Structures of thought, ways of Thinking, shapes of thought , employed in Critical Theory, that are also very often found in artworks, artists work and thought, include “Dialectical Thinking”, which shares a tendency to “Negation” (working through opposites and contradiction, but not to produce a new truth which overcomes the original contradiction, rather a more complex “truth” or thought), this could also be expressed (as Adorno does) as attempting a critique of “Categorical Thinking” our tendency to subsume particulars under a general category or “Identity Thinking” that is trying not to see the thing (idea/essence) as self same with its object, to think it under a general category (Woman, or Art, or whatever categories apply) but rather to resist this mode of thought which tends to reaffirm what already exists (the status quo, existing power structures and ways of thinking). Most of our thinking is caught up with “identifying” and “categorizing” so thinking otherwise takes effort, doesn’t come “naturally” perhaps, and has to be exercised against our habitual ways of thinking, it is thought as a kind of movement. It is not about producing or deciding right and wrong.
Theodore Adorno from “Negative Dialectics” (1966)
“Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint. My thought is driven to it by it own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking. We are blaming the method for the fault of the matter when we object to dialectics on the ground 9repeated from Hegel’s Aristotelian critics on) that whatever happens to come into the dialectical mill we be reduced to the merely logical form of contradiction, and that…the full diversity of the non contradictory, of that which is simply differentiated, will be ignored. What we differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity, as long as its demand for totality will be its measure for whatever is not identical with it. This is what dialectics holds up to our consciousness as a contradiction. …(57)
The Adorno Reader, Ed. Brian O’Connor
No object is wholly known: knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of a whole. Thus the goal of a philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept, their absorption in the concept, yet it is through such interpretations that the truth of the work unfolds….(64)
The Adorno Reader, Ed. Brian O’Connor
The artist Paul Pfeiffer could be said to use strategies of negation, in that he often literally, takes something out of the image. In the case of the work “Long Count” he erased the two fighters which were the focus of the image, leaving just the movement of the ropes in the boxing ring and the reactions of the audience.
below: Wilfredo Prieto Apolítico, 2001
Herbert Marcuse on Dialectical Thought. (quote below and more here)
The dialectical definition defines the movement of things from that which they are not to that which they are. The development of contradictory elements, which determines the structure of its object, also determines the structure of dialectical thought. The object of dialectical logic is neither the abstract, general form of objectivity, nor the abstract, general form of thought – nor the data of immediate experience. Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts – that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man. This practice (intellectual and material) is the reality in the data of experience; it is also the reality which dialectical logic comprehends.
Some more fairly clear notes on Hegel’s development of Dialectical Thought are here:http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/easy.htm