Already in the comments about the first instalment of this series, a problem of traditions has emerged. For a predominantly Anglo-Saxon audience, raised in the empirical and positivist tradition, understanding a group of thinkers schooled in speculative Hegelianism and Marxist dialectics is always going to require a leap of faith. This is also compounded by the fact that the largely monoglot Anglo-Saxon tradition has to work with translations of these thinkers, which are not always the best that can be achieved.

For example, terms such as Wissenschaft and Geist traditionally get translated into "science" and "spirit", apparently irreconcilable opposites, whereas in philosophical terms the difference between the two is much less marked. In fact, you might argue that in the original German they could both be translated as "knowledge", albeit different types of knowledge bounded by speculation. When it comes to the Frankfurt school, the Anglo-Saxon tradition is confronted with all of its worst nightmares in one torrid night of speculative muscle flexing.

Theodor Adorno opens his treatise on negative dialectics with the statement that "[it] is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of the 'negation of the negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy." In other words, he asks us to reject the idea that the outcome of the dialectic will always be positive but that we do so without leaving the dialectic behind as an explanatory model. We simply have to make it an open rather than a closed process.

In Hegel the dialectic is widely seen as the means by which, through contradiction and tension, human history represents the unfolding of human freedom as the expression of the Weltgeist, or world spirit. Each age has its own zeitgeist (a sort of temporal appearance on Earth as the expression of the absolute – Christ as God come to Earth, if you like) but each of those ages is linked and taken up into (aufgehoben) the next succeeding one. Thus history is not just "one fucking thing after another", as Alan Bennett has it, but a gradual accretion through contradiction of the necessary stages for the fulfilment of the absolute. As Ernst Bloch pointed out, werden, or "becoming", was Hegel's password and history was simply the process of becoming. The dialectic was thus the way to understand an old idea first put forward by Heraclitus that everything is constantly in flux, or panta rhei, that the basic condition of the world is change and not stability. But change towards what?

In Hegel it is the absolute and in Hegel's most famous follower, Marx, it becomes the liberation of humanity in some form of communist society achieved by the conscious action of the proletariat in overcoming the final dialectical hurdle by abolishing the ruling class and thereby, logically, itself. The Marxist dialectic replaces the idealist Geist of a period working in mysterious ways with the concrete materialist class struggle as the engine of history, constantly present and constituting history as such.

As early as the end of the 19th century, this Marxist analysis had become "Hegelianised" in the sense that it was increasingly presented as an automatic and inevitable fulfilment of a preordained path. Adorno criticised Hegel for giving rise to this by presenting a positive and affirmative dialectic in which "everything that is real is rational", in that everything that comes about must contribute in some way to the workings of the absolute. To use a technical term, this means that in Hegel there is an "identity of identity and non-identity". In more ordinary language, Hegel is arguing that existence as a whole constitutes a unity of all opposites, in which everything has its place and that the tension between these opposites gradually resolves itself into pre-existing whole.

Negative dialectics turns this on its head and says that there is a "non-identity of identity and non-identity" or that existence is incomplete, that it has a hole in it where the whole should be, that history is not the simple unfolding of some preordained noumenal realm and that existence is therefore "ontologically incomplete". It is here that we find the link between Marx and Freud because, where Marx talks about the objective material factors at work in history that condition our consciousness (being determines consciousness) even though we are not necessarily conscious of them, Freud argues that it is our objective unconscious being, of which we are equally unaware, that determines our conscious thoughts. The latent content of our dreams is therefore equated with the latent but as yet unrealised possibilities in human history (see Marx's letter to Ruge in my previous column).

Adorno's negative dialectics are designed to open up these as yet unrealised possibilities at both the micro and the macro level, at the level of individual as well as collective psychology in order to overcome both individual and social suffering. It is the very contradiction between what is and what might be that allows us to overstep the boundaries with which we are constantly presented in order to create our endpoint, rather than simply sleepwalk towards it. This means that we move from necessity to contingency. In negative dialectics there is no necessity for things to turn out in a certain way, and the future-orientated teleology that Adorno claimed Hegel followed is replaced with retrospective teleology in which we can only see that what has happened to get us to where we are had to happen to get us there, but that there was no necessity for it happen in that way. Human beings are a product of evolution but evolution is not there to create human beings. Walter Benjamin famously expressed this as the angel of history moving backwards into the future with the debris of history piling up around his feet. Negative dialectics are, in the end then, open dialectics conditioned by contingent events and not by a pre-given endpoint.

Next week I will look at how this works out in terms of an attempt to break out of the snow globe of western consumer capitalism. If you want to do some reading in preparation I would suggest the Dialectic of Enlightenment.