‘Suffering ought not to be’: Adorno on the dialectics of memory

Abstract

In recent decades, social and cultural memories have been much discussed in human geography. In line with an increasing interest in the nexus between memory and social justice, this article theoretically investigates the political geographies of remembering and its emancipatory potential. Surveying recent literature on the topic, I argue for a more nuanced consideration of capitalist thought forms as generally hindering remembrance. To pin down this argument, I draw on Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics, stressing the all-encroaching totality of capitalist thought forms while adhering to the hope of overcoming them. While this perspective stresses how capitalist relations render remembrance precarious, it also enables us to conceptualize spontaneous, embodied moments of memory as acts of resistance against the dominance of these capitalist thought forms. Thus, this article introduces negative dialectics as an approach to consider how places of memory might challenge capitalist relations by circumventing the respective thought forms and transforming society through tenderness and solidarity between diverse people.

Memory boom, the things that matter and the end of a bad world?

Like other social scientists, geographers have been engaged with the various phenomena of social and individual memories. They have argued that the ways in which memories are represented in space involve a field of multiple political, social and cultural activities that is at times contradictory and conflictive (Reichel, 1995). What we assume to be shared memories are never neutral renditions of the past, but powerful contemporary renditions of history designed to make sense of the present and provide orientation for the future (Siebeck, 2010: 178–179). Thus, there has been a long-standing interest within geography to how discourses and material practices of remembering serve the interests of those with power, most notably nation-states (e.g. Hammond, 2020; Nagle, 2016). This relates to a critical engagement with institutionalized discourses of a shared past providing identification with the respective nation, thereby affirming an existing political, economic and social regime. This article builds on a recently growing engagement with counter-memories (Courtheyn, 2016; Till, 2008) and remembrance practices in social movements (Daphi, 2017a, 2017b), focusing and reinforcing forms of collective remembering linked to counter-knowledge, more socially-just-imaginaries and progressive transformations (e.g. Brasher et al., 2017). Adding to this debate, I argue a dialectical understanding of the relation of memory and place, considering the unbroken dominance of capitalist thought forms (Marx, 1929: 49–50) that render our engagement with the past abstract, and thus oblivious to details, particularities and contradictions within society and the concrete and violent implications of capitalist relations (Tyner and Inwood, 2014: 775). While memory might challenge existing social and spatial relations towards greater justice (Tyner et al., 2014), this potential is obfuscated by capitalist thought forms perpetuating a tendency towards forgetting, thereby stabilizing and normalizing the violent and harmful status quo of capitalist relations (Adorno, 2019: 13; Marx, 1929: 50).

Pondering the relevance of capitalist thought forms, this article introduces Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics as a theoretical approach. I attempt to conceptualize the effect capitalist thought forms have on the individual and collective capacity to remember, as dialectics in which memory might circumvent and challenge capitalist relations to alleviate the associated forms of violence and harm affecting us in multiple, intersectional ways (see also Tyner, 2022). In line with Adorno’s theoretical reasoning, I understand remembering in this context first as the individual ability to bring the past to mind by engaging with historical knowledge empathetically and critically. This is a rather hopeful reading of Adornos work, understanding memory as one possibility to attempt the impossible: reasoning beyond capitalist reason. This means a critical awareness of hegemonic narratives of the past, paying attention to the various forms of exploitation and inequality at the heart of capitalist relations, which are deeply embedded in the materiality of our everyday life resulting in a violent afterlife if left unaddressed (Inwood et al., 2021: 1088). Hence, I am assuming that inequality, harm and dysfunctionality are not only by-products of capitalist relations, but also lie at its very core, constituting a form of negativity that damages and threatens the subject (Angehrn, 2014: 28; Tyner, 2022: 5). However, when capitalist thought forms cause us to remain blind to the parts of the past linked to exploitation, suffering and injustice, past suffering is reinforced, as any durable form of social justice must overcome the underlying structures (Adorno, 1997: 203; Inwood et al., 2021: 1098).

Drawing on Adorno’s negative dialectics, I argue that under some circumstances, locally situated, embodied and individual flashes of remembrance can produce ‘fissures in [the . . .] social cohesion of capital’ (Dinerstein, 2012: 531). Those flashes are triggered by the ‘warmth of things’ (Philo, 2021: 79), which Adorno draws on as critique and counter-proposition to expanding commodification, arguing that such warmth opens up a ‘possibility of relations without purpose’ (Adorno, 2020: 41) opposed to cold, instrumental relations, where people are only considered as a means to an end. Therefore, the embodied experience of remembering and the materiality of the place triggering it are theoretically highlighted. Such ‘relations without purpose’ (Adorno, 2020: 41) relate to whatever is outside capitalism – an impossible possibility of reconciliation (Adorno, 1997: 19). Hence, I draw on negative dialectics as a normative mode of critique, which seeks to recognize ‘the better’ in the negation of the existing (Angehrn, 2014; Pellizzoni, 2021) and to propose memories granting empathetic insights into the violence and harm done by capitalist relations as a first step towards an altered consciousness, and thus possible changes in material practices and social relations. However, in line with Tyner’s (2022) recent argument for an intersectional understanding of alienation, being ignorant towards the ‘everyday brutality’ of capitalist relations comes from a position of (White) privilege. Hence, we must take into consideration how capitalism continues to operate by structural discrimination and exploitation not only through the contradictions along lines of class, but also race, gender, age and ability (Tyner, 2022: 83).

Surveying human geographers’ recent engagement with memory, this article outlines the relationship between shared memories, place-making and the social and political implications of memory, which are deeply immersed in social power relations, but also inherently contested and contradictory. This perspective is enhanced by paying special attention to the role of capitalist thought forms and how they hinder discourses and practices of collective and individual memory. Subsequently, Adorno’s negative dialectics is introduced to conceptualize memory as dialectics, on one hand, obstructed by capitalist relations and, on the other hand, potentially fissuring them. Finally, I will relate negative dialectics to the aforementioned debate on places of memory, outlining how forms of memory that challenge capitalist relations might be possible.

Placing memory: Powerful meanings, contested sites and the reason for struggle

Geographers have repeatedly shown how placemaking related to socially shared memories can be appropriated or exploited as symbolic representations of political agendas, justifying and normalizing them, as well as contesting and negotiating normative implications of historic knowledge (Till, 2003; Till and Kuusisto-Arponen, 2015: 294; Webster, 2021: 14). Shared memories might then become attached to practices and discourses of placemaking, symbolically becoming linked to ‘place as location, a material setting for social relations, as a field of care and center of meaning, and as coming together of disparate practices and flows that together produce something unique’ (Cresswell and Hoskins, 2008: 393). Inspired by Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) work on collective memory and Pierre Nora’s (1989) Lieux de Memoire, geographers explored the links between place, shared memory and collective identity. Drawing on this theoretical background, geographers understood the social production of space and collective memory as mutual social processes (Alderman et al., 2020; Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004: 348). In this way, places of memory immediately relate to social power relations. Therefore, the following addresses how places of memory might justify social and political conditions, but also how these might be contested through negotiations of sites of memory and, finally, how localized memory might become part of counter-hegemonic struggles.

A site of power: Appropriation and justification

Walter Benjamin (1999) famously stated that history is usually remembered and recorded to the benefit of the ruling class (p. 248). Therefore, geographers have paid close attention to the interplay of placemaking and ‘politics of history [. . .] legitimating contemporary political projects’ (Meyer, 2008: 176). These works demonstrate how space is utilized ‘to justify present forms of social representation and political presence’ (Tyner et al., 2012: 856) and express underlying power relations (Foote and Azaryahu, 2007). Many of these works focus on the interdependence of state politics, nation-building processes, (racial) capitalism and marginalization or silencing of particular memorial narratives and groups, using academic discourses to challenge associated structures of injustice and inequality (e.g. Anderson and Daya, 2022; Brasher et al., 2017: 305; Inwood et al., 2021).

The role of memory as an ideological legitimization of state politics has been considered in the context of regime changes and how those translate into changing street names, newly erected monuments or memorials and also the neglect of existing memorial structures (Azaryahu, 2011; Forest et al., 2004; Martinez, 2021). While the renaming of streets, which has been an ‘obligatory accompaniment of political change’ since the French Revolution (Hebbert, 2005: 582), there has been a special interest in the alterations of monuments and memorials in post-totalitarian societies and how this relates to new state politics and to re-oriented conceptualizations of national identity. This is shown by Till’s (1999, 2005) works on Berlin’s changing landscape of memory, and Azaryahu’s (2003) analysis of the different configurations of political meaning attributed to the former concentration camp of Buchenwald, which Charlesworth (1994) recounts in relation to Auschwitz. Hammond (2020) illustrated how Turkish president Erdogan’s consolidation of power via ‘political, legal and economic changes’ (p. 540) was also enacted through the construction of a landscape of memory mourning the ‘martyrs’ of the July 2016 coup. Therefore, geographers have repeatedly stressed how the making of places of memory acts as a symbolic expression of state power and hegemonic discourses on national identity, thus, playing part in the ‘ongoing legitimation of the state’ (Mitchell, 2003: 445).

