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The Mundane Dialectic of Enlightenment: Typification as Everyday Identity Thinking

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Abstract

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: (1) automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, (2) are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and (3) suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction.

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Notes

  1. Although a critique of the naturalization of the social, which can always be changed, negative dialectics is also a critique of intellectual and collective attempts to ontologically separate humanity from nature: we are animals and subjectivity and intersubjectivity are wholly dependent on, though not determined by or reducible to, natural processes (Cook 2014).

  2. As an example of what Adorno means by subjectivism, take the following statements from Schutz’s (1975a: 34, 35) summation and review of Husserl’s second volume of Ideas: “[Husserl proves that] the spiritual world has ontological precedence over the naturalist one … Subjects cannot be dissolved into Nature because then that which gives meaning to Nature would have been eliminated. Nature is principally relative, Mind principally irrelative (absolute). If we eliminate all minds from the world, then there would be no Nature at all. If, however, we eliminate Nature … then Mind would still remain as individual mind”. In contrast, Adorno (1973: 183) argues for the “preponderance” or “primacy” of the object on the following foundation: “[n]ot even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject. To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject”.

  3. Following Schutz, I use the term objects broadly to refer to not only material objects but also a wide range of social and mental phenomena, including, action types, typical social relations, typical means to an end, typical solutions to typical problems, typical situations, social types (e.g., Unruh 1979), etc. (Kim and Berard 2009: 267). I think this is also consistent with Adorno’s use.

  4. I have argued elsewhere that Schutz undertheorizes how political-economic context influences relevance systems (Gunderson et al. 2020).

  5. It is beyond the goal of this project to assess Husserl’s late philosophy, where the theory of passive synthesis of likeness as a pre-predicative foundation of conceptual thinking is fully developed. It is worth noting that Adorno did not engage with Husserl’s late philosophy, which has affinities with his own (Finke 2008: 84).

  6. This is the foundation for the Frankfurt School’s critique of pragmatism (for a critical account, see Joas 1992).

  7. In a related critique, Schutz (1975b) finds Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity to be idealist and insufficiently sociological. Gros (2017a, b) provides a helpful reconstruction with a Marxist twist.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Gerontology, Miami University, 375 Upham Hall, Oxford, OH, 45056, USA

    Ryan Gunderson

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Gunderson, R. The Mundane Dialectic of Enlightenment: Typification as Everyday Identity Thinking. Hum Stud 43, 521–543 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-020-09562-3

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