world as an object of intuition
before mastering it intellectually through its
conformity to certain mental structures that
are deemed to be universally human (space,
time, causality). However, although Marx
concedes Kant’s point that the subject is
central to producing knowledge of the mate-
rial world, he denies that the role of human
sensibility is merely passive in this process.
Rather, he ascribes sensibility – and hence
human activity more generally – a trans-
formative role. As Peter Osborne points out,
‘This new materialist redefinition of the
human subject as sensible practice (practical
activity as the sensuous being of the human),
rather than a subject being defined by its
knowledge of an object, has profound conse-
quences for the traditional philosophical
concept of human essence’ (Osborne, 2005:
29). Instead of appearing as a mere ‘abstrac-
tion inherent in each single individual’, the
inter-relatedness of human activity means
that the old conception of society as an
aggregate of competing individuals no
longer holds. Instead, Marx foregrounds the
relational character of socially transforma-
tive practice under the banner of his new
materialism – a materialism aimed at chang-
ing society.
665
Finally, it bears stressing the importance
of Engels’ reformulation of his and Marx’s
concept of materialism in later works like
Anti-Dühring (1987a), Dialectics of Nature
(1987b) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End
of Classical German Philosophy (1990),
as well as the reception of these works by
Lenin. (As we will find, it is the Engelsian-
Leninist position that prompts the Frankfurt
School’s reformulation of materialism.) On
Engels’ late account, his and Marx’s com-
mon goal had been to demonstrate a ‘general
law of development of nature, society, and
thought’, which is at once historical and onto-
logical (Marx and Engels, 1990: 361). Engels
thus equates certain socio-political develop-
ments with particular natural processes. As he
argues, ‘what is valid for nature’ – the mate-
rial world as such – ‘must also be valid for his-
tory’; ‘Political praxis is … the consummation
of historical’ and, by extension, natural ‘laws’
(Elbe, 2013). This schema has epistemologi-
cal implications. For Engels, the ‘law’ of the
dialectic, which he and Marx had taken over
from Hegel, is, in fact, ‘split into “two sets
of laws”’: into ‘the dialectic of “the external
world”’, on the one hand, ‘and the dialectic of
“human thought”’, on the other (Elbe, 2013).
In this sense, Engels’ view aims at a material-
ist reversal of Hegel’s philosophy. ‘The inver-
sion of the dialectic in Hegel rests on this, that
it is supposed to be the “self-development of
thought”, of which the dialectic of facts is …
only a reflection, whereas the dialectic in our
heads is in reality the reflection of the actual’,
material, ‘development going on in the world
of nature and of human history in obedience
to dialectical forms’ (Marx and Engels, 1975:
520). In this sense, Engels suggests, Hegel’s
dialectic is marked by a simple mind–matter
dichotomy, which is unduly weighted
in favour of thought. It is not Spirit which
drives the historical process, but an as yet
unnamed material force. (By contrast, it will
be recalled, for Marx this force had been
human activity: practice.) Undoing this con-
fusion is supposed to put the dialectic back
on its feet. On the one hand, this is intended
666 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all
fields of intellectual inquiry (philosophy,
political economy and the natural sciences are
all seen as evincing the same dialectical-his-
torical tendency); and, on the other hand, this
unifying endeavour is designed to put social-
ism on the authoritative ground of empiri-
cal science. However, Engels’ view that the
dialectic ‘in our heads’ is merely a reflec-
tion of ‘actual developments in the world’
undercuts the primacy of praxis, and with it
critique, which he and Marx had previously
insisted on. Engels portrays consciousness
as a mere ‘product of evolution and a passive
reflection of the process of nature, not how-
ever as a productive force’ (Schmidt, 1971:
55–6). In other words, as Schmidt points
out, Engels’ later characterisation of his and
Marx’s concept of materialism portrays the
external world as a rigid, immutable given,
in which humankind is ‘limited to a mere
mirroring of the factual’, i.e. the ‘uncriti-
cal reproduction of existing relationships in
consciousness’ (Schmidt, 1971: 56). It seems
clear, then, that if the Frankfurt School’s con-
ception of a Marxian materialism entails that
human beings have the power to practically
affect their material circumstances (a return
to Marx’s early insight), then the cogency of
this view will depend on how effectively they
can challenge Engels’ position. In order to
gain a fuller sense hereof, however, it remains
to consider a final episode from the history of
materialism, namely: the reception of Engels’
ideas by Lenin.
Engels’ late re-formulation of his and
Marx’s concept of materialism resounds in
Lenin’s meta-scientific opus Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism (1961) – a work that
went on to significantly shape the theoretical
foundations of Soviet Marxism. On the sur-
face, Lenin’s book is couched in a string of
factional debates concerning recent develop-
ments in the natural sciences. The discovery
of radioactivity, in particular, is supposed
to have led to a widespread rejection ‘of an
objective reality existing outside the mind’;
a sentiment that – in turn – provoked ‘the
replacement of materialism by idealism
and agnosticism’ (Lenin, 1961: 252). Lenin’s
misgivings are directed chiefly at Alexander
Bogdanov’s three-volume work Empirio-
Monism (1904–6), which – for its part –
draws on theories developed by the Austrian
physicist Ernst Mach. In brief, Mach argues
that physics proceeds not from the study
of matter, but from the study of sense-
experience: ‘not bodies produce sensations,
but element-complexes (sensation-complexes)
constitute the bodies’ (Mach, 1959: 29).