The ongoing legitimization of state politics through memorials and monuments is closely tied to discourses of nation building (Siebeck, 2016). Places of state-mediated collective memory are also sites where hegemonic discourses about national identity are articulated and enacted (Cooke, 2000; Edensor, 2002). As shown by Johnson (1995), for example, who linked the emergence of Irish nationalist discourse with the construction of public monuments in Dublin. Therein, Johnson (1995) analyses how the evocation of national identity ties with the exclusionary impact spatial productions of public memory might have, symbolically marginalizing historical narratives that contradict or threaten hegemonic ideas of national identity. Hence, places of memory always contain acts of forgetting, neglect and silencing to justify contemporary social relations (Drozdzewski et al., 2016; Pickford, 2005: 155). Tyner et al. (2014) have argued that there is a tendency towards favouring socially conservative narratives over retelling the ‘struggles of labour, minorities, and radical activists’ (p. 910). Harvey’s (1979) seminal study of how the Basilica Sacre Coeur silences the memory of the Paris Commune or Mitchell (1992, 2000: 91–100) on the marginalization of labour struggles in the heritage construction of Jonestown, PA, verify that. As the memories of struggle against capitalist relations are often somewhat muted or silenced, any remembrance of labour exploitation, part and parcel of capitalist relations, is even more subdued. Mitchell (1996, 2012) has outlined how histories of migrant workers’ exploitation, organization and struggle are found in the formative moments of the Californian agriculture landscape, and how these workers ‘have to continually fight their own aestheticization, their dissolution, in the landscape’ (p. 200). Considering the afterlife of slavery in the southern United States, Inwood et al. (2021) argue ‘racial capital is inscribed in the landscape’ reinforcing ‘anti-Black racism and the workings of white subjectivities’ (p. 1088). Silencing of these narratives implies continued violence, denying the victims both acknowledgement of their suffering and material compensation (Steinberg and Taylor, 2005; Tyner et al., 2012). Thus, memory and the silencing of memory are vital for the legitimation of state politics, as well as for the normalization of the inherent violence and exploitation of capitalism. However, geographers often have framed their works within struggles for remembrance and greater social justice (Alderman et al., 2016: 210; Inwood et al., 2021: 1099). Consequently, the next section of this article is devoted to works that show how places of memory can become sites of social conflict and negotiation.

Negotiated places: Conflict and contestation

Multiple works in human geography show that the meaning, symbolic connotation, materiality and practices associated with places of memory are often a source of social conflict and, thus, are best understood as inherently contested (Alderman and Inwood, 2013a, 2013b; Brasher et al., 2020; Till, 2003). According to McDowell and Braniff (2014), ‘Memorial material has the power to bind communities, societies and nations in the present (p. 14). Yet it can also operate as sites of resistance or points of contestation’. When places of memory operate as such, the respective conflicts become attached to broader social negotiations challenging existing power relations (Till, 2003: 291). While places of memory are ‘lived and contested in specific situations’ (Legg, 2007: 456), especially in anti-racist or postcolonial settings, activists seek to be represented through changed historical narratives while demanding social justice in the present (e. g. Tyner et al., 2014). Therefore, ‘the study of social memory inevitably comes around to questions of domination and the uneven access to a society’s political and economic resources’ (Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004: 349).

There are various examples of how ‘challenging and changing of commemorative landscapes have become strategies used by historically marginalized groups to reconstruct their public image and articulate an alternative social future’ (Alderman and Inwood, 2013a: 187). Hintermann (2019) has shown how a non-official and illegally erected memorial in Vienna challenges Austria’s restrictions on migration and hegemonic discourses on national belonging (pp. 32–33). Similarly, Brasher et al. (2020) and Dwyer (2004) linked conflicts and protests concerning street names and monuments, relating positively to the Confederacy, with demands for racial justice in the United States. Moreover, Gordillo’s (2013, 2014) work on the rubble of the Spanish colonialization of what was to become Argentina challenges the voiding of the historical landscape to bring justice for the indigenous victims of various genocides.

The link between (re)negotiations of places of memory and the reconfiguration of social relations has also been addressed in the context of post-conflict societies. Till (2008, 2012) has used the concept of wounded cities and memory-work to rethink how engagement with past traumas ‘might offer possibilities of shared belongings [. . .] more just possible futures’ (Till, 2012: 5). Nagle (2016) has examined the importance of non-sectarian memory-work for social reconciliation in Beirut, and McDowell and Crooke (2019) and Johnson (2011) considered the impacts of non-sectarian memory-work on the peace-making process in Northern Ireland.

Works addressing the aftermath of racialized violence in Greensboro, North Carolina (Inwood, 2012) and Cape Town (Anderson and Daya, 2022) have linked the critique of persisting structures of inequality with the support of activist demands for social transformation. Thus, contested memories can be understood as a field of prefigurative politics, in which ‘activists [are] directing effort into performing now their vision of a “better world” to come’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 643), wherein the inclusivity of memory discourses anticipates a more inclusive world, and the remembrance of inequality, injustice and violence hints at eventually overcoming the relations of production causing the same. Addressing this link, the next section surveys works considering the relationship between places of memory and radical politics.

Spaces of transformation: Resistance and radical imaginaries

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the construction of counter-memories within human geography, connected to research on the construction of shared memories within social movements. Partially drawing on insights from social movement studies, shared memories have been found to provide an identity within social movements themselves (Daphi, 2017a: 25–27; Pile, 1997). Shared memories might become a vehicle to pass on strategic and political knowledge (Della Porta and Diani, 2020: 47–49) or a form of protest in itself, for example, through public displays of mourning (Iossifidis, 2020: 3). Place holds an important mnemonic role linking past experiences with activist strategies and discourses (Merrill and Lindgren, 2020: 658). Thus, place becomes relevant for any counter-hegemonic production of knowledge (Della Porta, 2020: 11–12; Harris, 2006: 21) contributing to ‘collective identities, framing practices, narratives, repertoires and provide means to sustain movement continuity’ (Merrill and Lindgren, 2020: 658).

Therefore, the exploration of the nexus between places of memory and radical politics focuses strongly on questions of movement continuity. The symbolic meaning ascribed to place and the emotional or affective bond attached to it, enabling shared identity, are considered to have a motivating effect on the respective social movement. For example, McCutcheon’s (2015) research on volunteers in an emergency food programme in Atlanta examines how the shared memory of Auburn Avenue, an important site of the Civil Rights Movement, is a vital factor for motivating volunteers campaigning for affordable housing in the area. How place-based shared memories are linked to activists’ identification with radical politics has also been brought forward by Arampatzi’s (2017) work on communities of struggle in Exarcheia in Athens and Daphi’s (2017b) work on the Global Justice Movement at the G8 summit in Genoa. Geographers have often understood movement memories as a means to ‘animate contemporary political imaginaries’ (Featherstone, 2005: 265), linking past and present struggles through places of memory. Based on Bloch’s concrete utopianism, Iossifidis (2020) conceptualizes the remembrance of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic Uprising as a space of transmission in which anti-austerity and anti-fascist politics and socially just futures became tangible. Courtheyn’s (2016) ethnography of the San José Peace Community in Colombia outlines how embodied acts of remembrance can rupture capitalist subjectivities while also providing a resource for sustained activism (p. 945). Rainey and Hanson (2021) argue in favour of a dialectics of traces, as:

[t]races are the details of place and social life that tell stories of change, putting into motion the dialectic and with it a whole set of epiphanies and realisations. Thereby, the manifestation of the past in the present has the power to invoke new utopian imaginaries and contest contemporary social relations. (p. 3)

However, Bosco (2004, 2006) work on the performance of memory as activism by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina also found that the revolutionary framing of shared memories might cause conflict within a movement. Hence, while memories might invoke identification and future imaginaries within social movements, the extent to which capitalist relations have hardened and continue to find new ways of extracting value (Pellizzoni, 2021: 369) and incorporating progressive activist engagement (MacGregor, 2021: 331–334), means their political impact remains questionable. Therefore, the following introduces Adorno’s negative dialectic as theoretical approach to consider memory as dialectics, constricted by the totality of capitalist thought forms, yet potentially circumventing and fissuring the same.

Obstructed memories: The implications of capitalist thought forms

From a Marxist perspective, the fundamental compulsion towards abstraction at the heart of capitalist relations has a profound impact on our individual and collective ability to remember. According to Adorno (1997), ‘abstraction [. . .] is of the essence of the barter process. Without disregard for living human beings there could be no swapping’ (p. 354). Exchange demands abstraction; only by abstracting something from the process of its production can it become a commodity that is traded through a universal system of equivalence, thereby, ‘value changes all labour products into social hieroglyphs’ (Marx, 1929: 47). Thus, ‘a definite social relation between human beings [. . .] has here assumed the semblance of a relation between things’ (Marx, 1929: 45). However, capitalist forms of abstraction have solidified in such a way that they have become objective thought forms (Marx, 1929: 50). Capitalist thought forms render relations of mastery to no longer be the apparent results of historic processes and, thus, changeable, but rather make them appear as the ‘natural’ order of things stabilizing associated power relations. Hence, there is a tendency in all capitalist societies to become oblivious to being subjected to various forms of control and mastery. To exemplify this nexus between capitalist thought forms and forgetting, the following draws on Adorno’s negative dialectics, outlining how forgetting becomes part and parcel of the constitution of subjects and objects under capitalist relations.

‘All reification is forgetting’

According to Horkheimer and Adorno (1997) ‘all reification is forgetting’ (p. 230). Specific forms of forgetting inherent in capitalist thought forms manifest on the side of the subject as well as the object, and will be discussed in the following through the Marxist concepts of reification and alienation.

Reification, a central concept to Western Marxism, denotes a state where the understanding of the world has been fundamentally altered by capitalist relations (Henning, 2007: 98; Holloway, 2019: 51–52). Relations between people appear as relations between things, rendering the latter to be objects of ‘factual knowledge and technical control’ (Feenberg, 2015: 122). However, when social relations are perceived as ‘things’, it is necessary to first ‘forget’, how these relations came about and how they normalize mastery and coercion. Hence, according to Adorno (2020), ‘[i]t is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces’ (p. 67). This means the exploitation of labour, the forms of dominance and repression necessary to enforce capitalist relations and any pain or suffering that resulted, no longer appears as changeable parts of social relations, but rather as laws of nature (Adorno, 1997: 354–356).

