ART&RESEARCH

All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralization of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology - since ideology always reflects economic coercion - everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same. (Adorno, 1944)

I’m all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality (The Clash, 1977)

Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and that of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged as well as the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions. He was a seminal social theorist and a leading member of the first generation of critical theorists putting forward many critiques of western consumer society including “instrumental rationality.” In terms of social and critical theory, instrumental rationality is often seen as a specific form of rationality focusing on the most efficient or cost-effective means to achieve a specific end, but not in itself reflecting on the value of that end. Many Marxists and others believed that capitalism’s economic and social relations had spread from controlling ‘primary’ production to all facets of human life; in Max Weber’s words they have been normalized and rationalized. What kind of ‘art’ based on what principles and made within what actual circumstances, could offer opposition or at least a resistance to this situation?

It is clear that Adorno was strongly ambivalent on the issue of an autonomous art, which claimed to separate itself from the rest of a ‘corrupting society’. An art, it was claimed, that was concerned centrally with itself as a practice, and therefore was unhinged from any relationship to social or ideological factors imprecated by capitalism.

A criticism often levelled at modernism is its active engagement with mechanization to the point where it became a central aesthetic to the movement. This can be traced back to one of the most famous forerunners of modernism – the Bauhaus. Gropius’s opening manifesto (1919) proclaimed that the Bauhaus would “create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artist”.

The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. Gropius argued that a new period of history had begun with the end of the war and he wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. The style in architecture and consumer goods was to be functional, cheap, and consistent with mass production. To these ends, Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional products with artistic aspirations. Many believed that German reform in art education was critical for economic reasons. Since the country lacked the quantity of raw materials that the United States and Great Britain had, they had to rely on the proficiency of its skilled labour force and ability to export innovative and high quality goods. Therefore designers were needed as was a new type of art education. This was reflected in the school’s philosophy which stated that the artist should be trained to work with industry: a philosophical legacy that would last even into the twenty-first century.

It can be argued that IKEA, the Swedish furniture giant claims ownership of this legacy as the company follows the principle that most of its furniture and accessories are made for purchasers to self-assemble and so engage with the pure functionality of the object. Originally, IKEA sold pens, wallets, picture frames, stockings or practically anything Kamprad found a need for. Furniture was first added to the IKEA product range in 1947 and, in 1955 IKEA began to design its own furniture. The company motto is the rather Orwellian: “Affordable Solutions for Better Living”.

IKEA furniture is well known for its modern, utilitarian design with much of it being self-assemble furniture (also known as “flat-pack”) designed to be assembled by the consumer rather than being sold pre-assembled. This permits them to reduce costs and use of packaging by not shipping ‘air’; the volume of a bookcase, for example, is considerably less if it is shipped unassembled rather than assembled. This is also a practical point for many of the chain’s European customers, where public transport is commonly used; the flat-pack distribution method allows for easier transit via public transport from the store to a customer's home for assembly.

The company contends that it has been a pioneering force in sustainable approaches to mass consumer culture. Kamprad refers to the concept as “democratic design,” meaning that the company applies an integrated approach to manufacturing and design. In a response to the explosion of human population and material expectations in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the company implements economies of scale capturing material streams and creating manufacturing processes that hold costs and resources down. An unfortunate aspect to this is the extensive use of chipboard, the intended result of which is flexible, adaptable home furnishings. However the use of cheap materials inevitably leads to badly assembled furniture whose ultimate destination is the city dump.

Newer IKEA shop buildings are usually very large blue boxes with few windows. They are often designed around a “one-way” layout, which leads customers along “the natural way”. This layout is designed to encourage the customer to see the store in its entirety (as opposed to a traditional retail store, which allows a consumer to go right to the section where the goods and services needed are displayed). The sequence involves going through furniture showrooms, household goods (market-hall), then the warehouse where one collects flat packs for products seen in the showrooms, and then arrive at the cashier’s station to make payment.

The development of capitalism as a system embracing all production within urban, industrialised societies had been well established by Marx. For Adorno and Benjamin two key issues dominate Marx’s legacy: firstly, how art/culture embodies and represents the type of society within which it is made, and against which certain artists may try and pit themselves; and secondly, whether a sphere of practices and values can be created and defended which stands outside the structures and effects of capitalism as a system which threatens to engulf all of human life and interests. These questions were politically as well as theoretically, vital, because the authors were writing in the context of the aftermath of the WWI, the Bolshevik revolution and the growth of fascism in the 1930s.