Bogdanov follows Mach by advocating a
strict empiricism, which rules out any form
of a priori knowledge. As he argues, ‘The
real world is identical with human experi-
ence of it’ (Rowley, 1996: 5). His specifically
Marxist manoeuvre is to recast the individual
experiences described by Mach into those
of a collective subject: the proletarian class
itself. Accordingly, knowledge of the external
world – and the ability to change it – is not
based on the merely subjective whims of indi-
viduals. Rather, it is made up of the ‘shared
perceptions of the collective consciousness
of a society’ (Rowley, 1996: 5). However,
as Lenin charges, Bogdanov’s idiosyncratic
adaptation of Mach cannot escape its rooting
in a fundamentally individualistic outlook.
Accordingly, the prioritisation of sense-
experience is said to displace the primacy of
mind-independent matter – a circumstance
whose political consequence is taken to mean
that materialism, which Lenin equates with
political praxis, is transformed into subjec-
tive quietism. Accordingly, the purportedly
bourgeois ‘belief that our knowledge of the
world is constructed out of a field of sense-
data’ is seen as creating ‘an insuperable bar-
rier between human consciousness and the
external world’ (Richey, 2003: 43). Lenin’s
effort to defend the priority of matter thus
requires an alternative account of how human
beings relate to the material world – an alter-
native epistemology. As Lenin argues, rather
than constituting bodies, sensation appears as
‘the direct connection between consciousness
and the external world’ (Lenin, 1961: 51).
 MATERIALISM
In a clear echo of Engels’ later works, sense
data is said to mirror the world as it really is,
independently of (and external to) conscious-
ness. Consequently, Lenin argues that ‘sensa-
tion, perception, idea, and the mind of man
generally’ are to be regarded ‘as an image of
objective reality’ (Lenin, 1961: 267). This
framework is supposed to guarantee the sim-
ple primacy of matter over ideas since ‘con-
sciousness is only an image of the external
world, and it is obvious that an image can-
not exist without the thing imaged, and that
the latter exists independently of that which
images it’ (Lenin, 1961: 69). The proof that
these images are bearers of objective truth is
supposed to be provided by scientific experi-
mentation, the analogue of which is seen as
political praxis. However, here Lenin runs
into difficulties since his suggestion that ‘it
is absolutely unpardonable to confuse … any
particular theory of the structure of matter’
with the ‘epistemological category’ of matter
itself, suggests that the primacy of matter is
somehow immune to scientific contestation
(Lenin, 1969: 129). Accordingly, his effort
to escape the trappings of Idealism (the mas-
tery of reality in thought) runs the danger of
reproducing, rather than refuting, the posi-
tion he rallies against. Indeed, the problem
that Adorno, Schmidt and others point to in
this regard can be summed up as follows: if
no ‘particular theory’ can pose a challenge to
the unshakeable reality of matter as an ‘epis-
temological category’, then matter itself –
along with the revolutionary politics that it
is supposed to guarantee – is dogmatically
elevated to a metaphysical invariant.
It goes beyond the limitations of the pre-
sent chapter to explore in detail how Lenin’s
reflections bear on his explicitly political
thought, and, furthermore, on his consequen-
tial revolutionary activities. The mediations
are complex. Suffice to note that Lenin’s
views became fundamental for formulat-
ing the theoretical self-understanding of the
Soviet Union as the quasi-inevitable product
of history’s untrammelled, ‘dialectical’ pro-
gress. It is this official iteration of a Marxist
667
materialism that was forcefully contested by
the members of the Frankfurt School, espe-
cially following the publication of Marx’s
Grundrisse in 1939. This juncture invites
a preliminary observation. To the extent
that one can speak of materialism in terms
of a unified concept, it seems to fall under
what Adorno and Horkheimer describe as
a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ (Adorno and
Horkheimer, 2002: 26): on the one hand, the
philosophically problematic insistence on
the simple primacy of matter can serve as an
emancipatory blow against the entrenched,
and apparently divinely ordained social struc-
tures of, say, the ancien régime; however, on
the other hand, a suggestion such as Lenin’s,
that human consciousness merely reflects
mind-independent matter, risks reproducing
these structures under a different name – as
incontestable facts of a seemingly inevitable
historical process, which tends (in Adorno
and Horkheimer’s estimation) to culminate
in barbarism rather than socialism. In other
words, a materialist programme like that of
the Frankfurt School – to ‘reject the illusion
that … the power of thought is sufficient to
grasp the totality of the real’ (Adorno, 1977:
120) – cannot be put into practice if matter is
transformed into a philosophical ideal.