While reification theorizes how the object is ‘transformed’ under capitalism, the respective thought forms also affect the subject (Adorno, 2013: 102). Under capitalism the individual experiences the world as thoroughly alienated – from themselves, from others, from their work and society (Henning, 2007: 98; Jiménez Contreras, 2021: 177; Lijster, 2017: 63). Alienation inflicts suffering on the individual through ‘indifference and divisiveness, powerlessness and social isolation against oneself and a world experienced as indifferent and alien’ (Jaeggi, 2019: 21). ¹ However, as all individuals have to partake in the causal social conditions for the sake of their survival, they are forced to reproduce the very relations that make them suffer (Adorno, 2013: 99–100). This results in an increasing dependence on, and internalization of, the respective relations of power and mastery (Specht, 1981: 33), and individuals are increasingly reduced to means, becoming solely tools to maintain capitalist relations. ‘They also become tools for themselves, according to their own consciousness, means instead of ends’ (Adorno, 2018: 451). As a consequence, individuals experience alienation as an unchangeable fact, fate even, as ‘the less of life remains, the greater the temptation for our consciousness to take the sparse and abrupt living remnants for the phenomenal absolute’ (Adorno, 1997: 375). The social origins of their suffering are forgotten and social relations appear ‘natural’, rendering the individual increasingly impotent and incapable of autonomous decision-making (Adorno, 2018: 452; Elbe, 2020: 84). Nevertheless, the individual experiences their alienated existence as a source of frustration and anger, but instead of directing the subsequent aggression towards the system causing it, it is directed at others, more vulnerable and marginalized, giving way to antisemitic, racist, and misogynist resentments (Adorno, 2018: 452; Tyner, 2022: 76). Thus, ‘the alienated subject does not remain unmarked by race, gender, sexuality and other forms of positionality’ (Tyner, 2022: 76). Thus, while alienation must be considered as a form of abstraction at the heart of capitalism, it nevertheless is experienced in multiple and at times contradictory everyday geographies (Tyner, 2022: 82–83).

As the subject becomes increasingly identified with the existing totality of capitalist relations, it is no longer possible to ‘think of radical social change in terms of an alternative totality’ (Tischler, 2009: 107). For Adorno (1997), capitalism has developed in such a way that

The law of value comes into play over the heads of formally free individuals. They are unfree, according to Marx’s insight, as the involuntary executors of that law – the more thoroughly unfree the more rank the growth of the social antagonisms it took to form the very conception of freedom. The process of evolving individual independence is a function of the barter society and terminates in the individual’s abolition by integration. What produced freedom will recoil into unfreedom. (p. 262)

Therefore, according to Adorno (1997), it is not possible to form knowledge outside capitalist relations, as ‘a world that is objectively set for totality, will not release the human consciousness’ (p. 17). Here, totality ‘refers to how the capitalist law of exchange and the resulting patterns of domination and instrumentalization structure the whole of society’ (Kuge, 2021: 102). For Adorno and his fellow Frankfurt School thinkers, ‘we don’t so much inhabit a world as a phantasmagoria, a world turned upside down in which things become persons and persons things, and things (both human and non-human) take on a spectral life of their own’ (Jeffries, 2016: 87). Thus, we inhabit a world in which the compulsion of abstraction is overpowering and historical processes remain veiled, making ‘forgetting’ an integral part of capitalist thought forms. While reification and alienation are fundamentally linked to negativity, they appear ‘natural’ and external to societal relations. The tendency towards abstraction manifests in such a way that the socially produced nature of capitalism is forgotten and its negativity, what ought not to be, is generally accepted. In line with Tyner’s (2022) intersectional reading of alienation, it is fundamental to keep in mind that while everyone is somehow abstractly affected, negativity is experienced in concrete socio-spatial settings. For example, drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois, Inwood (2019: 585; also Bonds and Inwood, 2016) has repeatedly argued how anti-Black-racism and White supremacy is part of the United States’ foundation as a nation, shaping a variety of racial oppression. Thus, negativity in this context is encountered as a lack of economic and political resources as well as experiences of inequality, injustice, harm and violence, most notably through the embodiment of race, but also gender, age, sexuality and so on.

While it is fundamental to Adorno’s theory to describe and critique the thought forms, that normalize the negativity and the harm caused by capitalist relations, negative dialectics is also intended as a means to ‘break-out’ of the prison of reified subjectivity (Grüny, 2014: 86), which will be discussed in the next section of this article. This ‘break-out’ inverts Adorno’s critique of an ever-expanding reification by focusing on the disruptive qualities that the discarded and left behind particles of history might have.

Constellations: Encountering non-identity

Negative dialectics is intended as a means to search for the possibility of non-capitalist knowledge, an attempt of ‘seeing through the mere appearances of bourgeois reality’ (Buck-Morss, 1977: 63). Based on the assumption of the totality of the capitalist mode of production a new form of thinking has taken shape, which Adorno (Durey, 2021: 128) calls ‘identity thinking’. Identity thinking refers to the compulsion that every object must be integrated in a system of equivalences, thus ‘forcing our understanding of the world into clearly determinate categories’ (Durey, 2021: 129) and reproducing the fundamental thought forms of capitalism (Jamesson, 1990: 20). For Adorno, this comes at a high price: ‘[t]he practical orders of life while purporting to benefit man, serve in a profit economy to stunt human qualities, and the further they spread the more they sever everything tender’ (Adorno, 2020: 44). As a result, the individual becomes increasingly integrated as it functions solely as a social character (Adorno, 2013: 102). This has fatal implications according to Adorno (1997) because ‘genocide is the absolute integration’ (p. 362). Thus, the endeavour to break out of identity thinking is not solely academic and theoretical but also a practical exploration of the possibilities for how to prevail over capitalist thought forms.

Considering the ways in which capitalism imposes abstraction on what constitutes the subject and object, I draw on Adornos negative dialectics to argue that awareness and empathetic knowledge of history is generally obstructed under capitalism. However, this implies a dialectic tension, as memory can be conceptualized as a moment of resistance against the overpowering effect of capitalist thought forms. When (empathetically) remembering the exploitation of labour, the exploitation and destruction of nature, of (racial, gendered, etc.) injustice and suffering, we recall moments of non-identity, of concrete experienced and embodied negativity, which in their bodily immediacy negate the causal capitalist relations (Adorno, 1997: 203). ‘Non-identity’ thus refers to all the moments of particularity and contradiction, which cannot be compared but stand for themselves (Adorno, 2008: 6), and in this case the direct and individual experiences of the ‘violence in capitalism’ (Tyner and Inwood, 2014: 780). Drawing on Benjamin (Angehrn, 2008: 276–281; Gimmel, 2015: 156–164), Adorno introduces constellations as model to relate to the non-identity of the object. Constellations are proposed as horizontal relations of objects, which can be presented but not systemized or hierarchically ordered, thereby, illuminating fragmentations, contradictions and the particularity, or rather non-identity, of an object (Adorno, 1997: 162). By this, constellations work against the social cohesion that capitalism achieves through abstraction and classification (Dinerstein, 2012: 534), as they are representing the historical and social processes of their coming into being as ‘cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object’ (Adorno, 1997: 163). The individual senses the object as part of a constellation by linking cognitive knowledge of history and spontaneous embodied reactions when somatically engaging with the object (Buck-Morss, 1977: 91–92). Adorno proposes constellations are a model of how to gain insight into the object or rather the concrete history of a place by which ‘the truth about an object would emerge to the sympathetic observer’ (Jeffries, 2016: 327). As such, constellations link cognitive relations to the past, to a knowledge of history, embodied experiences and an empathetic sense of solidarity, which come together to confront capitalist relations. However, this moment of confrontation is precarious, because ‘as long as the world is as it is, all pictures of reconciliation, peace and quiet resemble the picture of death’ (Adorno, 1997: 381). Thus, memory in a constellation relates to a specific awareness of history, namely, the historical implications of the inherent violence, harm, and negativity at the core of capitalist relations and how they continue to perpetuate our everyday lives, through (racialized, gendered, etc.) structures of inequality and injustice. Such memories theoretically trigger a change in our perception relating to the pain of others and reject the causal social relations in the capitalist mode of production. This form of remembrance then becomes part of, and a prerequisite for, social change that confronts and transforms the negative in the world. Returning to the geographical context, the next section will relate this theoretical exploration to space, discussing negative dialectics as one approach to understand how specific places enable moments of remembrance that might challenge capitalist relations.

