How to Get Over “Ambiguity Intolerant” Approaches to Social Theory? A Feminist Critique of Adorno's Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory

On_Culture

关键词: ambiguity;    authoritarian personality;    critical theory;    feminism;    social theory;    theory of knowledge;   

DOI  :  10.22029/oc.2021.1257

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

This article analyzes Theodor Adorno’s empirical research on the authoritarian personality and its underlying theory of reification, in order to interrogate how Adorno produces a theory of society which can overcome “ambiguity-intolerant” approaches to social theory. It is based on three hypotheses. The first concerns the relationship between method and social diagnosis elaborated in The Authoritarian Personality; here, I focus on Adorno’s search for a method to examine the reification of the individual in late capitalist society without externalizing this reification. Adorno’s specific way of overcoming a positivistic approach towards society brings me to my second hypothesis, wherein I try to understand positivistic approaches to society as “ambiguity-intolerant” ways to understand society. I consider these “ambiguity intolerant” because their two main criteria, namely “axiological neutrality” and “objectivity” do not allow a dialectical and therefore ambiguity-tolerant understanding of society. My third hypothesis is based on the idea that Adorno is not alone in his project of a critique of positivistic approaches: since the 1970s, at least, feminist epistemologies have also sought to critique the positivistic idea of an axiological neutral and objective knowledge of society. I then show how a feminist critique of Adorno can criticize his theory of the knowing subject as not sufficiently precise. Using Sandra Harding’s idea of “new subjects of knowledge,” I demonstrate that a feminist critique of the knowing subject can produce an empirically more vivid knowledge about the reification and corporality of the knowing subject in late capitalism.

【 授权许可】

Unknown