ADORNO’S ‘IMAGELESS’
MATERIALISM
Having briefly outlined some major markers
from the history of materialism – from
d’Holbach to Lenin – it remains to consider
the Frankfurt School’s particular contribution
to the development of this theme. Instead of
surveying its members’ individual positions,
the following section will focus on one para-
digmatic example, which speaks to many of
their common concerns, namely: Adorno’s
notion of an ‘imageless’ materialism. As will
become apparent, Adorno outlines a philo-
sophically self-reflexive challenge to the
scientistic tendencies of Marxist materialism
668 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
by elaborating on a number of the Institute’s
core ideas: a form of mimetic rationality that
would radically reconfigure the relationship
between humankind and the material world
under the yoke of capitalist modernity; the
suffering body as a negative expression of
humankind’s wish for physical fulfilment;
and an associated form of historiography that
would resist the progressive narratives of
vulgarised leftist discourse. In one way or
another all of these themes are echoed in a
memorable passage from Adorno’s magnum
opus Negative Dialectics, titled ‘Materialism
Imageless’. There Adorno writes:
Representational thinking [Abbildendes Denken]
would be without reflection – an undialectical con-
tradiction, for without reflection there is no theory.
A consciousness interpolating images, a third ele-
ment, between itself and that which it thinks
would unwittingly reproduce idealism. A body of
ideas would substitute for the object of cognition,
and the subjective arbitrariness of such ideas is that
of the authorities. The materialist longing to grasp
the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the
absence of images that the full object could be
conceived. Such absence concurs with the theo-
logical ban on images. Materialism brought that
ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to
be positively pictured; this is the substance of its
negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism
comes to agree with theology. Its great desire
would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire
utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of the abso-
lute spirit. The perspective vanishing point of his-
toric materialism would be its self-sublimation, the
spirit’s liberation from the primacy of material
needs in their state of fulfilment. Only if the physi-
cal urge were quenched would the spirit be recon-
ciled and would become that which it only promises
while the spell of material conditions will not let it
satisfy material needs. (Adorno, 1973: 207)
Above all, this passage seems to stake an
epistemological claim: that a purportedly
materialist form of cognition which interpo-
lates images – ‘a third element’ – between
consciousness and ‘that which it thinks’, in
fact, ‘unwittingly reproduces idealism’.
Adorno’s phrasing thus recalls the traditional
opposition of materialism and idealism – the
realm of ‘material needs’ vs. that of
‘absolute spirit’. It acknowledges a ‘risk that
supposedly materialist thinking will involun-
tarily turn into its opposite’ (Jarvis, 2004:
96), i.e. into a form of subjective domination,
which Adorno associates with certain unspec-
ified ‘authorities’. To be sure, Adorno’s refer-
ence to ‘representational thinking’ calls to
mind the various forms of ‘reflection theory’
that punctuate the history of materialism
from Democritus to Locke. In this respect,
the German term Abbild – image, copy –
takes centre stage. The locus of the problem,
Adorno suggests, lies in ‘the Eastern coun-
tries’ (Adorno, 1973: 206). Notwithstanding
this indelicate indictment of the so-called
‘East’, it is striking that Adorno speaks here
of a ‘materialism come to political power’, of
‘governmental terror machines’ that ‘entrench
themselves as permanent institutions, mock-
ing the theory they carry on their lips’
(Adorno, 1973: 204). Accordingly, his invec-
tive appears to be directed chiefly against the
official materialist doctrines of the Soviet
Union, not least amongst them Lenin’s
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. This
suspicion is confirmed by the fact that Adorno
explicitly names Lenin in the paragraph pre-
ceding the one from which the long citation
above is drawn. As he writes, ‘When Lenin,
rather than go in for epistemology, opposed it
in compulsively reiterated avowals of the
noumenality of cognitive objects, he meant to
demonstrate that subjective positivism is con-
spiring with the powers that be’ (Adorno,
1973: 205–6). This is further borne out in a
lecture dated 17 January 1963, where Adorno
describes ‘the big book by Lenin about
Empirio-Criticism, which through a
sort of dogmatic repetition declares the objec-
tive reality of the world vis-à-vis its reduction
to subjective givens’ (Adorno, 1974: 200).
Accordingly, the question arises as to what
kind of materialism is at issue here –
what kind of politics is supposed to follow
from it? Certainly, any attempt to answer
these questions cannot go unqualified today.
Inasmuch as the theoretical and political
sway of the Soviet Union has been irrevoca-
bly consigned to the history books, Adorno’s
 MATERIALISM
objections to the functionaries of dialectical
materialism may appear to have lost much of
their currency. Nevertheless, ‘Materialism
Imageless’ points beyond its immediate con-
text by holding fast to what Adorno describes
elsewhere as a ‘Utopia of cognition’ (Adorno,
1973: 10). That is to say, ‘the materialist
longing to grasp the thing’ means nothing
less than a desire to radically reconceive how
thinking bears on the material world, albeit
not without certain caveats. For what can we
really say about a ‘cognition that neither
merely depicts nor constitutes things – how is
it to be thought?’ (Schmidt, 1984: 25). After
all, the Utopia implied by Adorno’s concept
of materialism – ‘harmony between man and
nature’, as Schmidt puts it (1984: 25) – is
subject to a ban on representation. As Adorno
argues, ‘one may not cast a picture of Utopia
in a positive manner’; ‘one can only talk
about Utopia in a negative way’ (Adorno and
Bloch, 1988: 9). To form any image of
Utopia is to predetermine it from the stand-
point of the present situation and thus ‘to
garnish the status quo with its ultimate apolo-
gia’ (Comay, 1997: 348). The question thus
arises as to how we can make sense of
Adorno’s concept of materialism given that it
resists any positive determinations.
One possible avenue would be to respond to
this question negatively, i.e. by clarifying the
terms in which Adorno criticises Soviet mate-
rialism, especially Lenin’s theory of reflection.
This will allow us to situate his views, and – by
extension – those of the Frankfurt School more
generally, in the long history of materialism
sketched in the previous section. The following
pages, then, will consider two prominent aspects
of Adorno’s ‘imageless’ materialism: its quasi-
epistemological dimension and its somatic
moment.
In Negative Dialectics Adorno argues that
Lenin’s concept of materialism is rooted
in ‘an Epicurean-style materialist mythol-
ogy, which invents the emission by matter
of little images’ (Adorno, 1973: 205). As he
writes, the ‘naïve replica-realism’ of Lenin’s
theory of reflection is rooted in a ‘materialist
669
metaphysics, such as that advanced by
antique Epicureanism, with its thesis that we
continually receive little images from matter’
(Adorno, 1974: 213–14). Adorno thus raises
the question as to how matter, which Lenin
characterises as being ‘wholly without soul
or spirit, i.e. causal-mechanical material in
the sense of Democritus’, comes to emit such
images in the first place (Adorno, 1974: 214).
What interests us here is how the analogy
between Moscow and Athens allows Adorno
to expose certain metaphysical presupposi-
tions underlying Lenin’s account of how con-
sciousness relates to the material world. In
this regard it is worth considering a lecture on
Atomism, perhaps the earliest form of philo-
sophical materialism, which Adorno gave in
1963.1 Drawing on a major work by the pre-
eminent Neo-Kantian historian of material-
ism, Friedrich Albert Lange (Lange, 1887;
Schmidt, 1974), Adorno describes how, in
Democritus and Epicurus’ view, all mat-
ter continually emits ‘fine particles’, which
are absorbed by our sense organs (Lange,
1887: 106). The origin of our sense impres-
sions – mental images – is thus due to a con-
stant flow of such particles from the surface
of material bodies. As Lange expounds, it is
thus that ‘actual material copies of things’
are said to ‘enter into us’ (Lange, 1887: 106).
Accordingly, it is the impact of these particles
on our sense organs that enables us to per-
ceive the images supposedly sent out by mat-
ter. Adorno objects to the Atomists’ views by
asking how it is possible ‘to simultaneously
teach the being-in-itself of nature as some-
thing independent of us, whilst’, at the same
time, ‘assuming that our sensory perception
is the source of all cognition?’ (Adorno,
1974: 212). In order to square this contradic-
tion, Adorno suggests, ‘Epicurus is forced to
posit a metaphysical thesis, which is irrec-
oncilable with Materialism’s denial of meta-
physics’ (Adorno, 1974: 212), namely: that
matter emits little images, whose truth is ver-
ified by sensory experience. In turn, Adorno
asserts a convergence of the Atomists’ views
with Leninist reflection theory. As he argues:
670 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
This reflection theory, then, played a significant
role in the history of Marxist materialism. To this
day it lives on in the form of DIAMAT reflection
theory, according to which theory is supposed to
be an image of reality, regardless of the fact that
whilst the spiritual and intentional may be directed
at particular states of affairs – it may mean them,
make judgements about them – it does not resem-
ble them … imagistically. (Adorno, 1974: 212)
To be sure, Adorno’s identification of Lenin’s
dialectical materialism with Epicurean
Atomism is uneasy. His suggestion that there
is an absolute correspondence between
Democritus’ belief that nothing happens by
chance and Lenin’s alleged historical deter-
minism, for instance, does not account for
the role of Democritus’ doctrine of the
atomic swerve – clinamen – which states that
the movements of atoms, the indivisible
building blocks of matter, are ultimately
random – a claim that is supposed to account
for the existence of human beings’ free will
in an otherwise mechanistic universe.
Nevertheless, Adorno argues, Lenin’s theory
of reflection reproduces those meta-physical
presuppositions that it seeks to recant by
assigning an extra-physical quality to osten-
sibly disenchanted matter. By positing the
mysterious ability of mind-independent
bodies to emit images whose truthfulness is
confirmed through sensory reflection, and by
elevating this reality to the status of an unal-
terable philosophical principle which ensures
the efficaciousness of revolutionary praxis,
Adorno charges that Lenin’s concept of
materialism succumbs to the very ‘meta-
physical subtleties and theological niceties’
that it aims to overcome (Marx and Engels,
1996: 81). In other words, Lenin is said to
fetishise matter by imbuing it with life-like
qualities, whilst simultaneously reifying
human consciousness by turning it into a
passive object: a reflecting mirror. It follows
that if the official materialist doctrines of the
so-called ‘East’ aid the ‘uncritical reproduc-
tion of existing relationships in conscious-
ness’, as Schmidt suggests, then the kind of
Marxism that these doctrines serve to ground
is, at the very least, theoretically deficient.
