Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Two Critiques of Identity: Adorno and Castoriadis on the Capitalist Imaginary

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover Reading Adorno

  • 527 Accesses

Abstract

Adorno and Castoriadis emphasize the significance of identity thinking to the social-historical constellation of capitalism. Adorno contends that the principle of identity constitutes the nucleus of the capitalist imaginary, because it underpins commodity exchange and the formal rationality of bureaucratic administration. Castoriadis associates the logic of identity with the same tendencies; but he accentuates the horizon of meaning that animates the deployment of this logic. Adorno and Castoriadis, however, recognise that the critique of identity logic confronts a genuine antinomy. Although it is integral to the capitalist imaginary, the logic of identity is present in every institution of society. Adorno’s and Castoriadis’ respective critiques of identity therefore pose questions about the ontological underpinnings of capitalism’s value system. After explicating Adorno’s and Castoriadis’ critiques of identity logic, I explore more recent interpretations of the permutations of the capitalist imaginary. These accounts of conflict, innovation and individualism diverge from Adorno and Castoriadis’ assessments of organised capitalism. Yet, this does not mean that Adorno’s and Castoriadis’ philosophical critiques of identity are no longer relevant, rather my analysis outlines some highly significant, though arguably often neglected, current capitalist instantiations of identity logic. Adorno’s negative dialectics paves the way for categorical reframing of political economy and Castoriadis’ interpretation of the capitalist imaginary has similarly inspired contrasting civilizational perspectives and demonstrates affinities with other conceptions of capitalist theology.

An earlier version was published as Craig Browne, “Critiques of Identity and the Permutations of the Capitalist Imaginary”, Social Imaginaries, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2016): 95–118.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 10.

  2. 2.

    Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 13.

  3. 3.

    The latter assessment of late capitalism is evident in Adorno’s observation that: “If society is so organized that it automatically or deliberately blocks by means of the culture and consciousness industry and by monopolies of public opinion, even the simplest knowledge and awareness of ominous political events or of important critical ideas and theories: if, to compound it all, the organization of society paralyses even the very ability to imagine the world differently from the way it in fact overwhelmingly appears to its inhabitants then this rigid and manipulated mental conditions becomes every bit as much a material force – a force of repression – as its counterpart, i.e. free and independent thought, which once sought its elimination.” Theodor Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, in Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld, and Nico Stehr (eds.), Modern German Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 241.

  4. 4.

    Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy , ed. D. A. Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Cornelius Castoriadis, The World in Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1997).

  5. 5.

    Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 148.

  6. 6.

    Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

  7. 7.

    Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 107.

  8. 8.

    Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, ed. D. A. Curtis (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), p. 307.

  9. 9.

    Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution.

  10. 10.

    Castoriadis, Castoriadis Reader, pp. 290–318.

  11. 11.

    Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 63.

  12. 12.

    Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 57.

  13. 13.

    Johann Pall Arnason, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Post-functionalist Theory of Society”, Thesis Eleven, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1986): 77–91.

  14. 14.

    Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution.

  15. 15.

    Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p. XX.

  16. 16.

    Bernstein, “Introduction”, in Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 5.

  17. 17.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1956).

  18. 18.

    Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p. 77.

  19. 19.

    Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution, p. 262.

  20. 20.

    Adorno, Negative Dialectics .

  21. 21.

    Adorno, Negative Dialectics , pp. 313–319; Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology : A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); and Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 16–17.

  22. 22.

    Adorno, Three Studies, p. 87.

  23. 23.

    Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 81–82.

  24. 24.

    Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution.

  25. 25.

    Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p. 299.

  26. 26.

    Castoriadis, World in Fragments, p. 103.

  27. 27.

    Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 13.

  28. 28.

    Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy .

  29. 29.

    Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

  30. 30.

    Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 54–55.

  31. 31.

    Vincent Descombes, “The Principle of Determination”, Thesis Eleven, Vol. 29 (1991): 47–62.

  32. 32.

    Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth; Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution.

  33. 33.

    Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, p. 276.

  34. 34.

    Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 127.

  35. 35.

    Adorno, Negative Dialectics , pp. 146–147.

  36. 36.

    Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy .

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Peter Wagner, “The Problematique of Economic Modernity: Critical Theory, Political Philosophy and the Analysis of Capitalism”, in C. Joerges, Both Sträth, and Peter Wagner (eds.), The Economy as a Polity—The Political Constitution of Contemporary Capitalism (London: UCL Press, 2005), pp. 37–56; Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

  39. 39.

    Castoriadis, World in Fragments.

  40. 40.

    Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 69.

  41. 41.

    Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

  42. 42.

    Luc Boltanski and Evé Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005).

  43. 43.

    Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit.

  44. 44.

    Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit.

  45. 45.

    Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit.

  46. 46.

    Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

  47. 47.

    Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy ; Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable.

  48. 48.

    Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

  49. 49.

    Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

  50. 50.

    Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries.

  51. 51.

    Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

  52. 52.

    Hirschman, Passions.

  53. 53.

    Hirschman, Passions; Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

  54. 54.

    See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin, 1967); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992).

  55. 55.

    Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism.

  56. 56.

    Peter Murphy, The Collective Imagination (London: Ashgate, 2012).

  57. 57.

    Yang Moulier Bourang, Cognitive Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

  58. 58.

    Murphy, Collective Imagination.

  59. 59.

    Murphy, Collective Imagination.

  60. 60.

    Peter Murphy, “Bureaucratic Capitalism and the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis”, in V. Karalis (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 137–157.

  61. 61.

    Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930); Johann Pall Arnason, “Theorizing Capitalism: Classical Foundations and Contemporary Innovations”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2015): 351–367.

  62. 62.

    Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013).

  63. 63.

    Johann Pall Arnason, “The Varieties of Accumulation: Civilizational Perspectives on Capitalism”, in Joerges et al. (eds.), Economy as a Polity, p. 28.

  64. 64.

    Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism—15th–18th Century: Volume III—The Perspective of the World (London: William Collins & Sons, 1984), p. 620.

  65. 65.

    Arnason, “Varieties of Accumulation”, p. 27.

  66. 66.

    Arnason, “Varieties of Accumulation”, pp. 17–36.

  67. 67.

    Arnason, “Varieties of Accumulation”; Johann Pall Arnason, “The Multiplication of Modernity”, in E. Ben-Rafael (ed.), Identity, Culture and Globalization (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 130–154; Johann Pall Arnason, “The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity”, Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales, Vol. 27, No. 86 (1989): 323–337.

  68. 68.

    Ibid.; José Maurício Domingues, Global Modernity, Development and Contemporary Civilization (London: Routledge, 2012).

  69. 69.

    Johann Pall Arnason, “The Imaginary Dimension of Modernity”, Social Imaginaries, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2015): 135–150.

  70. 70.

    Arnason, “Varieties of Accumulation”; Jeremy Smith, “Contexts of Capitalism: From the ‘Unlimited Extension of “Rational Mastery”’ to Civilizational Varieties of Accumulation and Economic Imagination”, in Vrasidas Karalis (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 158–176.

  71. 71.

    Christoph Deutschmann, “Capitalism as Religion? An Unorthodox Analysis of Entrepreneurship”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2001): 387–403; Arnason, “Varieties of Accumulation”; Johann Pall Arnason, “Theorizing Capitalism: Classical Foundations and Contemporary Innovations”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2015): 351–367.

  72. 72.

    Deutschmann, “Capitalism as Religion”.

  73. 73.

    Ibid.

  74. 74.

    Craig Calhoun, “Series Introduction: From the Current Crisis to Possible Futures”, in Craig Calhoun and G. Derluguian (eds.), Business as Usual—The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown (New York: New York University Press, 2011), pp. 9–42.

  75. 75.

    Jocelyn Pixley, Emotions in Finance: Booms, Busts and Uncertainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  76. 76.

    Marilyn Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures (London: Routledge, 2000); Chris Shore, “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance”, Anthropological Theory, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2008): 278–298.

  77. 77.

    Geoffrey Pleyers, Alter-Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

  78. 78.

    Peter Wagner, “The Problematique of Economic Modernity: Critical Theory, Political Philosophy and the Analysis of Capitalism”, in Joerges et al. (eds.), Economy as a Polity, pp. 37–56; Wagner, Modernity as Experience.

  79. 79.

    Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit; Paul Blokker and Andrea Brighenti, “Politics Between Justification and Defiance”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2011): 283–300.

References

  • Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973).

    Google Scholar 

  • Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Translated by Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).

    Google Scholar 

  • Theodor Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, in Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld, and Nico Stehr (eds.), Modern German Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 232–247.

    Google Scholar 

  • Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Translated and edited by J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  • Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

    Google Scholar 

  • Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979).

