Immanent critique must combine internal analysis with an external social perspective

Evidence

Immanent critique must, then, step outside the object, it must ‘relate the knowledge of society as a totality and of the mind’s involvement in it to the claim inherent in the specific content of the object that it apprehended as such’. This means, for example, that dialectical criticism must relate its literary critical encounter with a work to the social determinations that generate, without directly causing, the work’s inner contradictions. Only by presenting society with the bill which the object, in itself hermetic, does not redeem, only, again, by bringing in an external perspective, can critique be saved from the temptation of a reversion to idealism, from the temptation of treating the mind and its products as self-sufficient -the original sin of autonomous culture. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 52

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘social determinations that generate, without directly causing, the work’s inner contradictions’ is the precise mechanism to run on new cultural objects — the heart of the reader’s project. — connects to: Purely immanent criticism, dominant since New Criticism, is an illusion. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1429; Critique reduces to critiquing the social process itself — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1107; A critique of essentialism must remain internal to essentialism. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 55 (+1 more)