As Adorno contends, Lenin’s trans-historical
metaphysics of matter embeds human beings
in a system of seamlessly determined nature
which belies ‘the possibility of freedom,
whilst’, paradoxically, ‘speaking at the same
time of spontaneous action, even revolution’
(Schmidt, 1984: 18). Whether or not bad
politics necessarily stems from bad theory,
as Adorno implies, cannot be decided here.
Suffice to note that his objections to Lenin
are designed to underscore the historical
constructed-ness of capitalist modernity, as
well as the imperative to critically interro-
gate its apparent permanence.
But what does Adorno’s criticism of Lenin
say about his own conception of material-
ism? If ‘Materialism Imageless’ negates
the images of Leninist reflection theory by
polemically invoking the theological ban on
images, then this strategy implies a different
mode of grasping (and acting upon) the mate-
rial world, which does not limit itself to mere
mirroring, and which does not inflict on it the
kind of violence that Adorno associates with
identity thinking. In other words, Adorno
seeks to cast into relief a different way of con-
struing the relation between mind and matter;
a relation which calls to mind the ‘Utopia
of cognition’ cited above. Such a relation,
however, resists positive portrayal, not least
because the tools available for its construal
are insufficient for expressing it. The task of
philosophy is thus to think thought beyond its
inbuilt limitations whilst using the restricted
terms at its disposal. Materialism, on this
reading, implies a complete overhaul of how
human beings think the material world, and
the possibility of its transformation, from the
inside out. Such a complete overhaul, how-
ever, raises questions – not directly answered
by Adorno – as to the kind of Marxism that is
conceivable on this basis. What seems clear
is this: whereas Lenin (following Engels)
postulates socialism as a quasi-natural his-
torical inevitability, Adorno (and the other
members of the Frankfurt School) stress
contingency, failure and the reversal of an
 MATERIALISM
emancipatory tendency into its opposite;
and whereas Lenin (again, following Engels)
emphasises the mind’s propensity to reflect
the world, Adorno aims to negate the image
of the status quo.
Having thus established the sense in which
Adorno’s confrontation with Leninist reflec-
tion theory throws into relief a new form
of materialist epistemology whose utopian
implications cannot be positively pictured,
it remains to explore the aforementioned
somatic dimension of his thought. In Negative
Dialectics Adorno argues that ‘the object’,
whose primacy is dogmatically asserted by
Lenin, ‘is a terminological mask’ (Adorno,
1973: 192). It covers over an elusive excess
of matter that cannot be captured by thought.
Wittingly or not, ‘Once the object becomes
an object of cognition’, Adorno suggests,
‘its physical side’ – its irreducibly material
moment – ‘is spiritualised’ (Adorno, 1973:
192). As he contends, leaving this spirituali-
sation unchallenged reduces sensation – ‘the
crux of all epistemology’ – to a ‘fact of
consciousness’ (Adorno, 1973: 193). In this
sense, theories of reflection, such as Lenin’s,
run the danger of misconstruing the thing
that is registered in sensation as being merely
another link in the chain of cognitive func-
tions. By contrast, Adorno argues, sensation
is not spent in consciousness. ‘Every sen-
sation is a physical feeling also’ (Adorno,
1973: 193). It is such ‘physical feeling’ that
Adorno associates with a ‘resurrection of the
flesh’ in ‘Materialism Imageless’. Curiously,
Adorno explicitly denies the Christological
connotations of his formulation. Instead, he
cites the ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ as his source
(Adorno, 1974: 187). Whatever the prov-
enance of Adorno’s imagery, ‘resurrection’ is
intimated negatively. Suffering becomes the
somatic index of the non-identity between
humankind and the material stuff of nature.
This contrasts starkly with Lenin’s Engelsian
suggestion that matter is simply reflected
by sensory experience. Adorno sugges-
tively illustrates this point in a passage
from Negative Dialectics titled ‘Suffering
671
Physical’. As he writes, ‘all pain and all nega-
tivity, the motor of dialectical thought, is the
variously mediated, sometimes unrecognis-
able form of physical things’ (Adorno, 1973:
202, translation altered). In a characteristic
gesture Adorno identifies the antithetical
moment of dialectical thought – ‘negativity’ –
with ‘pain’. His ‘Utopia of cognition’ thus
presents itself as ‘the mirror image’ of a neg-
ative affect, which inversely signals a state
of hedonic fulfilment (Adorno, 1974: 247).
Adorno thus upends the Engelsian-Leninist
topos of reflection. This is the sense in
which, for Adorno, suffering is imbued with
an ethical imperative. The ‘physical moment
tells our knowledge that suffering ought not
to be, that things should be different “Woe
speaks: Go”. Hence the convergence of the
specifically materialist with the critical, with
socially transformative praxis’ (Adorno,
1973: 203, translation altered). Once again,
Adorno’s multifarious concerns converge:
materialism is assigned an ethical dimension,
one which coincides with his view of critique
as a form of socially transformative praxis.
Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud
resound in these lines. As Adorno continues,
‘the telos of such an organisation of society’
as would allow for the satisfaction of want
‘would be to negate the physical suffering
of even the least of its members’ (Adorno,
1973: 203–4). The insistence on a negation
of ‘physical suffering’, in turn, recalls a for-
mulation from another important document
of Adorno’s materialism, his ‘Theses on
Need’ (1942). ‘The question of the imme-
diate satisfaction of needs should not be
posed under the aspects “social” and “natu-
ral”, “primary” and “secondary”, “true” and
“false”. Rather it falls into the same category
as the question of the suffering of the vast
majority of all the people on earth’ (Adorno,
2005: 43). In a ‘classless society’, he argues
in an atypically affirmative manner, the rela-
tion between ‘need and satisfaction will be
transformed’ (Adorno, 2005: 43, emphasis
added). Notwithstanding the question as to
what kind of anthropology informs Adorno’s
672 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
slippery conceptions of need and satisfaction,
this passage points forward to a central tenet
of his unfinished final work, Aesthetic Theory
(2002). The alleviation of bodily suffering,
the reconciliation of subject and object, the
overcoming of societal antagonisms – in
short, Utopia – can only be achieved in sem-
blance, through the labours of autonomous
art, conceived of as the paradoxical product
of modernity par excellence. In the present
context this means that whilst the possibility
of societal transformation is mandated by an
individual experience of bodily suffering, the
‘satisfaction of material needs’ hinges on the
continued criticism of a philosophical tradi-
tion, and a lived political reality, that has been
prematurely declared obsolete. ‘The power of
determinate negation’, as Adorno puts it in
Hegelian terms, ‘is the only permissible fig-
ure’ of such fulfilment (Adorno, 1992: 18).
It occurs in formally advanced works of art.
With this in mind, let us recall briefly the long
passage cited at the beginning of this section.
If Adorno argues that ‘spirit’ would ‘be rec-
onciled and would become that which it only
promises while the spell of material condi-
tions will not let it satisfy material needs’,
then the implication seems to be that ‘such
spirit may only emerge undiminished when
the conditions of lack and privation, which it
repressed, will come to an end’ (Buchholz,
1991: 144). This ‘end’ can only be arrived at
critically – through the consummate negation
of false life. Accordingly, Adorno argues that
‘one of the substantive misinterpretations of
materialism believes that, since it teaches the
preponderance of matter, or, indeed, of mate-
rial conditions, this preponderance itself is
what’s desired’ (Adorno, 1974: 198). Rather,
he suggests, ‘the telos … of Marxist mate-
rialism is the abolition of materialism, i.e.
the introduction of a state in which the blind
coercion of people by material conditions
would be broken and in which the question
of freedom would become truly meaningful’
(Adorno, 1974: 198). On Adorno’s reading,
then, a truly Marxian concept of materialism
is ultimately self-cancelling. This is the sense
in which he argues that ‘the perspective van-
ishing point of historic materialism would
be its self-sublimation, the spirit’s liberation
from the primacy of material needs in their
state of fulfilment’ (Adorno, 1973: 207).
That is to say, properly speaking, materialism
would mean its own undoing, erasing even
the trace of itself in the satisfaction of need.
As such, it is not simply a counter-position to
Idealism but rather the outcome of its imma-
nent critique – an immanent critique that aims
at an altogether different relationship between
humankind and the material world, which goes
beyond the coercive strictures of the status
quo. Adorno’s ‘imageless’ mode of materialist
cognition, then, points beyond the critique of
‘representational thinking’ to a ‘Utopia of cog-
nition’ whose quasi-messianic ‘promise’ moti-
vates the unlikely deployment of an ostensibly
biblical motif in the critical re-imagination of
a Marxian materialism that rejects the lure of
positive portrayals of a reconciled future.
SPECULATIVE REALISM
Having thus outlined Adorno’s misgivings
concerning Lenin’s mode of ‘representa-
tional thinking’, it remains to explore the
contemporary resonance of his critique.
Accordingly, it is worth noting that central
precepts of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism have recently resurfaced in a vari-
ant of philosophical materialism known as
Speculative Realism. This is especially true
of Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude
(2008a), which has been described as reading
‘like a repetition of Lenin’s ill-famed
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism …
rewritten for the twenty-first century’ (Žižek,
2012: 625). Before proceeding to interrogate
this claim, however, it bears emphasising the
sense in which Lenin’s presence at this junc-
ture is revealing: if it is true that After
Finitude seeks to ‘complete and correct the
programme of Marxist philosophy under-
taken by Lenin’ (Brown, 2011: 163), as has
 MATERIALISM
been suggested by some critics, then the
question arises as to whether the kind of
social/political change conceivable on this
basis is prey to Adorno’s critique of dialecti-
cal materialism. The point here will be to
argue that, if Meillassoux’s approach marks a
resurgence of a quasi-Leninist metaphysics
of matter, then Adorno’s position – and by
extension that of the Frankfurt School more
generally – provides a timely model for
rethinking materialism (and, indeed, Marxism)
today. In order to do so, however, it is neces-
sary to briefly summarise the central claims
of After Finitude.
Put briefly, Meillassoux’s argument is
two-pronged: on the one hand, he suggests,
it is possible to have determinate knowl-
edge of mind-independent matter; on the
other hand, he insists, one can demonstrate
that the form of this mind-independent mat-
ter is radically contingent. He expounds
these views in two steps: (1) Through a
critique of what he calls ‘correlationism’;
(2) Through a radicalisation of what he
describes as ‘Hume’s problem’.