    Google Scholar 

  • Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  • Johann Pall Arnason, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Post-functionalist Theory of Society”, Thesis Eleven, vol. 13, no. 1, 1986, pp. 77–91.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johann Pall Arnason, “The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity”, Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales, vol. 27, no. 86, 1989, pp. 323–337.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johann Pall Arnason, “Capitalism in Context: Sources, Trajectories and Alternatives”, Thesis Eleven, vol. 66, no. 1, 2001, pp. 99–125.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johann Pall Arnason, “The Multiplication of Modernity”, in E. Ben-Rafael (ed.), Identity, Culture and Globalization (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 130–154.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johann Pall Arnason, “The Varieties of Accumulation: Civilizational Perspectives on Capitalism”, in Christian Joerges, Bo Sträth, and Peter Wagner (eds.), The Economy as a Polity—The Political Constitution of Contemporary Capitalism (London: UCL Press, 2005), pp. 17–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johann Pall Arnason, “The Imaginary Dimension of Modernity”, Social Imaginaries, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015a, pp. 135–150.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johann Pall Arnason, “Theorizing Capitalism: Classical Foundations and Contemporary Innovations”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 18, no. 4, 2015b, pp. 351–367.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Urich Beck, Risk Society. Translated by Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992).

    Google Scholar 

  • Jay M. Bernstein, “Introduction”, in Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  • Paul Blokker and Andrea Brighenti, “Politics Between Justification and Defiance”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 14, no. 3, 2011, pp. 283–300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luc Boltanski and Evé Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  • Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevénot, On Justification. Translated by Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  • Yang Moulier Bourang, Cognitive Capitalism. Translated by Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

    Google Scholar 

  • Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism—15th–18th Century: Volume III—The Perspective of the World. Translated by Miriam Kochan (London: William Collins & Sons, 1984).

    Google Scholar 

  • Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  • Craig Calhoun, “Series Introduction: From the Current Crisis to Possible Futures”, in C. Calhoun and G. Derluguian (eds.), Business as Usual—The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown (New York: New York University Press, 2011), pp. 9–42.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth. Translated by Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (Sussex: Harvester Press,1984).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Translated and edited by David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader. Translated and edited by David Ames Curtis (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997a).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cornelius Castoriadis, The World in Fragments. Translated by David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997b).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable. Translated by Helen Arnold (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  • Vincent Descombes, “The Principle of Determination”, Thesis Eleven, vol. 29, 1991, pp. 47–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Christoph Deutschmann, “Capitalism as Religion? An Unorthodox Analysis of Entrepreneurship”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 4, no. 4, 2001, pp. 387–403.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • José Maurício Domingues, Global Modernity, Development and Contemporary Civilization (London: Routledge, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  • Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated and edited by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

    Google Scholar 

  • Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

    Google Scholar 

  • Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason. Translated by James Ingram and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

    Google Scholar 

  • Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right. Translated by Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

    Google Scholar 

  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1956).

    Google Scholar 

  • Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1962).

    Google Scholar 

  • Peter Murphy, The Collective Imagination (London: Ashgate, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  • Peter Murphy, “Bureaucratic Capitalism and the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis”, in V. Karalis (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 137–157.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  • Jocelyn Pixley, Emotions in Finance: Booms, Busts and Uncertainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  • Geoffrey Pleyers, Alter-Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

    Google Scholar 

  • Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin, 1967).

    Google Scholar 

  • Jeremy Smith, “Contexts of Capitalism: From the ‘Unlimited Extension of “Rational Mastery”’ to Civilizational Varieties of Accumulation and Economic Imagination”, in V. Karalis (ed.), Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 158–176.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chris Shore, “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance”, Anthropological Theory, vol. 8, no. 3. 2008, pp. 278–298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marilyn Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures (London: Routledge, 2000).

    Google Scholar 

  • Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

    Google Scholar 

  • Peter Wagner, Sociology of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994).

    Google Scholar 

  • Peter Wagner, “Modernity, Capitalism and Critique”, Thesis Eleven, vol. 66, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peter Wagner, “The Problematique of Economic Modernity: Critical Theory, Political Philosophy and the Analysis of Capitalism”, in Christian Joerges, Bo Sträth, and Peter Wagner (eds.), The Economy as a Polity—The Political Constitution of Contemporary Capitalism (London: UCL Press, 2005), pp. 37–56.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

    Google Scholar 

  • Peter Wagner, Modernity—Understanding the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Craig Browne

Authors
  1. Craig Browne
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Craig Browne .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, Berlin, Germany

    Amirhosein Khandizaji

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Browne, C. (2019). Two Critiques of Identity: Adorno and Castoriadis on the Capitalist Imaginary. In: Khandizaji, A. (eds) Reading Adorno . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19048-4_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19048-4_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19047-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19048-4

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation