ADORNO AND THE POSSIBILITY OF PRACTICAL REASONByMichael J Reno The prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work claims that because of his methodological negativity and his political pessimism he not only does not have a theory of practical reason, but also cannot even conceive of the possibility of a rational answer to Kant's question "what should I do?" Habermas, for example, interprets Adorno's work as engaging in the mere "ad-hoc determinate negation" of what exists. In the main, Adorno is taken to have fallen into the trap of a global skepticism regarding reason. On this interpretation Adorno seems to have given up on the possibility of practical reason and what remains of the liberatory potential of the Western Enlightenment. And, though he attempts to maintain a critical orientation toward social reality, his account of reason cannot maintain this orientation consistently; his critical position depends on the very reason that he criticizes and thus devolves into irrationalism, in the form of either a messianic philosophy of history or a foundationalist account of mimesis. I argue, instead, that Adorno's thought offers a conception of practical reason that avoids these problems, and further allows for both descriptive and normative insights into contemporary western liberal societies and the subjects who constitute and are constituted by such societies. Adorno conceives of the problem of practical reason as the problem of its very possibility and this takes the form of the possibility of experience. I argue that practical reason is possible in the contemporary world as experience that involves the self-conscious engagement with memory and imagination. Practical reason is possible insofar as experience in this sense is possible. Thus, a conception of the practically oriented subject is also possible. Further, through the related concepts of orientation, interpretation, and expression, I offer a way to conceive of the validity of experience, though not in a way that offers criteria for deciding whether some expression is in fact an expression of a valid interpretation and the result of the appropriate orientation to the inquiry. I show, however, that this seeming inability is in fact an asset in thinking through actual and potential responses to the irrationality of the contemporary world.
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