As a first step, Meillassoux’s effort to
show that human beings can grasp mind-
independent matter depends on his objections
to a characteristic of modern philosophy,
which teaches that ‘we only ever have
access to the correlation between thinking
and being’ – mind and matter – ‘and never
to either term considered apart from the
other’ (Meillassoux, 2008a: 5). In the main,
Meillassoux argues, European philosophers
since Kant have mistakenly surmised that
nothing can be totally a-subjective since
objectivity can only be construed on ‘the
foundations of the cognition in which it is
grounded’ (Kant, 1998: 507). He illustrates
this point by citing a passage from Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, which famously
likens the endeavour of critical philoso-
phy to ‘the first thoughts of Copernicus’
(Kant, 1998: 110), the so-called Copernican
turn. Whereas, in Kant’s view, traditional
metaphysics assumed that ‘our cognition
must conform to objects’ (the metaphorical
673
analogue of the sun’s revolution around the
earth), we must now consider the reverse:
that objects ‘conform to our cognition’, i.e.
that the earth revolves around the sun (Kant,
1998: 110). Without presuming to recount the
intricacies of Kant’s argument, the compari-
son with Copernicus is important because –
as Meillassoux points out – it contains a
slippage.
It has become abundantly clear that a more fitting
comparison for the Kantian revolution in thought
would be to a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’,
given that what the former asserts is not that the
observer whom we thought was motionless is in
fact orbiting around the observed sun, but on the
contrary, that the subject is central to the process
of knowledge. (Meillassoux, 2008a: 118)
If Copernican heliocentrism places reality at
the centre of intellectual inquiry, then Kant’s
critical turn entails a geocentric counter-
revolution through which humankind
becomes the measure of matter. Notwith-
standing the biases of Meillassoux’s reading
(Cole, 2015), his objection serves to frame the
question that he shares with Lenin: how can
thought grasp mind-independent matter?
Meillassoux seeks to ‘overcome the correla-
tional obstacle’ from the inside out by show-
ing that Kant’s ‘critique of metaphysical
necessity itself enables … the speculative
affirmation of non-necessity’ (Hallward,
2011: 136). In short, the correlation between
thought and being itself is presented as a mere
contingency. As Hallward explains, ‘in order
to guard against idealist claims to knowledge
of absolute reality’, Kant ‘accepts not only
the reduction of knowledge to knowledge of
facts’, that is, to knowledge of appearances
within certain intellectual strictures; he also
accepts that this ‘reduction’ is itself nothing
but one fact amongst others: ‘another non-
necessary contingency’ (Hallward, 2011:
136). In this tacit admission, Meillassoux
locates the supposed non-necessity of sub-
ject–object dialectics, which are presented as
incidental to the history of philosophy.
Immediate access to matter as such is thus
deemed possible.
674 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
In a second step, Meillassoux attempts to
radicalise the passages from Hume’s Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding that con-
test the principle of sufficient reason. As he
suggests, ‘any cause may actually produce
any effect whatsoever, provided the latter
is not contradictory’ (Meillassoux, 2008a:
90). In other words, ‘we may well be able to
uncover the basic laws that govern the uni-
verse – but the cause that underlies those
laws themselves, and which endows them
with necessity, will remain inaccessible to
us’ (Meillassoux, 2008a: 90). Meillassoux
concedes Hume’s basic point; however, he
suggests that Hume shied away from the full
consequence of his insight by declaring it as
being beyond demonstration. By contrast, he
contends, the impossibility of demonstrating
that things are as they are of necessity in fact
proves that no such necessity exists. ‘Rather
than try to salvage a dubious faith in the
apparent stability of our experience’ – like
Lenin, Meillassoux speaks of fideism – ‘we
should affirm the prospect that Hume refused
to accept’: that ‘an infinite variety of “effects”
might emerge on the basis of no cause at
all, in a pure eruption of novelty ex nihilo’
(Hallward, 2011: 132). Here a decisive differ-
ence between Meillassoux and Lenin comes
into focus. Whereas Lenin holds that ordinary
sense experience provides the ultimate proof
of matter’s primacy, which, in turn, ensures
the pre-eminence of transformative political
praxis, Meillassoux argues that it is precisely
the stability of ordinary sense experience
which prevents us from surrendering to the
full consequence of absolute contingency:
complete, spontaneous transformation. As
Hallward points out, the ‘conversion of
Hume’s problem into Meillassoux’s oppor-
tunity’ thus requires a ‘deflation of experi-
ence and the senses’ (Hallward, 2011: 133);
it demands ‘that thought must free itself from
the fascination for the phenomenal fixity of
laws, so as to accede to a purely intelligible
Chaos capable of destroying and of produc-
ing, without reason, things and the laws
which they obey’ (Meillassoux, 2008b: 274).
In this respect, Meillassoux is far from
Adorno’s insistence on the significance of
sensory experience and human affectivity.
Instead, he isolates the mathematical dimen-
sions of objects from their physical exten-
sion: ‘what is mathematically conceivable
is absolutely possible’ (Meillassoux, 2008a:
126). The irrefutable reality of mind-inde-
pendent matter is supposed to be proven – ex
hypothesi – in terms of pure number.
