For Adorno, rigid materialism itself reifies and becomes ideology

Evidence

Describing the situation as it appeared to him at the end of the 1940s, Adorno writes that ‘the definition of consciousness in terms of being has become a means of dispensing with all consciousness which does not conform to existence. The objectivity of truth, without which the dialectic is inconceivable, is tacitly replaced by vulgar positivism and pragmatism – ultimately, that is, by bourgeois subjectivism’. For him, in the rigid ‘opposition of base and superstructure, of material and mind’, there is already ‘an element of stasis, and indeed of reification … which Marx criticises as ideological’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1319

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The subtle move here — that vulgar materialist reduction repeats the reification it claims to critique — is a genuinely dialectical claim that repays sustained reflection.
• XREF: connects to: Ideology is a material system of meaning, not merely false consciousness — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 628; Adorno defined materialism as reorienting minute details rather than economic analysis — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 383; Adorno recovered theological motifs materialistically for post-Auschwitz metaphysics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2569 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Ideology is a material system of meaning, not merely false consciousness #expands (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 628