In CCS, Adorno
concentrates on five themes, which I will state briefly, so that we will later
see how the different interpretations are supported by the larger text. For a
critical summary of the entirety of CCS that shows how Adorno develops each of
these themes, see Appendix A. The first theme that Adorno explores is the way
in which the forces that underlie contemporary Western society are largely
invisible to Western society’s members.
Adorno finds this invisibility
disturbing because contemporary Western society and culture are the products of
human-affected dialectical movements, which means both that the members of
Western society have the power to alter this society and also because Western
culture, though it currently serves to perpetuate society – because it is the
product of both an element that is subservient to society and one that works
against it – has the power to significantly alter Western society.
Adorno
argues that society should be altered
because the main invisible force that underlies Western society – its push to
turn everything and every person into a commercial commodity – is one of the
prerequisites of atrocities like Auschwitz.
This commodification is further problematic because it contributes to the
assumptions in Western thought that Western culture has no link to material
reality and that all-encompassing concepts are more important than particular
instances, where (for Adorno) culture is intimately linked to material reality
and the particular and the total are both important.
