Disciplinary boundaries reflect reification, not the nature of their objects

Evidence

Rather, the question of the culture industry is raised from the perspective of its relation to the possibilities for social transformation. The culture industry is to be understood from the perspective of its potentialities for promoting or blocking ‘integral freedom’. These positive or negative potentialities, however, are not naively or immediately available; and this because the terms through which we might gauge potentialities for change are themselves not naively or immediately available. According to Adorno the division of labour between disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, history and psychology is not contained in or dictated by their material, but has been forced on them from the outside. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 11

Categorization

• DEFINE: A key methodological warning: the analyst’s own categories are contaminated by the same fragmentation being analyzed — essential for the stated reading purpose.
• DEEPTHINKING: The reflexive move — that the analytical tools themselves are products of the fragmentation under study — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting caution about running Adorno’s analysis.
• XREF: connects to: Cultural works can be analyzed as deliberate reification rather than disguised class relations — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 749; Nobel Prizes reflect disciplinary politics and local context, not pure scientific merit — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 480; Borrowed ecological concepts illuminate the contested boundaries between disciplines — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 84