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People on the political right like to throw around the phrase "cultural Marxism" as a label for identity politics, feminism, intersectionality etc. Evidently its a reference to the Frankfurt school, which is supposed to have infected post-war American Universities with a strand of collectivist ideology wrapped up in the language of critical theory. Of course the Frankfurt school were leftists, but I always thought their leftism was more about economics, capitalism, consumerism, art, media etc. than race/gender theory. So the way right-wingers use the phrase "cultural marxism" always sounded illiterate to me. But recently it was pointed out to me that the phrase "identitarianism" was actually coined by Adorno. I tried reading the SEP entry on Adorno, but the relevant section on the term is hard for me to understand (a bunch of stuff about Kant and Hegel). Does anyone know if Adorno is at all part of the provenance of our contemporary notion of "identity politics", or whether this is just an accident?

Tim kinsella
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    Maybe useful Identity Thinking in Adorno: "Adorno coined the term 'identity thinking'. [...] Adorno condemns identity thinking as systematically and necessarily misrepresenting reality by means of the subsumption of specific phenomena under general, more abstract classificatory headings ". – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Oct 12 '17 at 12:25
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    You can see also Brian O'Connor, Adorno, Routledge (2012) Ch.5. Identity and nonidentity – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Oct 12 '17 at 12:29
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    In conclusion: YES, gender and race are (according to Adorno) "general label" used to identify. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Oct 12 '17 at 12:30
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    This is a good book, Title: Autonomy and solidarity : interviews Author: Habermas, Jürgen. Verso, 1986. – Gordon Oct 12 '17 at 13:04
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    "Identity politics" is divide and conquer politics, it's the way the Left is divided and destroyed. It's a killer virus, and if you are on the Right you can only sit back and chuckle about it. – Gordon Oct 12 '17 at 13:16
  • thanks guys. agreed about identity politics, @Gordon , except for the chuckling. – Tim kinsella Oct 12 '17 at 13:44
  • uh i always get the feeling that a lot of wannabe "organic intellectuals" came to academia because of writers like adorno (who worked with the owi and is often said to have given up on communism), and then were saddled with identity politics as their only grail –  Oct 13 '17 at 02:16
  • I am down-voting this question for all the preliminary bald assertion about right-wing ideology that is made without reference to any actual source. Your question can easily be asked with just the last sentence: Was Adorno a part of the provenance of contemporary identity politics? – Ben Jul 17 '18 at 02:25
  • knock yourself out, @Ben – Tim kinsella Jul 17 '18 at 02:27
  • @Tim: Just thought it reasonable to explain my down-vote, rather than just casting it without explanation. – Ben Jul 17 '18 at 02:31
  • @Ben, in some .se communities, its encouraged to give background about how and why the OP came to the question. Maybe I should have led with the question or put it in bold. I'd edit but I don't want to bump it. – Tim kinsella Jul 17 '18 at 02:43
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    also maybe i was a little too categorical about "people on the right" -- i was referring to a specific fringe, but it doesn't read that way. – Tim kinsella Jul 17 '18 at 02:44
  • @Tim: I agree that context can be helpful in understanding how you came to the question. In the present case, my objection is to the way your context is written, and the fact that you seem to use it as an occasion to slander a viewpoint that you don't specify or source. You refer critically to "the way right-wingers use the phrase", but you don't provide any link, source, etc., to verify what these right-wingers actually say "cultural Marxism" is. You just tell us that they "always sounded illiterate", but you give us no opportunity to see what you are even asserting to be false. – Ben Jul 17 '18 at 02:46
  • As an aside, I notice that in many criticisms of the concept of "cultural Marxism" there is a real lack of clarity in what it is that people are actually asserting to be cultural Marxism. People seem to deride the concept without actually sourcing any argument or identifying what they are arguing against. It is not really in doubt that the Frankfurt School existed, that they sought to be influential (like any academic school would), that they held views critical of many aspects of Western Civ, including a general set of arguments asserting cultural oppression, etc. – Ben Jul 17 '18 at 02:51
  • @Ben. I do specify the viewpoint: that "cultural marxism" is an appropriate way to refer to identity politics, feminism, intersectionality. You're right that i don't provide a source -- probably because i didn't feel like linking to some alt-right youtube video. – Tim kinsella Jul 17 '18 at 02:57
  • @Ben I think you might be on the verge of an answer to my question. What do you mean by "cultural oppression"? do you mean something different from purely economic oppression or capitalist exploitation? – Tim kinsella Jul 17 '18 at 03:02
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    @Tim: I'll try to construct an answer - watch this space! – Ben Jul 17 '18 at 03:04
  • @Timkinsella rationalwiki has an explainer on the term cultural marxism and is not an alt-right source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism maybe this helps. – mart Aug 17 '18 at 05:14

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In Dialectic of Enlightenment and later in Negative Dialectics, Adorno talks about the non-identity between concepts and objects.

Western thinking has privileged concepts over particular objects of experience that can't be reduced to the concepts used to subsume and define them. So, if I'm friends with Fred and Fred is black, it is not unusual to subsume "Fred" under the general category "black." I then lose contact with that which is unique and does not fit under any general rubric. This:

a) shows the limit of the conceptual, as some things cannot be grasped in terms of general concepts, and

b) makes mass-society and dehumanization of particular individuals possible by lumping them in such categories.

This is very much at odds with "Identity Politics" which relies on general concepts both for understanding and changing society.

silverskid
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  • I made an edit which you may roll back or continue editing. You can see the versions by clicking on the "edited" link above. Welcome. – Frank Hubeny Aug 15 '18 at 18:42
  • It's not obvious to me how much modern identity politics, especially, eg, intersectionality, which stresses the uniqueness of individuals through the unique exchanges of power they embody, has to do with the ideas Adorno is critiquing. Could you say a bit more in that direction? Also, welcome to p.SE. – Canyon Aug 17 '18 at 16:16
  • Adorno is, perhaps above all, interested in individuality. He thinks that in mass-societies individuals interpret their own individuality and that of others by means of culturally predefined, pre-structured categories, hierarchies and identities. Since there exists a multiplicity of categories they can and do intersect. But in knowing Smith is Asian & poor & queer, I don't know Smith as an individual. Reflexivity and critical thinking are what enable each of us to think and act as individuals rather than being tokens of types or instantiations of general concepts. – silverskid Aug 18 '18 at 04:12