To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping (...) arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. (shrink)

This paper discusses the phenomenological method’s reliance on imaginative procedures in view of ethnomethodological research. While ethnomethodology has often been seen in continuity with Alfred Schütz’ phenomenological sociology, it mainly parts ways with phenomenology by stressing that the decisive details structuring mutual understanding (gestures, bodily expressions, or the myriad trifles that regulate casual conversation) are „not imaginable, but can only be found out”. This paper reflects from a phenomenological perspective on what such a claim entails by first delineating this line (...) of criticism from other objections raised against the use of imaginative procedures in phenomenology and by showing how this line of questioning departs from the core philosophical debates concerning imaginabilitiy and unimaginability in the Kantian tradition. Further on, the paper offers an in-depth interpretation of the aforementioned ethnomethodological claim in order not only to outline its methodological implications for phenomenology, but also to show that it involves possible key insights for understanding interaction, which phenomenology needs to take into account despite its eidetic scope. (shrink)

Adorno’s intensive criticism of phenomenology is well known, his entire early period during the 1920s and 1930s being marked by various polemical engagements with Husserl. This engagement finds its peak during his work at his second dissertation project in Oxford, a dissertation that was supposed to systematicaly expose the antinomies of phenomenological thinking while particularly focusing on Husserl’s concept of “eidetic intuition” or “intuition of essences”. The present paper will take this criticism as its starting point in focusing on two (...) highly specific aspects of Adorno’s interpretation: the opposition between eidetic intuition and the traditional theories of abstraction and its relationship to genetic phenomenology. In light of this criticism I subsequently show: 1. that, in his later work, Adorno’s understanding of eidetic intuition undergoes a significant revaluation; 2. that he reappropriates key elements of the eidetic method in his own procedure of physiognomic analysis, and 3. that his account of physiognomics is relevant for addressing the aforementioned incongruities of phenomenological eidetics itself. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss a well-known challenge against phenomenology as a viable form of social criticism. According to this challenge—the Mediation Argument—phenomenology falls short of the requirement that any kind of critique needs a suitable medium of representation because the phenomenological account of experience prioritizes immediacy or directness. I aim to show through a reconstruction of Adorno’s version of the Mediation Argument against Husserl that this challenge fails: it distorts the phenomenological account of meaning by misattributing problematic ontological commitments (...) as well as an overly simplistic idea of normativity to phenomenology; and it systematically underplays critical aspects of the transcendental methodology of phenomenology by ignoring crucial contrasts between phenomenology and commonsense philosophy. Contrary to what the Mediation Argument suggests, I conclude, phenomenology is well-placed to confront the ontological commitments and normative assumptions that commonly lend ideological support to the status quo. (shrink)

Pre-theoretical experience and the lifeworld are traditionally seen as a key reference for phenomenology. In the present paper I intend to point out their relevance for critical theory as well. To this extent, I start off with a brief overview of phenomenological approaches to pre-theoretical experience and their relationship to empirical research. In sketching out some of the overlaps between phenomenology and early critical theory in this regard, I then specifically focus on Adorno’s reflections concerning the role of an extended (...) concept of experience in both his sociological and his philosophical work. Outlining Adorno’s methodological appropriation of “unregimented experience” in the guise of what he terms “physiognomic interpretation” – a procedure intended as a corrective to both rigorous empirical research and philosophical aprioric reasoning – I try to show wherein Adorno’s own approach to the pre-theoretical diverges from phenomenology. Finally, I conclude with some reflections concerning the different functions experience acquires in traditional phenomenology and critical theory. (shrink)