Adorno on Critique

“Essentially an anti-critical schema from philosophy has sunk into blather: the appeal to the positive. One continually finds the word critique, if it is tolerated at all, accompanied by the word constructive. The insinuation is that only someone can practice critique who can propose something better than what is being criticized. By making the positive a condition for it, critique is tamed from the very beginning and loses its vehemence. In fact, it is by no means always possible to add to critique the immediate practical recommendation of something better. The word positive has in the meantime been made into a magic charm. It automatically snaps into place. Its dubiousness can be seen in the fact that in the present situation the higher form, toward which society should move according to progressive thought, can no longer be read out of reality as a concrete tendency. If one wanted for that reason to renounce the critique of society, then one would only reinforce society in precisely the dubiousness that obstructs its transition to a higher form. The objective obstruction of what is better does not abstractly affect the larger whole. In every individual phenomenon one criticizes, one swiftly runs up against the limitation. Again and again the demand for positive proposals proves unfulfillable, and for that reason critique is all the more comfortably defamed. Perhaps the observation suffices here that from a social-psychological perspective the craving for the positive is a screen-image of the destructive instinct working under a thin veil. Those talking most about the positive are in agreement with destructive power. The collective compulsion for a positivity that allows its immediate translation into practice has in the meantime gripped precisely those people who believe they stand in the starkest opposition to society. This is not the least way in which their actionism fits so smoothly into society’s prevailing trend. This should be opposed by the idea, in a variation of a famous proposition of Spinoza, that the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better.”

Pp. 287-288 in Adorno, Theodor. [1963/1969] 1998.“Critique,” pp. 281-288 in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press.