There are at least two aspects of
Meillassoux’s argument which resonate with
Adorno’s critique of Lenin: one regarding
the place of transformative praxis, the other
regarding materialism’s relapse into idealism.
First, Meillassoux equivocates between
meta-physical and physical necessity, between
‘epistemology and ontology’ (Hallward,
2011: 137). In short, he inverts the Engelsian-
Leninist view that reality evinces a devel-
opmental logic, whereby both cells and
societies evolve according to dialectical laws
that are reflected in consciousness. After all,
as we have seen, Meillassoux claims that
‘there is no cause or reason for anything to be
the way it is’. Consequently, the transforma-
tion of material conditions may be both abso-
lute and instantaneous (Meillassoux, 2008a:
138). Although the consequence of the
Engelsian-Leninist dialectic is a strong form
of historical necessity, whereas the outcome
of Meillassoux’s speculative-realist deduc-
tion is an absolute form of contingency, both
positions converge in mistaking metaphysical
claims for ontological ones. Whereas the for-
mer over-determines the course of history, the
latter can provide no account of what drives
processes of transformation. In other words,
whereas Engels and Lenin struggle to make
room for spontaneous action, Meillassoux
can provide no adequate substitute for what
others have called ‘substance, or spirit, or
power, or labour’ (Hallward, 2011: 138). That
is, ‘his insistence that anything might hap-
pen can only amount to an insistence on the
bare possibility of radical change’ (Hallward,
2011: 138). By contrast, Adorno insists on
the need for radical societal transformation
 MATERIALISM
without consigning it to the realms of abso-
lute necessity or absolute contingency, but,
rather, to the domain of possibility, however
slim it may be.
Second, Meillassoux’s defence of mind-
independent matter tends to get tangled
up in mathematical abstractions, which
not only lose sight of the material reality
they purport to safeguard, but which – on
Adorno’s model – might be seen as repro-
ducing capitalism’s abstract reduction of
quality to quantity.
As a matter of course, every unit of measurement,
from the length of a meter to the time required for
a planet to orbit around a star, exists at a funda-
mental distance from the domain of number as
such. If Meillassoux was to carry through the argu-
ment of ‘ancestrality’ to its logical conclusion, he
would have to acknowledge that it would elimi-
nate not only all reference to secondary qualities
like colour and texture but also all conventional
primary qualities like length or mass or date as
well. What might then be known of an ‘arche-
fossil’ … would presumably have to be expressed
in terms of pure numbers alone … Whatever else
such … knowledge amounts to, it has no obvious
relation with the sorts of realities that empirical
science tries to describe. (Hallward, 2011: 140)
Meillassoux’s misstep, then, lies in the
assumption that such mathematical forms of
argumentation can remedy the ills of capi-
talist abstraction, which seem to appear to
him as ‘mere errors of the intellect’ that do
not have ‘any basis in a social, material and
extra-logical reality’ (Hallward, 2011: 140).
That is to say, the mathematical form of
Meillassoux’s argument undermines its pur-
portedly materialist content: the material
condition of ‘the tiny, fragile human
body’, to use Benjamin’s evocative phrase
(Benjamin, 2002: 144). The point, then,
would be to say that Adorno’s outline of an
‘imageless’ materialism gains currency in
the present context because it models a radi-
cally open-ended criticism of capitalist
modernity, which does not foreground
mind-independent matter, so much as it
insists on the importance of an on-going
criticism of everything that exists.
675
CONCLUSION
As has been argued, the Frankfurt School’s
particular contribution to the history of mate-
rialism lies in its foregrounding of certain
epistemological, ethical and aesthetic
impulses, which follow from a focus on indi-
vidual experiences of visceral, somatic suffer-
ing in capitalist modernity. On these grounds,
Adorno et  al. aim to negatively intimate a
Utopian mode of relating to the material
world, including humankind’s own corporeal-
ity, which resists the dogmatic prioritisation of
mind-independent matter. Accordingly, the
authors from the orbit of the Institute for
Social Research are notable for seeking to
challenge the orthodoxies of dialectical mate-
rialism by casting into relief a Marxism that
would liberate humankind ‘from the primacy
of material needs in their state of fulfilment’.
On this basis, the Frankfurt School tacitly
devised models for a broadly Marxian form of
social criticism that aimed to offset the per-
ceived failings of Engels and Lenin’s dog-
matic metaphysics of matter. The resurgence
of certain precepts of such a materialist meta-
physics in the work of authors including
Meillassoux, in turn, gives a renewed actuality
to the Frankfurt School’s position. However,
the openness of their concept of materialism –
its critical disposition – means that its applica-
bility to current political struggles must
continually be determined afresh by subse-
quent generations of readers.
Note
1 Adorno refers in passing to the surviving frag-
ments of Marx’s doctoral dissertation, The
Difference Between the Democritean and Epi-
curean Philosophy of Nature from 1841. A more
thorough investigation of this text might have
prompted him to redraw the genealogy of Marx’s
concept of materialism in order to contrast it with
its Leninist re-imagination – a task that is laud-
ably undertaken in Schmidt’s doctoral disserta-
tion, which was written under the supervision of
Adorno and Horkheimer.
676 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FRANKFURT SCHOOL CRITICAL THEORY
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