Adorno’s critique targets economy-in-general as universal rationality, not just capitalism

Evidence

Adorno’s critique of economy is a critique of economy in general, which, as a thing-in-itself, is the universal rationality for all, a rationality present in those meta-economic principles around which the world is forcibly arranged. Because negative utopia is just as all-encompassing as its ‘positive’ inverse, material critique, it sustains ‘all its hopes as worries’. Its rigidity owes to the desire to transcend critique and utopia in one: in the reconciled state, both would no longer be necessary. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1605

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the claim that negative utopia ‘sustains all its hopes as worries’ — how does this bear on the ‘pessimistic cul-de-sac’ reading the book is contesting?
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that critique and utopia are both transcended in the reconciled state, so negative critique wants to abolish itself, is dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Disagreement with Pollock forced Adorno to retain economic critique — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 586; Adorno prioritized critique of dead-end economic theory over new economic research — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 505; Adorno’s identification of exchange with identity logic is meta-economic, not capitalist — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1298 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno made instrumental reason a transhistoric urge rather than a capitalist product #corroborates (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 380