History, embodiment and transformation: Remembering through space

This article has introduced a dialectical understanding of memory by drawing on Adornos negative dialectics as a theoretical approach, paying particular attention to capitalist thought forms, and thus expanding the recent debate on the political geographies of remembrance. Therefore, it is relevant to stress that the way we relate individually and collectively to memory through space is not only shaped by powerful discourses of collective remembrance but also by how capitalism and capitalist thought forms are perpetuated through the production of space, which are in turn experienced and embodied through situated socio-spatial settings, as well as, various, even contradictory subject positions (Tyner, 2022: 103). Critiqued as spatial fetishism, capitalist thought forms are well documented in how we relate to productions of space and naturalize the powerful ways in which those thought forms are reproduced though practices and discourses of placemaking (e.g. Castree, 2001; Soja and Hadjimichalis, 1979). Applying Marx’s critique of the commodity fetish, geographers have considered the implications of the commodification of space (Castree, 2009; Harvey, 2001). According to Harvey (1989: 175), ‘Commodity exchange and monetization challenge, subdue and ultimately eliminate the absolute qualities of place’, leading to a fragmented, abstract and yet homogeneous appearance to make space exchangeable through the market (Lefebvre, 1991: 365). The processes of commodification, monetarization and abstraction of space usually remain hidden, conveying what Henri Lefebvre (1991: 27) termed the ‘illusion of transparency’, as the materiality of space appears detached from any social or political relations that had part in their production (Mitchell, 1992: 203). Thus, the abstraction manifest in capitalist productions of space are a tool of domination according to Lefebvre (1991): forms of mastery and power relations that are necessarily part of the social processes through which space is produced remain hidden and, therefore, naturalized (p. 370). The (material) production of space relies on the exploitation of labour to produce surplus value, or as Inwood et al. (2021) argue for slavery, even ‘stolen labour’ (p. 1088). By abstracting from those material, exploitative, conditions of productions, the underlying powerful relations and their inherent violence (Tyner and Inwood, 2014: 780) are reproduced and solidified. This unfolds as persistent structures of economic, political, cultural and social injustice. Thus, ‘forgetting’ relates to the totality of capitalist relations and thought forms, but also to (White) privilege (see also Bonds and Inwood, 2016: 720) – situating the normalization of past violence within a materialist reading that stresses the afterlives of labour exploitation along the lines of race and gender. In short, those who are disenfranchised might have a hard time forgetting about historical injustices as they are confronted with its persistence through limited access to societies’ economic and political resources on a daily basis.

Adorno’s negative dialectics and the model of constellation enable us to consider the relevance of capitalist thought forms in productions of space, while providing a normative foundation of our critique and develop ideas that go beyond capitalism, highlighting the particularity and non-identity of place. This approach focuses on the qualities of place that are hidden, lost or forgotten by capitalism’s drive towards abstraction. This relates especially to the histories of those who suffered in the past without reason or fault and whose experiences are perpetually silenced and marginalized, as they challenge and contest the structures of race, class and gender we have come to accept under capitalism. As negative dialectics sets out to be a dialectic of ‘non-identity’ (Adorno, 2008: 6), it is concerned with anything divergent, unreconcilable and implies a focus on the singular, individual, particular and contradictory. Thus, negative dialectics is an approach that zooms in on the small, singular moments in which the individual sympathetically approaches the object, sensing the constellation by which ‘the mystery of time reveals itself in terms of space’ (Theunissen, 2007: 188). This might rupture capitalist productions of space, as usually both time and space are ordered, segmented and partitioned by institutions and state apparatuses (Poulantzas, 2014: 115–148). Sensing the historical constellation, remembering the omissions and contradictions in the process of placemaking, breaks with singular ascriptions of symbolic meaning that have been imposed to legitimize an existing political and economic order (Till, 2003: 291) questioning established privileges as well as social structures preserving them. As place contains multiple and contradictory histories, constellations heighten our awareness towards this multiplicity while questioning singular narratives of nation building and state-mediated memories. According to Philo (2021), ‘Adorno thereby illuminates what typically gets abandoned by the “victor’s” version of history; what gets expelled, shunned and banished from the standard retellings of history’ (pp. 82–83). As Adorno (1997: 377–378) postulated that the past has left traces that undermine the greyness of capitalist relations, offering hope from ‘that which was or is doomed’ (p. 378) negative dialectics serves as a theoretical foundation to consider the matter discarded in the production of space, the small quotidian histories and the rubble (Gordillo, 2014: 11) to gain deeper insights into history, thereby, sensing contradictory narratives, to do justice to pain and suffering through eradicating its structural and systemic causes.

Negative dialectics serves as an approach to understand history, within the present, through an engagement with space. This implicates an understanding of history that focuses on becoming aware of the historical and contemporary injustices bound up in the various forms of social power. Adorno imagines this as a momentary revelation that unfolds on two levels: the affective and somatic experience of the object (Angehrn, 2008: 279) and the cognitive rational knowledge, referring to knowledge acquired previously, and applied to the object by the individual (Buck-Morss, 1977: 91). As these two modes of perception interlock, a moment of cognition arises that emanates from the materiality of the object or, in this case, rather the materiality of place (Adorno, 1997: 183). In this moment, the subject gains a new awareness of the past, sensing those moments of placemaking that are usually hidden (Adorno, 1997: 162–164). Therefore, negative dialectics enable us to assume that the traces of history, or rather its rubble, might enable spontaneous insights that lead to a new and critical awareness of history. These traces can take multiple forms, such as graffiti, stickers, parts of a building that no longer seems to ‘fit’, urbanistic arrangements meant to segregate a population, or the material leftovers of Western colonialism. According to Martinez (2009), ‘memory is the only instance that can defeat it [domination] and create some justice’ (p. 237). This also ties in with various struggles for remembrance articulated from politically, culturally or economically marginalized subject positions and eventual material redistribution (Inwood et al., 2021: 1098). Most notably, this link has been emphasized in the context of Black-Lives-Matter protests, linking demands for material redistribution, social justice and a strong critique of mnemonic discourses normalizing White supremacy.

