ABSTRACT
Maintaining that the form of thought which animates late capitalism is thoroughly ideological in character, Adorno nonetheless objected to the blanket generalization that all Western culture exhibits false consciousness. In a section of Minima Moralia titled “Baby with the Bath-water,” Adorno argued that to equate culture with lies would be tantamount to repudiating even those forms of thought that are critical of existing conditions.1 If the “great refusal” is illusory or false, it is so only to the extent that the pervasiveness of exchange relations in the West appears to give the lie to the idea that society could be ordered in any other way than it currently is; it flies in the face of the overwhelming and seemingly irremediable existence of matters as they are. Yet the refusal to accept and adapt to existing conditions must also be given its due. For our exchange-based society has never been egalitarian and free in the more emphatic sense of those terms – a point Adorno reiterates in Negative Dialectics when he criticizes the blatant injustice and unfreedom that lie within the coercive equality of exchange.2 To denounce the bald assertion that exchange is truly free “is at the same time to speak for truth: in the face of the lie of the commodity world, even the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective.”3