In the decade that followed Walter Benjamin’s suicide, many of his ideas began to surface in Adorno’s writings. In 1941, Adorno moved to southern California to join Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock who had moved there because of the former’s health problems. There, Adorno and Horkheimer collaborated closely on a major statement of their now common position, which drew heavily on Benjamin’s legacy. Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in 1947 but not widely read until the 1960s, indicated to many the Frankfurt School’s growing disenchantment with Marxism, even in its heterodox forms, and its concomitant embrace of what Benjamin, many years earlier in his more militant period, had attacked as “left melancholia” (Linke Melancholie, 1931). The economic base for this shift had been given by Pollock in several essays he had contributed to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung on “state capitalism” (State Capitalism: Its possibilities and limitations, 1941). Although not contending that capitalism had resolved all its contradictions, Pollock intimated that state intervention in the economy had allowed it to contain and displace them indefinitely. The choice Pollock suggested was between democratic and authoritarian versions of state capitalism, rather then between capitalism per se and socialism.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment the authors reached even gloomier conclusions about the ways in which Western society had undermined its emancipatory potential: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”¹

In terms that harked back to Nietzsche and Weber as well as Marx, they explored the unexpectedly pernicious effect of rationality – understood in its instrumental, subjective sense – in producing the present crisis. The more substantive and synthetic reason, which German idealism had called Vernunft in opposition to the merely analytical Verstand (intellect or understanding) had become ‘eclipsed’ - to borrow the title of a book by Horkheimer written during the same years. However much rationality sought to free man from mythic thinking, he remained caught in its nexus. They claimed Enlightenment had inadvertently produced its opposite for two basic reasons. First, instrumental reason was closely related to the exchange principle in which everything was reduced to an abstract equivalent of everything else in the service of universal exchange. Or to put it in terms that Adorno would frequently employ, the qualitatively different and non-identical was forced into the mould of quantitative identity. One of its most prominent victims was the unique individual, which had come into its own during the period of bourgeois ascendancy. Horkheimer and Adorno treated its passing in a highly nuanced way, both mourning its loss and realizing its limitations. But they had very little use for the various forms of collective pseudo-subjectivity that had replaced it.

The second source of instrumental reason’s inadvertently destructive effect was its link with the domination of nature. Carolyn Merchant notes how historically the metaphor of dominion spread from the religious to the social and political spheres, a mind set that was made more intense by the scientific world view that conceived of reality as a machine instead of an organism. As a consequence the domination of nature as well as of women was authorised.² Previously the medieval theory of society had emphasised the whole while stressing the value of each part. The connection between the parts was integrated through a universal harmony pervading the whole.³ As Kate Soper points out, there is a correlation in the philosophical dualism of Descartes which opposed God and nature, mind and body.⁴

This led the natural world being reduced to Latin names, whose qualitative differences were lost in the name of scientific control, subjective domination of objects paved the way for the comparable domination of subjects through “reification”. The primary clues to these revisions come from a theory of reification proposed by the Hungarian socialist Georg Lukács in the 1920s and from interdisciplinary projects and debates conducted by members of the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s and 1940s. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, Lukács argues that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g. law, administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines, including philosophy. “Reification” refers to “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Lukács was especially concerned with how reification makes human beings “seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the marketplace”.⁵

Initially Adorno shared this concern, even though he never had Lukács's confidence that the revolutionary working class could overcome reification. Later Adorno called the reification of consciousness an “epiphenomenon.” In his opinion what a critical social theory really needed to address is why hunger, poverty, and other forms of human suffering persist despite the technological and scientific potential to mitigate them or eliminate them altogether. The root cause, he says, lies in how capitalist relations of production have come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible, concentrations of wealth and power.⁶

Domination of the external world led to control of man’s internal nature and ultimately of the social world as well. Fascism, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, could be partly understood as the return of man’s mythic repressed past and the revenge of dominated nature, which employed many of the tools developed by instrumental reason in the service of that domination. ‘Progress’ began to spawn its antithesis, a barbarism all the more brutal because of its use of modern techniques of control. Science, rather then being an unequivocal force for human betterment, proved to contain the seeds of a new form of dehumanization. One of its preconditions was the obliterated memory of a state in which nature was not yet dominated by instrumental reason. In fact, “all reification”, Horkheimer and Adorno insisted, “is forgetting”.⁷