In conclusion, negative dialectics fundamentally centres on the question of how the object, or in this case a concrete place, might trigger a change in perception and how that in turn alters the experience of the subject. However, while Adorno envisions how moments of non-identity fissure capitalist thought forms and enable a specific moment of interpersonal tenderness, he avoids at all cost any indication of how that moment might be seized, broadened and used by emancipatory groups or projects. This leads to more questions that need to be considered empirically. How might a specific place trigger an embodied and cognitive response? How do those responses relate to each other apart from very subjective experiences? However, in most cases, it will be impossible to trace the entire history of a place as envisioned in Adorno’s model of the constellation. Nevertheless, when considering the relations between place and memory, negative dialectics sharpens our view for two, interrelated things: the particularity and multiplicity of histories connected to place, as not one individual will share the exact experience and sentiment of past injustices especially in the context of racism and colonialism or activist memories, and second, how those experiences become the hidden and buried moments, the insight into which is usually obstructed through the power of capitalist thought forms. By considering these two aspects, negative dialectics can be used as an approach to analyse how memories linked to place might challenge capitalist relations in a profound manner.

Conclusion: Negativity, fissures, and a glimmer of hope

The aim of this article was to introduce Adorno’s negative dialectics as a theoretical approach to remembering as fundamentally obstructed by capitalist relations, yet turned dialectically potentially fissuring the very same relations. Drawing on the aforementioned theoretical concept, I have argued that, yes, memory can challenge capitalist relations by contradicting and circumventing capitalist thought forms implicating abstraction, reification and, by extension, forgetting. Moreover, this conceptualization expands the debate on the political and social processes by which memory might take form in space. Geographers have stressed how shared memory and its discourses might challenge or contest a set of political-economic conditions, and their correlating institutional and governmental structures. These works have analysed shared memory and productions of space as mutually constitutive social processes and, thereby, linked to fundamental conflicts and negotiations about the form and shape a specific society ought to take. However, this article has argued that some of these works tend to underestimate the role of capitalist thought forms, as they are described by Marx (1929: 43–58) in his analysis of the commodity fetish. Nevertheless, these thought forms are pivotal for the subject matter, as they have an abstracting effect, necessarily implying forgetting. Therefore, this article has expanded the recent debate on the political geographies of memory by arguing the relevance of capitalist thought forms as fundamental opponents of remembrance. This results in a more nuanced understanding of forgetting: not only as an expression or exercise of political power, but rather as a specific form emanating from capitalist relations.

Adorno’s negative dialectics can be employed as one approach to theoretically consider how capitalist thought forms and their associated social relations might be challenged through the connection of memory and place. Therefore, this article has surveyed basic aspects of Adorno’s theory: society is understood as totality, where everything is subjected to the capitalist principles of barter and exchange (Durey, 2021: 130–131; Kuge, 2021: 102). This results in specific subject and object configurations, both marked by the application of capitalist principles that abstract from particular and singular moments in favour of systems and hierarchies (Jamesson, 1990: 20). Adorno proposes constellations as one way to challenge the totality of capitalist principles (Gimmel, 2015: 156–164), thereby developing a model in which history becomes tangible through space (Theunissen, 2007: 188). The individual might become aware of a constellation through experience and knowledge, thus relating rational and irrational, embodied and mental aspects in a moment of spontaneous cognition. This approach then offers a possibility of conceptualizing memory as a moment of resistance, emanating from the individual against the supremacy of capitalism and its thought forms. Nevertheless, it remains obligatory to pay closer attention to the intersectionality of capitalist thought forms (Tyner, 2022: 76), offering a necessary update of Adorno’s theoretical approach.

Therefore, negative dialectics might further the debate on the radical possibilities of remembering by linking the consideration of embodied and performed memory in space, and the question of related emotions and affects with the fundamental question of a radical geography transforming capitalist relations. Moreover, negative dialectics also implicates a new perspective on negativity within human geography, departing from the discourse of negativity as a ‘natural’ part of the conditio humana, and instead driving forth the question of suffering and pain rooted in capitalist relations. However, while we might easily agree on the negative effect capitalist thought forms have on the way relationships form between humans, there needs to be further debate on how geographies not only contest but actively contribute to some sort of revolutionary praxis.

Another important relation that also needs to be debated and adapted further is the proposed link between body pain, resistance and the experience of inter-human solidarity. Geographers working on shared memories have highlighted instances of structural violence and injustice (e.g. Till, 2012; Tyner et al., 2012). Could there be new possibilities for alliances and solidarities in a stronger focus on the embodied experience of pain and suffering? Could this incite a new impetus towards new forms of thinking, going beyond the negative, the malum of our world?